The Tigers, as they seemingly always do, have a bullpen problem. They rank 26th in the majors in bullpen ERA (4.37) and 25th in FIP (3.92), as Joe Nathan has been a disaster in the ninth inning, and Al Albuquerque, Phil Coke, and Ian Krol haven’t been very good at protecting leads before Nathan takes the hill either. When your most reliable reliever is Joba Chamberlain, you know there’s some issues.

So on Wednesday night, the Tigers did what contending teams with bullpen issues do; they paid through the nose — giving up Double-A starter Jake Thomspon and rookie reliever Corey Knebel — to get an experienced, high-quality closer, acquiring Joakim Soria from the Rangers. Soria has been fantastic this year, posting a ridiculous 1.07 FIP, thanks to the lowest walk and highest strikeout rate in his career. Oh, and the fact that he hasn’t allowed a home run yet. That helps too.

Of course, not allowing home runs in Texas is a neat trick that Joe Nathan pulled off last year, and that hasn’t really carried over to his pitching this year in Detroit, but even when the home runs return, Soria should still be pretty big upgrade for the Tigers relief corps. However, even very good relievers only pitch about 10 innings per month, and with just a little over two months left in the season, there just aren’t that many innings left for Soria to make a significant difference in the standings. Besides, the Tigers were extremely likely to win their division even without Soria, as they currently hold a 6 1/2 game lead over the Indians and a 7 game lead over the Royals.

In terms of moving the playoff odds needle, perhaps no significant trade made this month will have less of an effect that the Tigers acquiring Soria. But this trade isn’t about the regular season. This trade is about the postseason, and the potential impact Soria could have in October.

We’re all pretty familiar with the fact that relievers just don’t pitch enough innings to be highly valuable in the regular season, but the game is played differently in the postseason. The increased frequency of off days makes it easier to lean on your best relievers more often, and the importance of each game provides an incentive to make sure that the best pitchers are on the mound the most often. And this shows up in their usage patterns.

For illustration, the most frequently used relievers throw about 5% of a team’s total innings over the course of the regular season; that’s ~75 innings out of around 1,450. Most are a bit under that, but if you’re really aggressive with your closer usage or have a relief ace working in a setup role, you can give him 5% of the total innings pie from April through September.

Now, let’s take a look at the percentage of innings pitched by elite relievers in last year’s postseason. Eight of the top 20 relievers in 2013 WAR made it to at least the division series and pitched in multiple games. Here are their percentages of innings pitched for last postseason:

After throwing 5.1% of the Red Sox innings in the regular season, Uehara threw nearly double that amount in the playoffs. For reference, 9.6% of a team’s total regular season innings would equal out to about 140 innings per year. Based on the fact that the average leverage index when Uehara entered the game was 1.76, you could equate the impact of the innings he threw in the postseason to a starting pitcher that threw 246 innings in the regular season.

Yeah, elite relievers can matter an awful lot in October, which is why teams continually trade legitimate prospects to acquire them in July. Of course, Uehara carried the heaviest workload of the elite relievers, so this is basically the absolute best case usage scenario for a relief ace in October. The A’s managed to use Doolittle similarly, but only through one round, and every other team who advanced beyond the division series gave a lighter workload to their best bullpen arms. The average percentage of innings pitched for these eight relievers was 6.5%, which still translates a regular season workload of about 95 innings, but doesn’t match what Boston got out of their closer.

But, again, we have to factor in that while these pitchers are throwing fewer innings, they are pitching in innings that have a greater impact on wins and losses than a starting pitcher does, and we can’t simply equate one reliever inning with one starting pitcher inning. The way this is handled in reliever WAR is through chaining, which gives the reliever credit for pitching in higher leverage situations but doesn’t incorrectly assume that those innings would have gone to a replacement level reliever instead.

So, yes, Soria might only throw a handful of postseason innings, and reliever performance is volatile enough that perhaps he won’t end up making a significant difference for the Tigers. In that case, they’ll have just punted one of their best pitching prospects and a power arm who might have been a useful reliever himself. Certainly, this is the kind of deal that could easily backfire, and the Tigers may very well regret this deal in the long run.

But they made this because of the potential for an Uehara-style impact. Uehara’s dominance over a very large workload was one of the primary reasons the Red Sox won the World Series last year, and despite their diminished importance in the regular season, relievers can matter an awful lot in the postseason. We shouldn’t diminish Soria’s potential impact on the Tigers playoff run just because individual relievers don’t matter as much in the regular season.

If Brad Ausmus learns from the mistakes Jim Leyland made last postseason — note the very low percentage numbers for Benoit and Smyly on that list above — and aggressively uses Soria this October, this trade could end up being a significant difference maker for the Tigers. The idea that relievers don’t really matter that much holds up to scrutiny in the regular season, but the postseason is a different game, and it’s one where guys like Joakim Soria can matter a lot more.

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about front-loaded contracts, qualifying offers, scouting umpires, pitcher command, and more.

