Phillies Trade Griff McGarry To Dodgers

The Dodgers have acquired minor league right-hander Griff McGarry from the Phillies in exchange for international bonus pool space, the teams announced Tuesday. (The Phillies’ announcement adds that they’ll also receive a player to be named later or cash.) He wasn’t on Philadelphia’s 40-man roster and thus won’t require Los Angeles to make a corresponding 40-man roster move.

McGarry once ranked as one of the more promising prospects in Philadelphia’s system, sitting third among Baseball America’s rankings ahead of the 2023 season. His standing slipped after a a pair of down showings in 2023-24, but the Nats scooped him up in December’s Rule 5 Draft following a rebound campaign in 2025. Washington wound up returning McGarry to the Phillies at the end of spring training, and he’ll now head to the Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate in Oklahoma City.

Back in 2022, McGarry’s age-23 season, he pitched 87 1/3 innings across three levels and notched a 3.71 ERA with a huge 35.7% strikeout rate but a concerning 14.6% walk rate. He was rocked for a 6.00 ERA in 17 minor league starts the following season, then turned in a 4.55 ERA in 30 minor league relief appearances in 2024. McGarry had fallen almost entirely off the Phillies’ prospect map, but he bounced back with 83 2/3 innings of 3.44 ERA ball in a return to a rotation role in Triple-A last year.

McGarry walked more than 18% of his opponents in 2023 and saw that number spike all the way to 24% in 2024. Last year’s 13.9% walk rate is still far too high, but it’s a big step in the right direction relative to 2023-24, and he paired it with a huge 35.1% strikeout rate. The 6’2″ righty isn’t an especially hard thrower, sitting 93.9 mph with his four-seamer in ’25 and a hair better in this year’s small sample (94.3 mph). McGarry is a two-pitch right-hander, coupling that four-seamer with a slider that rests at 82-83 mph each year. He’s worked out of the bullpen again in 2026, allowing four runs in four Triple-A frames and walking more batters (seven) than he’s struck out (four).

Suffice it to say, McGarry is a pure change of scenery candidate and development project for the Dodgers. He’s long intrigued scouts with a fastball and slider that both grade as plus pitches and generate whiffs in droves, but McGarry’s command is nowhere close to average. The most recent scouting reports on him at FanGraphs, Baseball America, MLB.com and other outlets peg him with 30-grade command (on the 20-80 scale). There’s potential for a big relief arm in the plausible range of outcomes, even if it’s on the low-probability end of the spectrum, and it didn’t cost the Dodgers much to roll the dice on the soon-to-be 27-year-old righty.

It’s not yet clear how much international pool space is going back to the Phillies, but bonus pool allotments have to be traded in increments of $250K (unless it’s the remainder of a pool that’s currently at less than $250K total). In all likelihood, the Phils are adding one or two slots, giving them a bit of extra spending capacity to bring in some teenage talent on the international amateur market.

To be clear, no actual money is changing hands in the swap. The league places a hard cap on the amount each club can spend on international amateurs, but any team can acquire up to 60% of its original pool space in trades with other teams.

The Dodgers and Phillies both opened the 2026 international free agent period (which began in January) with a $6.679MM pool. Los Angeles spent about $3.265MM of that sum on day one of the period, per MLB.com. The Phillies spent about $4.85MM, with a hefty $4MM of that sum going to Venezuelan outfielder Francisco Renteria.