Trade details: The Seattle Mariners acquire LHP Jose A. Ferrer from the Washington Nationals for C Harry Ford and RHP Isaac Lyon
In the most Hollywood trade since the Texas Rangers picked up Cole Hamels, the Mariners acquired Jose Ferrer from the Nationals on Saturday night for Harrison Ford (fine, Harry Ford, but his given name is Harrison). Ford was Seattle’s 2021 first-round pick and was a top-100 prospect as recently as this offseason, while Ferrer is a left-handed reliever coming off a mixed season at best. I like the deal for both sides.
Even though at first glance it looks like the Mariners gave up a top prospect for a generic middle reliever, the pitcher they’re getting is a lot better than his 4.48 ERA last year might imply. Jose Ferrer — still the true Cyrano, no disrespect to Steve Martin — is that left-handed reliever, and he’s coming off his first full year in the majors.
He appeared in 72 games for the Nationals in 2025, putting him in the top 10 in the league in appearances, and posted a 64 percent groundball rate while walking just 4.6 percent of opposing batters. He did this by throwing his 97-98 mph sinker about 70 percent of the time, which would be fine if he had no other weapons, but he does have at least one and maybe two.
He’s developed an above-average or better changeup with hard tumbling action, and he throws what I think are both a cutter and a slider. (Statcast calls them all sliders, but within the data, you can see two clusters by spin rate and horizontal break.) The slider is a real swing-and-miss pitch. It’s almost deranged that Ferrer didn’t use the secondary stuff more, given the size of the platoon split he had last year, with righties hitting .323/.380/.422 off him with a .408 (!) BABIP.
I can see what the Mariners might like about Ferrer: He gets groundballs and doesn’t walk guys. He has two underutilized weapons that should get him more swings and misses while closing that platoon split.
Harry Ford made his major-league debut in 2025. (Steven Bisig / Imagn Images)
Meanwhile, Ford’s star has dimmed in the last year or two. Even in February, when I ranked him as the No. 79 prospect in baseball, I pointed out that the odds of him sticking at catcher were declining, and he still hasn’t shown all that much in-game power. The same is true now, and then some. Still, he gets on base at a very high clip, with a .408 OBP in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League last year, bolstered by a 16 percent walk rate, without being passive.
Ford doesn’t square the ball up consistently enough for real power, making a lot of medium contact in Triple A but not enough hard contact to see 20 homers, and he continued to pop the ball up too often. The Mariners tried him briefly in the outfield in 2024 but only gave him eight games in left before giving up on the experiment, which wasn’t showing much promise.
The Nationals are in an entirely different situation: They don’t have the MVP runner-up behind the plate in the majors, and they don’t have a catching prospect above Double A, which is probably being generous to Nationals prospect Caleb Lomavita despite his rough year at the plate. They can try Ford at other positions, and they can consider whether to work with him on his swing to get to more consistent hard contact, although I know the Mariners worked on that, as well.
For Washington, this is a good reliever they’ll never miss for a player who has a career OBP in the minors of .405, coming to a club that had exactly one regular with an OBP over .325 last year. It’s a model trade for the Nats, one they should hope to repeat as often as possible.