This is an exciting week in baseball, especially for those who are into speculation and rumor, as the July 31 trade deadline is coming up Thursday. Over the next 24 hours, we should see some pretty significant moves, with Jon Lester looking like the biggest name to join a contender, but potentially being joined by the likes of David Price and Cole Hamels. Where these players end up may very well decide which teams make the playoffs, or in some cases, which teams get to bypass the wild card game and advance right on to the real postseason.

Of course, Thursday’s deadline isn’t an actual trade deadline in the literal sense of the word. Trades can still be made next month, and they can even be made in September, right up until the end of the year. Thursday is just the end of the rules that make it easy to make a deal, because once the calendar flips over to August, waivers become involved and things get a bit more complicated. The guys who get moved in August are usually those who have big, expensive contracts, so Thursday’s deadline doesn’t really apply to guys like Cliff Lee, Matt Kemp, or Jonathan Papelbon.

This brings up a question, though: Why do we have a trade deadline that is only a deadline to trade some players and not others? And, while we’re at it, why is the deadline July 31 anyway?

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The Cardinals are reportedly kicking the tires on David Price and Jon Lester, and presumably, they’ve probably at least inquired about Cole Hamels. It’s no secret that they’re looking for pitching, and they both the means and the motive to make a big move. And not surprisingly, trade rumors with the Cardinals inevitably invoke Oscar Taveras‘ name.

According to all the prospect guys, Taveras is the Cardinals best prospect, and one of the best prospects in the game. But while I’m not a prospect expert by any means, I will say that I hold some reservations about Taveras’ long-term value, as I think he fits the mold of the hitter that prospect analysts miss on the most often.

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Oh, hanging curve
Shapely and round, you are
With the touch of a finger and the flick of a wrist,
You’re sent spinning, darting downward,
Destined for Your Leather Sanctuary
Perhaps, first, met with a kiss from the Earth!
But nay
Neither governed by gravity nor man,
You stand tall
Proud – and erect – for the world to see
Fearlessly perpetuating your fleeting, floating existence
For just a moment too long, before:
*thwack!*
A new trajectory is born
At the hands of your nemesis:
That unforgiving maple lumber
Helplessly hurtling,
You shoot scowls toward your maker between rapid rotations
“What have I done to deserve this?”
Before long, you reach Your Leather Sanctuary
But it is not the one you’ve grown to love
No, like a hard bed at the Motel 6: you rest, uneasy
Disappointment looms on the face of many
Josh Beckett seems not to care.
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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Seattle at Cleveland | 19:05 ET
Felix Hernandez (158.1 IP, 62 xFIP-, 5.6 WAR) faces Corey Kluber (149.1 IP, 72 xFIP-, 4.3 WAR). The pair rank first and third, respectively, among all pitchers by WAR this season — the former on the strength largely of the league’s most valuable changeup by linear-weight runs; the latter, owing to a cutter and curveball which both rank among the top three in the league by runs according to their respective pitch type.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio.

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Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the trade deadline, draft strategy, five-strikeout innings, and more.

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The Pittsburgh Pirates don’t have much of a recent history of buying. This is because the Pirates don’t have much of a recent history of winning. But the team was somewhat active during each of the past two seasons. In the middle of 2012, the Pirates added guys like Wandy Rodriguez, Gaby Sanchez and Travis Snider. In the middle of 2013, they added guys like Marlon Byrd, Justin Morneau, John Buck and… Robert Andino? The Pirates were happy to make some tweaks, but they didn’t want to do anything too big, because they’ve been thinking longer-term. They haven’t been positioned to give up prospect talent.

Well, it’s 2014. And the Pirates are good again. They’ve been rumored to be in the mix for some smaller bits, but Tuesday brought word of a potential blockbuster:

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a fast-emerging dark horse in the Jon Lester sweepstakes, joining the Los Angeles Dodgers in pursuit of the Boston ace as the Red Sox decide whether to trade him before Thursday’s deadline, major league sources told Yahoo Sports.

Lester’s a big fish. Arguably the biggest fish out there. He’s also a rental fish, in whatever kind of market it is where you rent fish. The Pirates haven’t previously targeted moves like this, but this season not only are they in the mix — they seem like a perfect match. The Pirates check off all the boxes on the Jon Lester trade-partner checklist.

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While this is definitely a gross simplification, there are essentially two competing schools of thought on how to construct a roster: emphasize talent at the top of the roster — the Stars and Scrubs approach, as it is often called — or spread the wealth around to limit glaring weaknesses. To be sure, either approach can work, as the reality is that the total production level is more important than the distribution of that production within the roster, but there are certainly differing camps who prefer one strategy or the other.

The argument in favor of the Stars and Scrubs approach has a lot of overlap with the argument for the non-linear valuation of WAR. As the argument goes, one +6 WAR player is worth more than two +3 WAR players, because it is easier to upgrade on a +0 WAR player than a +3 WAR player, so if you start out with +6 and +0, you can upgrade the +0 guy to a +1 or +2 WAR player and come out with a higher overall level of production.

I think the theory has a few problems, however.

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When the Royals and Rays matched up on the big James Shields/Wil Myers (and others) trade in the winter of 2012-13, the judgement from the baseball community was swift and decisive. It wasn’t necessarily that you couldn’t trade a budding star like Myers away under any circumstances; after all, plenty of people liked the Jeff Samardzija / Jason Hammel trade for Oakland even though it cost them Addison Russell. It was that the 2013 Royals, unlike the 2014 A’s, didn’t appear to be close enough to success to make a “win-now” move at that price. It was that the Royals already had a Jeff Francoeur-sized hole in right field and could have made a similar overall improvement by just putting Myers out there instead.

It seemed that Dayton Moore was trading the future for the present, even though the present wasn’t likely to work out, and so far, that’s been the case. The 2013 Royals won 86 games, a huge 14-game improvement over the 72-win 2012 team, but didn’t come close to the playoffs. The 2014 Royals are two games over .500, and our latest playoff odds give them just a 14.7 percent chance of making it to October. Recent reports that they’re looking for a right-handed right fielder have led to some pretty easy snark considering who they gave away. Dave wrote last week that they should trade Shields now, since he’s an impending free agent; I argued that they were the team most likely to mistakenly “go for it” before the deadline.

If the Shields trade was made on the premise that they needed to get to the playoffs for it to be a success, then it certainly looks like it’s going to be a failure, just as most predicted the day it was made. Needless to say, nearly two years later, the trade still looks bad for Kansas City… but maybe not exactly in the way that we might have thought. Read the rest of this entry »