Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- The Cubs made a last-minute trade deadline pivot, swapping targets at the top of their wish list.
- The move brings a left-handed pitcher with a strong minor-league resume but comes with questions about his recent MLB performance.
- Chicago now has depth to work with, but the front office still faces pressure to add more starting pitching before the postseason.
For a brief moment, Chicago Cubs fans were on top of the world. Just a day after Jed Hoyer added veteran righty Kevin Gausman from the Toronto Blue Jays at a very reasonable cost, word broke that he'd struck another deal — this time for Los Angeles Angels lefty Reid Detmers,one of the most enticing pitching targets of this year's trade deadline.
And then it all fell apart. Almost as soon as the Detmers report had broke, it was quickly swatted down by several national insiders. Instead of Detmers, an established mid-rotation starter with the potential to be much more, the Cubs were in fact acquiring a different lefty: Braxton Garrett, who's spent most of this season in Triple-A with the Miami Marlins.
That's ... quite the swing, to put it mildly. We still don't know exactly what happened with Detmers and how seriously the Cubs were involved, and we're not going to try to tell you that it's not a downgrade for Chicago's World Series hopes; Garrett has posted a 14.54 ERA across two big-league starts this year, after all. But while it's not the one the North Side was hoping for, this move can still be a real positive for a beleaguered Cubs rotation.
Projected Cubs rotation after Braxton Garrett deal replaces Reid Detmers
Role | Pitcher |
|---|---|
SP1 | Shota Imanaga |
SP2 | Matthew Boyd |
SP3 | Kevin Gausman |
SP4 | David Peterson |
SP5 | Braxton Garrett |
SP6 | Colin Rea |
IL | Edward Cabrera |
IL | Ben Brown |
Adding Garrett may not seem like very much on the surface. His numbers in Miami this year (in admittedly a very small sample) are ugly, and he pitched to a 5.35 for the Marlins in 2024 before missing all of 2025 due to injury. But there's a reason why the Cubs targeted him at the deadline, and there's reason to think he can help this rotation down the stretch.
Before injuries took their toll, Garrett had established himself as a workmanlike mid-rotation arm, posting a 3.63 ERA (124 ERA+) across 247.2 innings in 2022-2023. And while his MLB cameo this year didn't go well, he's come back from surgery and thrown the ball very well at Triple-A, with a 2.90 ERA and 9.6 K/9 across 77.2 innings.
Is he going to start a playoff game for Chicago? Almost certainly not, unless things go very wrong. But they've got Gausman, Shota Imanaga, Matthew Boyd and ideally Edward Cabrera (who just made a rehab start late last week and should hopefully be back soon) and Ben Brown (coming back from a neck issue) for that. It's not the greatest rotation, but you feel at least OK about each of those guys taking the ball in October — with the likes of David Peterson, Garrett and Colin Rea waiting in the wings.
Would the Cubs be better off had they paid up for Detmers? Of course. But we also don't know what the price would've been for an in-demand lefty under team control through 2028, and Chicago is better today than they were yesterday.
MLB trade grades: How did Cubs, Marlins make out in Braxton Garrett trade?
In return for Garrett, the Marlins are acquiring a pair of top-30 Cubs prospects in Long and Beck. The former is definitely the buzzier name of the two, currently ranked No. 10 in Chicago's system by MLB Pipeline. Long has put up very solid numbers in Triple-A Iowa for the past two years, but he's been blocked at the big-league level by guys like Michael Busch and Moises Ballesteros, and his inability to hang in the outfield defensively means there was no long-term path to regular playing time.
He'll have no problem getting a shot in Miami, which has been searching for more first base/DH help all year long. Long has good patience at the plate and can hit both righties and lefties pretty well, but he doesn't have the sort of power (or the ability to tap into it) that you'd like to see from a guy with zero fielding or base-running utility. Beck, meanwhile, is a reliever who's struggled to miss bats at Triple-A, meaning that these are two very fungible players for an arm that should meaningfully help the Cubs down the stretch. It's not nearly as sexy, but it's also pretty tidy work.
Cubs grade: B
Marlins grade: C+
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