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December 9, 2015: Seattle Mariners trade RHP Freddy Peralta, RHP Daniel Missaki, and RHP Carlos Herrera to the Milwaukee Brewers for 1B Adam Lind.
This was the trade that happened at the time. Lind was the team’s first baseman with one year of regular season money coming off the low end in a string of seasons where his OPS was in the low to mid-.800s during half-time. That is, a fairly useful player, but not a valuable trade asset; so guys get business all the time.
What Milwaukee had done here on the curve has just repeated itself a lot over the years: in exchange for a low average return, they took a portfolio approach in guys at the bottom of the minors with marks. Missaki was an intriguing arm who had already placed in the WBC at the time of the trade; he never really pitched in Brewer’s system due to frequent elbow issues, although he eventually carved out a corner as an international and upper-minor iterman swingman in the 2020s. Herrera never made it out of Belgium A and was released during the pandemic.
It was very high in BP’s estimation when the deal happened, neither the headliner (Missaki) nor the most projected in this deal (Herrera). The prospect was untidy in his third season at club level, with Sterling’s approach to walking but unimpressive stuff. He’ll never actually make the Brewers Top 10 prospect list for us either; In November 2017, we wrote about him as a fastball/slider type topping out at 92 with “no strikeouts.”
In fact, in his rookie campaign in 2018, Peralta averaged just 91 mph on his fastball. His speed was three ticks that would jump offseason, but it wasn’t until 2021 that he established himself as a regular member of the major league rotation. The Brewers smartly brought him up well before that, in the 2019-2020 offseason, for an unproven price tag brought up until now: only $15.5m guaranteed with two $8 million options through 2026. If you don’t know, the Brewers are absolutely good at this stuff, and have been for a decade.
Over time, “Fastball Freddy” established itself as a fairly solid non-low end. 2 starters But, despite occasionally flashing top-in-turn excitement, it never really emerged in one … until 2025, when another speed tick was obtained, and its change increased. He posted a 2.70 ERA and finished fifth in NL Cy Young voting.