Let’s talk about this Jose Ferrer x Harry Ford trade, huh?

A very "Eeeuuuuuuuugghhhhh I don't know, Jim!" Mariners trade

The funniest thing about anytime the Mariners acquire a reliever they’re going to actually keep and use is how abstract and distant it feels in the moment compared to the to near-certain reality of multiple days’ mental health hinging on this guy’s arm in the medium-distant future.

Right now, Jose Ferrer is a young lefty with a hard sinker and secondary stuff that could be better utilized. He’s also the dude the Mariners finally ended up trading Harry Ford for.

But in six months, probably sooner, he’ll be the guy Dan Wilson is using too much. Or too little. Or against the wrong guys. Maybe it’s the right guys.

Maybe it’s literally Game Seven of the ALCS.

OH NOW HE STARTS WALKING PEOPLE—GOD. DAMMIT.

Hey, that’s a long way off.

Let’s talk about the actual guy and the actual trade.

They’re good, the bad and the we’ll see of Jose Ferrer

We’re going to talk about the cost to acquire him here in a second but for now, let’s focus on the guy who will stand as a foundational piece of an offseason where the Mariners look to go from eight outs to zero outs from their first pennant.

There’s a lot of really good analysis out there from folks who are better analysts than me. What I’ll do is blend what I’m seeing with what the other, smarter folks are seeing.

The quick primer: Ferrer is a hard-throwing lefty who tossed 76.1 innings across 72 appearances for the Nationals last year, posting a 4.48 ERA and 1.4 fWAR.

As has been clear for a while now, teams do not care about ERA. It’s not meaningful because it can be misleading and because it can be misleading, it’s not as predictive as other metrics.

To follow, from the Mariners’ release on the move, are the types of things teams do care about.

[In 2025,] Ferrer posted an elite 64.3 ground-ball percentage across his 72 appearances, which ranked in the 99th percentile of all pitchers according to Baseball Savant. Ferrer also ranked in the 95th percentile in lowest walk rate (4.9%), 94th percentile in average fastball velocity (97.7 mph), and 93rd percentile in lowest barrel rate (4.8%) in 2025.

This would be why his FIP the last two years—2.76 in 2024 and 3.03 in 2025—were a good deal better than his ERAs, a 3.38 in 2024 and the aforementioned 4.48 in 2025.

FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching), for those who don’t know, aims to surface “what a player’s ERA would look like over a given period of time if the pitcher were to have experienced league average results on balls in play and league average timing” by focusing on strikeouts, walks and home runs.

Luke Arkins over at Mariners Consigliere notes the likely culprit in the gap between Ferrer’s actual and expected results.

Ferrer’s .276 AVG placed 140th among 153 relievers facing at least 200 hitters, while his .310 wOBA ranked 122nd. Suboptimal results that must improve moving forward. […]

Possible smoking gun: Ferrer’s opponent AVG and OBP are definitely unappealing. But there’s evidence worth considering when discussing a pitcher whose success is contingent on keeping the ball on the ground. His team’s infield defense was suspect in 2025.

The Nationals’ infield contingent accrued a minus-27 Fielding Run Value (FRV) - the worst in baseball. This had to factor into Washington’s .282 AVG on ground balls being the highest allowed by any team. In Ferrer’s case, opponents hit .273 on ground balls he surrendered, which was 24 points above the MLB average.

To me, a pitcher with the third highest ground ball rate in baseball with the worst infield defense behind him is bound to experience damaging results on grounders. Perhaps this is one of many factors influencing the Mariners to acquire Ferrer.

Arkins goes on to highlight the Mariners, also, had bad infield defense in 2025.

That could change, yes, but it’s also not the point I’d like to make.

In baseball and sports and life, your ability to influence an outcome is dependent in large part on how many variables you can control.

For Ferrer, quality of contact is one of those variables he appears to be good at controlling. But you know what’s better, as a pitcher, than inducing weak contact?

That would be preventing contact entirely.

And Ferrer’s relative inability to do that makes me a skosh uneasy about his outlook as an elite high-leverage arm.

