Yankees acquire Sonny Gray for 3 top prospects

Sonny Gray is leaving the A’s with a parting gift that will speed up their rebuild, and New York’s rotation just got a whole lot better.

The Yankees got the stabilizing rotation presence they wanted, as Jack Curry broke the news that New York had reached agreement with the A’s on a deal for Sonny Gray. Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan quickly confirmed the three prospects going back to Oakland in the deal: Jorge Mateo, James Kaprielian, and Dustin Fowler.

Gray slots right into the Yankees rotation alongside fellow acquisition Jaime Garcia, giving the Yankees a new-look starting five that includes Luis Severino, CC Sabathia, and a seemingly rejuvenated Masahiro Tanaka, who has cut his ERA from 6.55 at the start of June down to 5.09 and dominated the Rays over eight innings with 14 strikeouts in his last start.

Gray doesn’t need to be a No. 1 starter for this deal to work. His presence as even a mid-rotation arm will go a long way toward keeping New York at the top of the AL East in 2017, and if he looks more like the No. 2 he has for much of the summer, then even better for the Yankees. The fact he’s also around in 2018 and 2019 and not just a rental made it much easier for the Yankees to further decimate their preseason top-10 prospect list.

Mateo was the fourth-ranked prospect on the Yankees according to Baseball America coming into 2017, with Kaprielian fifth and Fowler ninth. Between this deal and trading Blake Rutherford (No. 3 on the list) earlier this month, the top of their system has taken a beating.

However, Aaron Judge was also on that top 10, and his 2017 has him dominating the AL. Clint Frazier was ranked second, and not only is he still around, but he could push Jacoby Ellsbury out of a job. Gleyber Torres will miss the rest of 2017 recovering from Tommy John surgery, but the young shortstop was tearing things up at the plate before then, and the long-term concerns are much different for a position player than a pitcher.

In short, the Yankees still have plenty of exciting new youth to go around, and they added the 27-year-old Gray and his two-and-a-half years of team control to the organization in exchange for a haul of kids. Gray will help the Yankees get under the luxury tax threshold next season in much the same way that Judge and Frazier will, and that will allow the Yankees to have plenty of cash available for their next wave of major signings. That’s worth giving up prospects for, even leaving aside that Gray makes them a more capable contending team today.

As for the A’s, their rebuild has been sped up considerably: Three top-10 prospects from a farm system that was one of the game’s best is no small thing. Giving up Gray wasn’t an easy decision, but the A’s have admitted it’s rebuild time, so moving him for the largest haul makes sense. This is the kind of deal that should work out for both sides, but it will take longer to see things that way in Oakland.

That being said, the A’s did not pry the top prospects the Yankees had from the system, and just like Gray is risky in some respects — injuries, his down 2015 — the prospects they did get have plenty of variance, too. The Yankees should be commended for not giving up as much as they could have, but we’ll need to wait and see if the A’s faith in who they did get was well placed.