The Royals announced Wednesday that they have acquired the right-hander Nate Pearson from the Astros in exchange for a minor league righty Max Martin. Houston designated Pearson for assignment over the weekend. Kansas City designated an outfielder Cameron Misner for an assignment to get Pearson on the roster (more on that DFA here).
Pearson, 29, was once considered one of the best prospects in the sport – if not the best. Baseball America and MLB.com both ranked him among the top 10 prospects in the game for the 2019-20 offseason. Injuries made the 2017 first-round pick promising and put him in a bullpen role.
A former 28th overall pick by the Blue Jays, Pearson has pitched in Toronto, Chicago (Cubs) and Houston. Kansas City will be his fourth team. He has never gone over 66 1/3 innings in a major league season and has just 176 2/3 major league frames overall, dating back to his 2020 debut. Pearson has a career 4.99 ERA, a 22.6% strikeout rate, an 11.1% walk rate and a 36.3% ground ball rate. He is playing the current season with a salary of $1.35MM and is controllable through the 2027 season through arbitration.
The Astros signed Pearson to that one-year deal at the start of last season, with the idea of giving him a chance to return as a starter. The next addition of the season (Tatsuya Imai, Mike Burrows, Ryan Weiss, Kai-Wei Teng, Peter Lambert) and last season’s elbow procedure led to Pearson being used only in relief, however. He pitched 20 innings out of the Houston ‘pen and posted a 3.60 ERA with a 19% strikeout rate and a 14.3% walk rate. He still averages a scorching 97.7 mph in his four homers, but Pearson’s strikeout rate and his 9.8% swing rate are both south of major league averages (22.1% and 10.8%, respectively).
Pearson gives Kansas City a power arm to work with for the remainder of the season and possibly into next season. It makes sense that a club with a third-slowest fastball coming out of its bullpen this year would be interested in bringing Pearson into the fold.
In exchange for a cheap flight on a talented but often injured shortstop, the Royals will part with Martin, their 10th-round pick in last year’s draft. The UC Irvine product is a pure bullpen prospect who splits the season between Low-A and High-A, playing well at both stops. The 22-year-old has excelled against inexperienced competition, as one would expect from a college arm. He threw 40 1/3 innings and worked to a 2.01 ERA with a strikeout-to-walk ratio (22.6% and 8.2%, respectively) and a whopping 57% groundball rate.
Despite the strong results, Martin did not crack the top 30 Kansas City prospects in the midseason reviews from Baseball America or MLB.com. It’s still good business for the Astros to add a 22-year-old who has had solid results in High-A in exchange for a righty that they already designated for assignment.
For the Astros, they won’t just be adding a more promising young player than most of the lottery tickets traded for a DFA – they’ll also be cutting some money from their CBT payroll. It’s not a huge amount, but Pearson was still owed $479K of this year’s $1.35MM salary. That amount is deducted from both Houston’s actual tax bill and their luxury tax bill.
As shown in MLBTR’s new Payroll Tracker — available only to Trade Rumors Front Office subscribers — Houston entered Wednesday with an estimated $236,161,196 in luxury tax. That puts them $7,838,804 away from the comfort limit of $244MM – a barrier that owner Jim Crane usually avoids. Moving Pearson gives Houston GM Dana Brown more breathing room. It’s not a huge amount, but any front office leader will take any extra wiggle room they can get this time of year.
The Athletic’s Chandler Rome first reported that Pearson was being traded to Kansas City. Anne Rogers of MLB.com broke the news that Martin was headed in the other direction.
