Yankees, Brewers Trade Fun All-Star Pitchers, Everyone Wins

It is a ritual as old as time. The Brewers are developing an exciting young player into an All-Star, and a fun one at that. Next, it approaches free play – that’s how time works. The Brewers then trade that player to a struggling team, getting back a few players with years of team control. Finally, the Brewers are developing you players to stars, spin the wheel again and the band plays on. Today’s edition: Milwaukee traded Devin Williams to the Yankees in exchange for Nestor Cortes and infield view Caleb Durbinas Jeff Passan first reported.

Williams is the rare pitcher who isn’t even as famous as his best pitch. Nicknamed The Airbender, his screwball/changeup hybrid has made major leaguers look like overmatched kids for years. On the back end of the pitch and a plus fastball, he has compiled a career ERA of 1.83 over five plus seasons of dominance. His 39.4% career strikeout rate sounds like a typo. He stepped up in the 2020 season and has been the second-best reliever in baseball since then, behind only Emmanuel Clase.

It doesn’t matter what you call the pitch; Williams’ results speak for themselves. “Changeup-first dominant closer” only sounds flat until you look at the raw data. He misses more bats than Josh Hader. He might even be better than his run prevention numbers suggest because the runs he gives up come in bunches. In 2023, for example, he gave up 10 earned runs all year, and four were in a single game. The result: He’s first among relievers in win probability added by a ton because a truly outrageous number of his games end in scoreless innings. He is not Mariano Riverabut he might be the closest thing in today’s game: an automatic ninth inning.

Williams was available because he will reach free agency after the 2025 season. The Brewers love to build elite bullpens, but they are especially frugal in the way they do it. Their payroll hovers around $120 million, and he’ll bring in something in the neighborhood of $20 million per year (deserved!) when each team can bid for his services next winter. He’s a true rental — he happens to be so good that the Yankees surrendered two interesting players for a year of relief pitching anyway.

Cortes, like Williams, will be a free agent after the 2025 season. Like Williams, he doesn’t function like most other pitchers. But where Williams has an incomparable breaking pitch as his one strange trick, Cortes is all funk. He changes speeds and throws five or six different pitches, depending on which classification system you like. He varies his delivery endlessly, sometimes within a match. He disrupts the timing and uses elite command to avoid walks.

It doesn’t seem like it should work, but it does. In his four-year stint with the Yankees from 2021-24, he has compiled a 3.33 ERA, 3.68 FIP and achieved 9.4 WAR despite intermittent injury problems. Nobody feels comfortable during a Cortes start, from opponents to his own team’s fans. He constantly walks a tightrope to get batters out with half-assed stuff—and he pulls off that balancing act with remarkable frequency.

Durbin, the other player Milwaukee got for Williams, is an oddity in his own right. He is 5’6″ and, to quote Eric Longenhagen, “built like a size extra small Tyler O’Neill.” His career path—record-setting high school wrestler, Division III baseball standout, late-round draft pick included as a lottery ticket in a trade for a reliever—is straight out of central casting. I’ll borrow freely from Eric’s notes here to paint a image, but remember this as I do: There’s a faint whiff of magical realism to Durbin, as if he exists in a world similar but not quite like ours.

Durbin torched the middle minors in 2023 after being acquired from the Braves for Lucas Luetge after the 2022 season. He broke his wrist in 2024 and played in just 90 games as a result — but he hit a scorching .287/.396/.471 in those games, walked more often than he struck out, and stole 29 bags while he was caught only three times. He did so while playing solid defense at second and third, as well as emergency defense at shortstop and in the outfield.

He succeeds in about the way you’d expect. He gets plenty of contact, especially in the zone, thanks to a compact swing that punishes pitches up in the zone. There is a ton of lift and pull in his game and his excellent bat control helps him stay ahead even against good opposing pitches. The exit velo numbers weren’t great in 2024, but wrist injuries often sap power for a while even after players return from them, so it’s fair to predict some improvement in that area next year.

