Ryan Weathers is part of what I will call the “Interesting Lump of Clay” group of pitchers acquired via trade in the offseason.
Teams did not love the free-agent group because of cost, age, injury history and/or other reasons. Thus, the trade market was active for starters. Both New York teams, for example, wanted to deepen/upgrade their rotations and did it via trades — Weathers to the Yankees and Freddy Peralta and Tobias Myers to the Mets.
Peralta does not fit into the category I am detailing because both he and Sonny Gray, who was traded from St. Louis to Boston, are fully established starters.
Weathers and Myers do in that they are “Interesting Lumps of Clay” who still perhaps can be molded into something special and have at least a few years of club control for the acquiring club to try to shape them. They have hinted at greater upside without yet demonstrating a consistency that their acquiring teams believe they could pull out of them.