In 2025, among relievers who threw at least 50 innings,

• Ferrer’s strikeout rate of 21.9 percent ranked 98th out of 144

• His 11.5 percent swinging strike rate ranked 79th

• His Win Percentage Added (WPA) of 0.78 ranked 75th

WPA is very specifically not supposed to be a predictive stat. But it is, a bit like ERA although better, supposed to be a reflection of the events that transpired.

What happened could have been a little fluky, but it is what happened.

When you’re a pitcher who doesn’t get elite swing-and-miss results, like Ferrer, you open yourself up to more randomness and an increased potential for your results to be worse than the underlying metrics.

It’s a lot easier to block this out in December, long before you’re hanging on this guy’s every pitch, but you’ll definitely feel it whenever he’s got a runner on third with fewer than two outs in an enormous spot.

Of course, at 26 and changing organizations, he’s not a finished product.

On that, to Brendan Gawlowski at FanGraphs. Gawlowski’s a former scout and a friend of mine. He’s also a very smart dude who likes the move for the M’s and sees the potential for upside in changing up a repertoire that sees Ferrer chuck sinkers 71 percent of the time.

The changeup performed very well in 2025, generating big whiff and chase rates, and hitters didn’t do much with it even on contact. He could probably stand to use it more.

The real path forward may be the slider, though. Ferrer’s sits in the low 90s and has tight, two-plane movement, not quite cutterish but in the neighborhood. His command of it isn’t great, generally in the dirt to the glove side, but whether it’s because guys don’t expect the Spanish Inquisition or they’re just not seeing his spin very well, opponents did absolutely nothing with it and whiffed more than half the times they swung. The Mariners have had a lot of success getting fastball-heavy arms to diversify their arsenal — Logan Gilbert and Bryce Miller are two obvious examples — and it would come as no surprise if they have Ferrer lean on the bender a lot more going forward.

Put everything together, and you can imagine why Seattle sees Ferrer as an impact reliever, the kind worth parting with a top prospect for. Sources from around the game like Ferrer as an upside play. […]

The more I look at Ferrer, the more he seems like a reliever with another gear, a guy with closer stuff who is a plenty good fit for Seattle’s bullpen as is.

This will be something to watch once the boys get down to Peoria, both in early reporting on bullpens and then in Cactus League action.

This is getting way longer than it needs to be so let’s get to the other side of it real quick.

Farewell, Harry Ford – that was, well, something

When a move like this goes down, one for a long-established Mariners prospect with a good deal of volatility in value, you often see two sides that look a lot like what we saw in the fallout from Ford’s move:

• Ford was a consensus top 100 prospect and moving him for a reliever is an obvious overpay

• Ford was never—or at least no longer—as good as people thought; the market dictates his worth and this was it

I’m not going to take either one of those sides because, man, I don’t know.

I don’t have the scouting eye to know any better and I don’t have the sources to tell me what the market was saying.

What I will say though: the arc of Harry Ford as a Seattle Mariner ending here is a bummer. And weird.

It goes back to a piece I wrote in June.

It’s good to try to win

If I were to pick the most relevant point out from there, it’d be this: sometimes it’s just as risky to not trade prospects as it is to trade them.

Ford has been a member of the Mariners organization since 2021. He became tradable after the Braves finished beating the Astros in the World Series that year.

The Mariners have run out a playoff team or near-playoff team every one of the four seasons since then and Harry Ford contributed nothing of value to any of those clubs when he otherwise could have.

It was never obvious, not even now, that he should have—but he could’ve. That’s undeniable.

When he’s moved now, here, for this, you can’t help but wonder who the best player was the Mariners could’ve used Ford to acquire in 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025.

Heck, in 2025, the possibility exists he could’ve chipped in himself had the M’s and Ford committed to developing more positional versatility.

Or maybe, the whole time, the Mariners didn’t think he was all that good and were intent on limiting him to exposure that would reveal as much to rival teams.

I don’t know.

Ford could still, through Ferrer, have an impact on Mariners teams going forward.

But the last Mariners team was one lockdown pivot inning from a quality reliever away from the first pennant in franchise history.

There’s no guarantee this or another roster gets that close.

And Harry Ford is left as a valuable reminder in why it can be dangerous to hug your prospects a little too tightly.