This kind of approach has its limitations. It would be wildly irresponsible to project above-average power production at the major league level from a 5’6” batter until we’ve seen far more evidence that he can keep it up. But he checks enough boxes offensively that I’d be very interested to find out how that works out in the big leagues, because he has a lot of skills you can’t teach: bat control, command of the strike zone, and an ability to identify and attack spaces that he can damage.

The defense will be crucial to the whole package here. Eric likes his defense at second and third, though he’s less optimistic about his ability to handle short. Durbin may not have the raw speed to handle center, but he has good baseball instincts and solid acceleration, as you can tell from his superlative baserunning bona fides. In Milwaukee’s outfield, he will never sniff center anyway, and he is a good option in both corners. He also looks like a great sharing partner too Brice Turang in second place. Here is a video of Durbin in AFL action this year, courtesy of Longenhagen.

All three players in this industry feel like they could be characters in a baseball movie. Williams succeeds with a one-on-one pitch with a killer moniker. Cortes doesn’t look like a good big league pitcher, but he’s succeeded anyway thanks to his willingness to use every trick in the book at his fingertips. Durbin feels improbable across the board — the path to prominence, the body type, just about anything imaginable. If you wanted to make one Ocean’s Elevenheist movie featuring baseball players, all three of these guys would fit the bill thanks to their eccentricities and strengths.

But the trade itself? It’s right down the middle, standard stuff for both the Brewers and the Yankees. The whole point of having a New York-level budget is that instead of going after guys like Cortes who can mimic Max Fried-level production, if everything goes right, you can just go sign Max Fried. Even after trading Cortes, the Yankees have a jam-packed rotation; Clark Schmidt projects as their sixth start, and I’d be comfortable if not overjoyed to start him in a playoff game.

Likewise, Durbin is an exciting player and someone you’d love to have as a relief option at the league minimum — but the Yankees don’t have to pay the league minimum, and at the end of Aaron Judge‘s best, they will probably have more than league minimum value at most positions. Oswaldo Cabrera is not so different from Durbin in terms of overall utility and value, although he gets there in a different way.

Williams, on the other hand, lets the Yankees play the way they want. Manager Aaron Boone likes to use his bullpen aggressively in high-stakes games and free up Luke Weaver acting as a firefighter will make that unit even more deadly. Williams is the best available at his position, and the Yankees can either keep him after this year or collect a compensatory pick if he leaves in free agency. He addresses a position of real weakness, and all he cost the Yankees was a free-agent-to-be starter they struggled to find room for and a minor league infielder. This trade makes their big league team much better and likely won’t cost them much down the line.

Milwaukee also gets exactly what they want. Cortes is clearly not elite in the same way Williams is, but he might be a better fit for the Brewers, even in a one-for-one trade. They have to start pitching badly; even with Cortes in the mix, their rotation has plenty of question marks, especially how many innings Brandon Woodruff will pitch. The Milwaukee bullpen was excellent in 2024 when Williams missed the first half of the season, and the organization’s development staff has done an incredible job finding and working with relievers to unlock new skill levels. The Brewers are exactly the kind of team that prefers 160 good innings to 60 good ones.

Do you add a utility infielder with six years of team control on top of that? It’s a classic Brewers move, and he even fits the roster well; they need an infielder who can cover second and third, they’d prefer him to be right-handed, and a little outfield coverage wouldn’t hurt either. It wouldn’t shock anyone if, over the course of three or four league-average seasons, Durbin becomes a Swiss army knife. This trade has a lot in common with Corbin Burns trade Milwaukee made last offseason — and the Josh Hader trade before that, and Carlos Gomez act before that and well, you get the idea.

In summary, this is the most win-win trade between competitors I’ve seen in a while. Everyone gets what they are looking for here. Both teams improve their chances for 2025. Both teams look better in their new configuration. All players are fun. The only thing I don’t like about this trade is that I didn’t think of it myself. What a pleasure.