San Diego Padres Trade Deadline Targets: Daniel Norris

We continue to search for trade targets for the San Diego Padres as the trade deadline approaches in a few days.

It’s very clear that if the San Diego Padres are going to make any trade before the upcoming MLB trade deadline it will be to improve the bullpen.

The Padres bullpen ranks 26th in all of baseball with a 5.48 ERA in 98.2 innings with just 88 strikeouts.

And this was a bullpen we thought coming into the season might be the best in baseball.

But we already know all of that, now we’re just focussing on what we can do to improve the bullpen because despite all of it’s problems the Padres have still proven they’re a playoff contender.

We’ve already covered several trade targets on the site like Mychal Givens and Trevor Rosenthal.

Today I want to focus on someone that not a lot of people are talking about in Daniel Norris of the Detroit Tigers.

Norris is a left-handed pitcher who has primarily been a starter throughout his career, but the Tigers have moved him into the bullpen as a long reliever and he’s really excelled in that role. Not much unlike what happened with Drew Pomeranz last year.

Granted it’s a small sample size, but Norris has a 1.35 ERA in 13.1 innings out of the bullpen in 2020 with 12 strikeouts and just 1 walk.

He’s gone at least 1.2 innings in each of his 5 relief appearances, which would be huge for the Padres who could use someone to give multiple quality innings in the bullpen; although we’ll settle for just one quality inning right now.

Norris is still just 27 years old and has one year of arbitration left before becoming a free agent.

Plus, if the Padres ever needed him to make a spot start in the rotation you can feel pretty comfortable putting him back in that role.

I wouldn’t think the price is that high on Norris, and I think he’d be a huge help in the bullpen.