A week before last year’s trade deadline, Detroit Tigers right-hander Troy Melton got clobbered in his major-league debut. He served up a solo homer in the first inning and a grand slam in the second. The Tigers lost badly. The front office weighed whether to flip Melton for a rental bat.Today, he’s leading the Tigers’ rotation.For this week’s mailbag, we asked baseball fans: Who is a player you could remove from a contending club, and that team would fall apart? Some selected MVP and Cy Young candidates. Others chose unsung heroes, like a 35-year-old lefty hucking 91 mph heaters in the Houston Astros bullpen.In Detroit, one answer is Melton. Despite the inauspicious debut, his 1.93 ERA across 125 2/3 career innings is the best mark of any MLB pitcher with at least 100 innings pitched since the 2025 All-Star break.
Top ERAs over the past 13 months PlayerIPERAFIPTroy Melton125.21.933.98Shohei Ohtani123.22.262.40Chris Sale159.12.322.44Cam Schlittler214.12.392.89Cristopher Sánchez242.22.522.47Yoshinobu Yamamoto208.22.543.11Jacob Misiorowski173.12.602.47Parker Messick176.12.603.14Tarik Skubal1822.622.91
*minimum 100 innings pitchedAfter missing the first two months of the season with elbow inflammation, Melton has posted a 1.46 ERA and allowed one earned run or fewer in 10 of 13 starts. The Tigers are 11-2 in those games. Where would they be without him? Melton’s breakout has helped fuel belief in the Tigers as playoff contenders even after trading starters Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize.Let’s get to your other MVPs.Reader submissions have been edited. All stats are updated through Wednesday.Boston Red Sox: Ceddanne Rafaela. Third in the AL by WAR. He’s also top three in FUN on the Sox. — Nunya B.If you haven’t followed Rafaela’s career arc, he came up in the Red Sox system with a profile best encapsulated by The Athletic’s Keith Law, when ranking Rafaela the league’s No. 32 prospect in 2024: “Rafaela’s one of the most fascinating prospects in the minors, a 5-9 infielder/center fielder from Curaçao who hits the ball harder than you’d expect from someone his size, plays some of the best center-field defense anywhere in professional baseball, and might swing at a butterfly if it flew within 10 feet of him.”All of that proved remarkably accurate in Rafaela’s early days in Boston. He popped 31 homers and stole 39 bases across his first two full MLB seasons. He won a Gold Glove last year. Yet he entered this season with a .284 career on-base percentage and an OPS+ of 89.In this memorable Red Sox summer, Rafaela has put the whole package together. He’s headed for another Gold Glove, leading the AL in outfield assists and all outfielders not named Pete Crow-Armstrong in Outs Above Average and Fielding Run Value. At the plate, he’s slashing .286/.324/.436 with 16 homers and an AL-leading 28 doubles, still swinging freely and chasing wildly yet putting balls in play and getting to pull-side power. It’s not always pretty. But it’s undoubtedly FUN.San Diego Padres: Jackson Merrill. They would not even have a sniff of a wild-card spot without Merrill. — D. P.At the All-Star break, the Padres were a .500 team languishing in third place in the NL West, 12.5 games behind the division-leading Los Angeles Dodgers and needing to leapfrog four teams in the NL wild-card race.Since then, the Padres are 17-9. They have jumped five teams.And … what have we here?Merrill pre-All-Star break: .219/.278/.359, .628 OPS
