Rockies trade Miguel Castro to Baltimore for player to be named later

DENVER – It was announced Friday that the Baltimore Orioles have traded for (former) Colorado Rockies reliever Miguel Castro who was placed on waivers just a few days ago.

As we noted when the news first broke that Castro had been DFA’d, the move only made sense if the Rockies got something decent in a trade or Castro somehow passed through waivers and ended up back in the organization. Clearly now, it will have to be door number one. We neglected to mention the possibility of an injury because he looked fully healthy when we saw him in spring training, and in fact, GM Jeff Bridich put any such thoughts to rest in an interview with the Denver Post.

There are strong arguments to be made that the Rockies had better options to open space on the roster for Kyle Freeland. But none of them hold much water, especially this one:

I’m told part of reason #Rockies haven’t put Rayan Gonzalez on 60-day DL for TJ surgery is they didn’t want to use up year of service time.

— Patrick Saunders (@psaundersdp) April 2, 2017

Gonzalez is a great dude with a live fastball. But he is also 26-years-old, hasn’t made his MLB debut yet, has mediocre statistics as a minor league reliever. Other options included saying goodbye in one way or another to Jordan Lyles or Chad Qualls, but the Rockies would have to eat some money in each case.

Bridich managed to move Tommy Kahnle for Yency Almonte in a very similar situation. After winning CAL League Pitcher of the Year, Almonte came in 19th on our list of Top 25 Rockies Under 25. Three spots behind Castro. Kahnle ended up being cut by the Chicago White Sox so if that pattern holds, Bridich will come out looking pretty smart on this one.

The player to be named later will have to be pretty good for this move to not come back and bite the Rockies.

“The reasoning is that we needed to put Kyle Freeland on and somebody had to come off,” Jeff Birdich said earlier today. “There’s two ways to look at it. One is that we had to make a tough decision and exit somebody with a great deal of potential still. The other way to look at it is that we added someone that we feel like is a better pitcher and will be a better contributor for us now and in the future.

“It’s not ever an easy decision. Especially when it comes to pitching and wanting to have as much talented pitching around as possible but this game is full of difficult decisions like that and we had to make one.”