The Pittsburgh Pirates have traded starting pitcher Joe Musgrove to the San Diego Padres as part of a three-team trade, pending physicals.
The news broke shortly after 6:15 p.m. Monday evening by ESPN Insider Jeff Passan and was confirmed in a tweet by Ken Rosenthal shortly after 7 p.m., where he added the third team involved was the New York Mets.
Musgrove, a San Diego native, went 1-5 with a 3.86 ERA in just 39.2 innings pitched in the abridged 2020 season. In exchange for Musgrove, the Pirates will get outfielder Hudson Head and pitchers David Bednar, Drake Fellows and Omar Cruz.
Head, 19, is ranked as the Padres’ 7th-best prospect according to the MLB Pipeline. He last played in 2019 as part of the Arizona Fall League, where he hit .283 with 34 hits in 32 games played.
Cruz, 21, is listed as San Diego’s 17th-best overall prospect and 8th-best pitching prospect, and while MLB.com says he doesn’t have overbearing speed on his pitches, he “spots his low-90s fastball well to both sides of the plate and isn’t afraid to attack the right-handed batters inside.”
Bednar – a Mars High School graduate – was drafted by San Diego in 2016 and pitched only 6.1 innings in 2020. He is also listed on the Pipeline as the Padres’ 20th-best prospect.
Fellows was drafted out of Vanderbilt in the sixth-round by San Diego in 2019, and pitched for a 13-2 record in 2019 with a 4.02 ERA in 116.2 innings pitched. According to Vanderbilt’s website, Fellows led the team in strikeouts with 133 in 2019, with predicted first-overall pick Kumar Rocker coming in third with 114.
The Pirates will also get catching prospect Endy Rodriguez from New York, while the Mets receive left-handed starting pitcher Joey Lucchesi from San Diego. Rodriguez was signed to a minor-league deal in 2018 and quickly rose up to be No. 14 on the Mets prospect rankings.
Rodriguez played 66 games in the Mets’ farm system, where he hit for a .276 batting average (60 hits in 211 at-bats) and garnered a .452 slugging percentage.
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