The Rockies and Dodgers lined up on an intra-division trade that’ll see hard-throwing righty Seth Halvorsen go from Colorado to L.A. in exchange for minor league righty Nick Frasso and minor league outfielder Landyn Vidourek. The teams have announced the swap. Halvorsen is on the 15-day injured list due to shoulder inflammation at the moment, so he’ll head to Triple-A Oklahoma City to finish off a rehab assignment he recently started. The Dodgers can then decide whether to formally option him upon his activation or bring him right to the major league bullpen.
The 26-year-old Halvorsen brings mammoth fastball velocity, shaky command and more than five seasons of club control to the Dodgers. Colorado’s seventh-round pick back in 2023, he appeared in the majors barely a year after being drafted and has now amassed 71 innings across parts of three major league seasons. He’s posted a pedestrian 4.31 ERA in that time but done so with big velocity (99.6 mph average on the four-seamer), a sharp 12.4% swinging-strike rate and a strong 48.8% ground-ball rate. Halvorsen has walked a bloated 12.1% of his opponents and been far too homer-prone (1.52 HR/9), but there are a lot of interesting components in his profile.
Halvorsen sports an unappealing 4.74 ERA in 19 major league innings this season, but he’s posted a 2.04 ERA, 32.4% strikeout rate, 9.5% walk rate and 45.2% grounder rate while averaging an absurd 99.9 mph on his heater in 17 1/3 Triple-A innings. This is the first season in which he’s used a minor league option. He’ll have two more option years remaining after this one.
Halvorsen joins the Dodgers as something of a development project, but that’s an area in which L.A. has excelled. They’ve expended relatively humble acquisition costs to add players like Evan Phillips, Will Klein, Alex Vesia, Anthony Banda and others in recent years, going on to coax strong bullpen performances from all of them. That’s not an exhaustive list of every Dodgers bullpen success story, and there are plenty of misses along the way as well, but the organization has a clear competency when it comes to unlocking bigger performances from talented-but-unestablished bullpen arms of this nature.
Addressing the bullpen isn’t a dire need for the Dodgers, but that’s to be expected for a team with a Major League Baseball-best 63-37 record. Los Angeles doesn’t necessarily have many glaring deficiencies, but every contender is always on the hunt for bullpen help. Bringing in an arm with this type of power repertoire and remaining club control/minor league options is all the more appealing.
Halvorsen joins several important Dodgers relievers on the major league injured list. Edwin Díaz has been out since late April after having a bone spur removed from his elbow. Blake Treinen hit the injured list in mid-June due to elbow inflammation. Brusdar Graterol hasn’t pitched this season and underwent back surgery on June 1. Ben Casparius, a vital arm for the ’25 Dodgers, has been out since mid-April due to shoulder inflammation.
The current bullpen group remains strong. Tanner Scott is enjoying a rebound season and has more than capably filled the closer role for the injured Díaz. Klein, Vesia, Edgardo Henriquez and Jack Dreyer all have earned run averages under 3.00. Henriquez and Vesia are at 2.25 and 2.14, respectively. It’s a strong group that’ll only get even deeper if Díaz can make a full recovery. That said, Henriquez is the only member of this group who can match — or, in his case, exceed — Halvorsen’s velocity.
In exchange for a high-upside, highly volatile bullpen play in Halvorsen, the Rockies will acquire a former top-100 prospect (Frasso) and a player the Dodgers selected in the third round just last summer (Vidourek). Colorado general manager Josh Byrnes — second on the team’s baseball ops hierarchy behind president Paul DePodesta — is eminently familiar with both players. Byrnes, who was hired this past offseason, spent more than a decade in the Dodgers’ front office as their senior vice president of baseball operations.
Frasso, 27, has yet to pitch in the majors (though he does have two days of MLB service). He’s a 2020 fourth-round pick (Blue Jays) that the Dodgers originally acquired in the 2022 trade sending right-hander Mitch White to Toronto. Two years later, Frasso cracked the back end of the top-100 lists at MLB.com (No. 80), Baseball America (No. 97) and Baseball Prospectus (No. 79).
