The Philadelphia Phillies have been cruising lately, but that shouldn’t cloud the fact that they still need to make some moves at the trade deadline if they want to compete with the best teams in baseball. Arguably the club’s biggest need is a quality right-handed bat to balance out a lineup that is carried almost entirely by lefty swingers Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber and Brandon Marsh. It would be a tricky fit, but the Detroit Tigers’ Gleyber Torres might be just the guy they’re looking for.
Longtime New York Yankee Gleyber Torres rose to prominence as a power-hitting middle infielder with a sketchy defensive reputation. Fortunately, his bat was able to carry him to two All-Star games with the Bronx Bombers, as he slashed .265/.334/.441 and blasted 138 homers across 3,673 plate appearances in his seven seasons in pinstripes.
The Yanks let Torres walk after the 2024 season, and the Tigers scooped him up on a one-year, $15 million prove-it deal. That gamble paid off handsomely for Detroit, as the Venezuelan posted a .745 OPS in 145 games with the club and earned himself a third All-Star nod in the process. He accepted the Tigers’ qualifying offer this past winter, bringing him back into the fold for 2025, this time for a shade over $22 million.
Torres has been even better in 43 games this season, working to a .790 OPS. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to prevent his squad from sliding well out of the playoff picture with a 35-48 record on the season. That brutal reality has led many around the sport to speculate that the Tigers could become reluctant sellers at this year’s trade deadline, with back-to-back Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal serving as the belle of the ball.
The Phillies aren’t likely to wade into the Skubal waters considering their dynamite starting pitching staff and dearth of tradeable assets. However, if Detroit does sell they should be in on Torres. Incumbent second baseman Bryson Stott’s presence complicates a Torres trade, but in order to improve the lineup, Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski will need to get creative.
Phillies trading for Gleyber Torres might be crazy enough to work
If Dombrowski can reel in Torres, he can shift around a few other dominoes to accommodate the move. First, Stott would slide over to shortstop where he has 110 games’ worth of big league experience to his name, and has served as the injury replacement for Trea Turner at times over the past two seasons. Stott’s all-time great .994 career fielding percentage at the keystone points to an ability to hack it at the more difficult shortstop position.
Now for the trickier part: Trea Turner. The $300 million man has been killing the Phillies this year, both at the plate and in the field. His woeful .626 OPS is one of the main reasons why the Phillies so desperately need another right-handed bat, and with his 33rd birthday just around the corner, it’s fair to wonder if his best days are behind him. In the same vein, his already-suspect glovework has fallen off a cliff this year, and the three-time All-Star has racked up 10 errors in just 78 games thus far.
With Turner producing diminishing results on both sides of the ball, it’s only a matter of time until he gets moved off one of the hardest positions on the field. So where should the Phillies play him?
Way back in Turner’s rookie 2016 season, the Washington Nationals gave him a 45-game tryout in center field, where he acquitted himself decently well with only two errors in 387 ⅔ innings at the position. It’s hard to imagine a decade later the 12-year veteran would be able to make a seamless transition back to the outfield, but his top-tier speed would give him plenty of margin for error when chasing down balls in the gap.
Moving Turner to center (or whichever outfield position he’s comfortable with) would kill two birds with one stone. Stott’s defensive prowess would upgrade the infield run prevention, while adding Torres to the lineup, and pivoting away from either Justin Crawford or Gabriel Rincones Jr. as an everyday player would go a long way towards lengthening a lineup that contains too many free outs.
The Phillies will need to think outside the box if they want to address the issues that plague them on their road to capturing October glory. There’s no guarantee it’ll work, but a Gleyber Torres trade coupled with moving Trea Turner off shortstop might just be the kind of gamble that a championship-caliber team needs to make to finally get over the hump.
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