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After being spurned by Juan Soto in free agency, the New York Yankees blitzed out a fast reply, signing Max Fried to an eight-year deal at this week's Winter Meetings. Far from satisfied, though, they've now turned to their bullpen, and the Brewers are giving them arguably the best closer in the game. Devin Williams will wear the navy blue pinstripes in 2025, and the Brewers will get (among others) left-handed starter Nestor Cortes to bolster their starting rotation.
Stunningly, the Crew will also receive second baseman Caleb Durbin in the deal. One of the Yankees' top prospects, Durbin was widely expected to start for the Bombers in 2025, but will instead take over an infield role with the Brewers.
Though he's generally been projected as a second baseman in the majors due to his diminutive stature, Durbin played a good amount of third base in the upper minors in 2024, including in the Arizona Fall League. He's a right-handed batter, and he could slot in nicely at the top of the order almost right away. He batted .275/.388/.451 at (mostly) Triple A in 2024, with elite contact rates and speed. He only hit 10 home runs in 406 regular-season plate appearances, but then hit five in a remarkable stint in the AFL, during which he maintained a .976 OPS.
Durbin feels very much like a Brewers type, positionally. He's versatile, and the team doesn't automatically need either to move Brice Turang or Joey Ortiz to short. The latter remains more likely, perhaps, but Durbin's body type screams keystone, and the chances of Turang sliding to short do rise incrementally here. It's a huge addition, and this deal very neatly echoes the haul the Brewers got for Corbin Burnes last winter: a top infield prospect who'd been waiting for their chance, and a key left-handed pitcher for a rotation the team had quietly marked as a unit in need of urgent help.
Speaking of which, let's turn our attention to Cortes, who would have been the much bigger name a year or two ago. Intriguingly, he, too, is only one year from free agency, so the Crew gain no team control in this part of the exchange. They do shift resources from an unfathomably deep bullpen to a needy rotation, though, and Cortes had another strong year in 2024. It was cut short by elbow trouble in September, and like Williams, his only indelible image from the 2024 postseason is as the victim of a massive home run—in his case, Freddie Freeman's Game 1 walk-off grand slam in the World Series.
When he's right, though, Cortes is a solid mid-rotation starter. He walked just 5.5% of opposing batters in 2024 and can miss bats reasonably well. He's most famous for his craftiness, with a delivery that he sometimes manipulates dramatically to confound hitters' timing. Though an extreme fly-ball guy, he doesn't give up undue numbers of home runs, thanks to a fastball-cutter-slider mix that induces lot of lazy fly balls and pop-ups. Few pitchers figure to profit more handsomely from pitching in front of the Brewers' all-world outfield defense than Cortes can.
Much of the question with Cortes is the health of his elbow. He pitched in October only against doctors' orders. He suffered a flexor strain in his throwing arm, and while the full offseason to recover should allow him to ramp up normally next spring, there's a real risk associated with that injury; it is often a precursor of a torn UCL. Cortes was projected for $7.7 million via arbitration in his final year of team control, according to MLB Trade Rumors, so if he were at immediate such risk, the Yankees would have considered non-tendering him. They didn't, and the expectation is that he'll be ok. But that issue certainly made him more available in this deal.
It also necessitated some money changing hands, which is the final piece in this deal. The Yankees will send some money to the Brewers (no specific amount reported yet), so that the deal will trim the payroll for the small-market, budget-conscious Crew. All in all, this trade checks every box you might have hoped the team could check in the Williams maneuver. They've filled their infield void. Durbin is a great hedge against regression at the plate by Turang, too. Cortes slots into a rotation that already featured Freddy Peralta, Brandon Woodruff, Aaron Civale, and Tobias Myers, and their depth begins to seem formidable. There might be another trade in the offing, at some point, as Cortes and Civale would both be pitching as impending free agents and there's a whiff of redundancy here, but both Cortes and Durbin are great fits for what the Brewers like to do.
This trade was an inevitability this winter, and in some ways, it's a sad one. Williams has been superb for the Brewers for his entire career, and Trevor Megill won't quite replace him the way he replaced Josh Hader years ago. However, on balance, the Brewers got better and more sustainable by making the move, and they once again found the best move to keep themselves ensconced in their comfortable place atop the NL Central. They have more to do, but this was the heaviest lift of the winter, and they've finished it well before Christmas.
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