Injuries have frequently set Frasso back. Not long after cracking those top-100 rankings, he wound up requiring surgery to repair the labrum in his right shoulder. That spring injury naturally wiped out his entire 2024 campaign.
Frasso, who’d been a starter up until that point in his minor league career, returned in 2025 and pitched 77 innings with diminished results during a season split between starting and relieving. A late-May move to the ‘pen didn’t do much to improve Frasso’s middling ERA, but his strikeout and walk rates improved dramatically in relief. He’d been sitting between 14-15% in both categories but jumped to 23.4% and 10.7% upon being moved to the ‘pen full time.
This year, Frasso has worked exclusively as a reliever (except for a 1 2/3-inning “start” as an opener) and posted a 4.74 ERA with a massive 35.1% strikeout rate against an ugly 14.9% walk rate. Further distancing himself from that 2024 surgery has restored some life to his arsenal. He sat 94.6 mph on his four-seamer in 2025 but is at 96.2 mph so far in 2026. His swinging-strike rate has jumped from 9.3% to a hearty 12.7%. His opponents’ chase rate has surged from a poor 24.5% to a strong 33%; opponents have gone from a 78.1% contact rate to just 72%. The ERA might not be much to look at, but beyond the shoddy command, Frasso has been dogged by a through-the-roof .407 average on balls in play — despite holding opponents to an average exit velocity of only 87.1 mph and a paltry 32.1% hard-hit rate.
Since Frasso has yet to make his major league debut, he still has his entire slate of club control remaining. The Rockies could call him up to the majors and control him for six seasons beyond the current one — all the way through 2032. Frasso is already in his final minor league option year, however, so he’ll need to break camp with the team in 2027 or else be traded or exposed to waivers. With that in mind, it’d behoove the Rox to get a real look at him in the season’s final couple months.
The 22-year-old Vidourek is a toolsy but contact-challenged outfielder whom the Dodgers took with the No. 104 overall pick last summer. He’s hitting just .170/.332/.311 in 256 Low-A plate appearances this season, due in no small part to a massive 38.7% swinging-strike rate.
Vidourek draws praise for above-average raw power, plus speed and a plus-plus arm in the outfield. The University of Cincinnati product also posted standout exit velocity, barrel rates and hard-hit rates in his brief minor league career. When Vidourek does make contact, it’s typically impactful, but he’ll need to substantially reduce his swing-and-miss to have hope of becoming a regular.
The Dodgers have been playing Vidourek in center field this season. FanGraphs noted back in December that he was likelier to end up in right field as he continues to fill out an athletic 6’1″, 192-pound frame. Baseball America touted his 70-grade throwing arm as the best in the Dodgers’ entire system.
There’s a lot to like with Vidourek, but the penchant for whiffs is a glaring, prominent red flag. Given his blend of power, speed and defense, Vidourek doesn’t need to suddenly develop a plus hit tool in order to become a potential regular in the majors, but the current rate of whiffs — particularly in the low minors — simply won’t cut it.
Vidourek has the potential to substantially (and quickly) improve his stock if he can hone his bat-to-ball skills, but the Dodgers were willing to take that risk due not only to their desire to acquire a controllable high-octane reliever but also to the outfield depth in the system overall. Center fielder Andy Pages is controlled through the 2030 season, and the Dodgers incredibly have three outfielders ranked inside the top 20 on Baseball America’s latest top-100 list: Josue De Paula (No. 4), Mike Sirota (No. 14) and Eduardo Quintero (No. 18). Zyhir Hope, ranked No. 55 at BA, gives the Dodgers a fourth high-profile outfield prospect. The Rockies aren’t nearly as deep in outfield prospects — or prospects in general — so they’ll buy an extremely tooled-up prospect in hopes of catching him before his stock soars.
Joel Sherman of the New York Post first reported that Halvorsen was being traded to the Dodgers for a pair of minor leaguers. His colleague, Jon Heyman, first reported the names of the two prospects.