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There’s absolutely no denying that pitch-framing is a thing. Different people call it different things, but it’s real and it matters and it’s going to continue to matter until or unless everyone’s the same or there’s an automated strike zone. Pitch-framing is normally associated with catchers, because it’s the catchers who’re doing the framing. Borderline pitchers are in large part up to them, and given that we have pretty good data, a lot of people ask us here at FanGraphs when we’ll incorporate pitch-framing into catcher WAR. It’s something we’d like to do, but it’s also something that’s a lot more complicated than you might think.

Framing data affects pitchers. Those are the next people to be considered when the subject comes up. Catchers receive pitches, but catchers receive pitches thrown by pitchers, and good or bad framing value already shows up in the data. It just doesn’t show up next to the catchers’ names, being instead woven into the pitching statistics. So if we’re going to give catchers WAR credit for framing, we have to figure out a way to strip the same amount of credit from pitchers. Framing affects, among other things, walks and strikeouts, and right now those are pitcher-only.

So when people talk about framing, they talk primarily about catchers. Sometimes, they’ll talk about pitchers, often talking about specific batteries. Barely ever do people talk about the hitters. You know, the other people dealing with balls and strikes. The victims, as it were, in the case of good receiving. Or the non-victims, in the other case.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced last April by the present author, wherein that same ridiculous author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists* and also (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on the midseason prospect lists produced by those same notable sources or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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It’s a bit of an odd time to write about baseball. Some trades are trickling in, but we’re about a week removed from the All Star Game. The ASG break is a great time to do some summaries, compare some first halves, look at some guys who may be surprising or disappointing. But there’s only been a handful of days since everyone submitted those stories, and very little has happened since, at least as far as big-picture stuff goes. It is for this reason, and many other selfish reasons, that I am now writing about husky guys stealing bases.

This actually started as a tweet from fellow FanGraphs-er Jason Collette. It’s a fairly innocuous thing on its own. The fact that Molina has only scored three runs is a bit of an oddity, but more on a “weird baseball” level — which I assume Jason was going for. The fact that he has three steals is even less of a big deal. Lots of dudes don’t have many steals. As of this writng, 64 players have less than 3 steals. It is slightly noteworthy that Jose Molina has as many steals as both Starlin Castro and Andrelton Simmons, but only because guys like Castro and Simmons are smaller young guys that look like they should be speedy. Conversely, Molina looks like he should not be speedy. That is, he’s 39 years old and rotund.

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As we head into play on Wednesday, 12 of the 15 teams in the American League are within six games of a playoff spot. This is great news if you were a member of Bud Selig’s Blue Ribbon Committee, tasked with bringing parity — competitive balance is the preferred MLB jargon, I believe — to a sport that has seen its fair share of dominant dynasties. The addition of a second wild card, along with rising television revenues that have shrunk the gap between the haves and the have-nots, means that more teams are fancying themselves as contenders now than ever before.

The Royals, a game below .500, are reportedly more interested in acquiring a hitter to bolster their offense than in selling off the final few months of James Shields‘ contract. The Rays are five games below .500, but have won six straight and might just be talking themselves out of trading David Price, given their recent surge. Even the Red Sox, who looked dead and buried a few weeks ago, have now won eight of their last 10, and can probably make a case for keeping their team together to make a last ditch run at defending their championship.

However, I’d like to make a suggestion to American League teams chasing the second Wild Card spot: proceed with caution.

The reward for even winning the Wild Card used to be a best-of-five series that would likely result in at least two home playoff games, a nifty little reward for a team’s fan base. Under the new system, however, the carrot at the end of the Wild Card stick is just a single game winner-take-all affair, with the loser only extending their season by one additional day, and maybe not even playing that game in front of their home crowd.

And the news gets worse for the second Wild Card entry in the American League this year; not only are you going on the road for an elimination game, but you’re almost guaranteed to be going up against one of the very best teams in baseball.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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Kevin Kiermaier debuted for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2013. Here were his end-of-season numbers:

The Rays added Kiermaier to their 40-man roster on September 30 last season for their Game 163 tiebreaker against the Texas Rangers. Kiermaier debuted in the ninth inning when Joe Maddon subbed him in as a defensive replacement in center field, and as a result Kiermaier earned a spot on the Rays postseason roster for their Wild Card game against the Indians. An unusual debut, to say the least, but not surprising given what was thought of Kiermaier at the time.

Rays General Manager Andrew Friedman called Kiermaier the best defensive player in their organization at any level at the time of his callup last season. MLB.com’s Bernie Pleskoff, a former professional scout, called Kiermaier an “outstanding defender” and went on to say that Kiermaier could win multiple Gold Gloves.

It was always thought that Kiermaier had a future as an MLB player, probably as a fourth or fifth outfielder who mostly served as a late-inning defensive replacement or pinch runner. Now, Kiermaier has the highest WAR on the team projected to be best in the AL East, and he’s done it in less than half as much playing time as anyone else.

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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
San Diego at Chicago NL | 20:05 ET
Ian Kennedy (129.1 IP, 87 xFIP-, 2.3 WAR) faces Tsuyoshi Wada (113.2 IP, 25.9% K, 6.0% BB at Triple-A). That the latter has produced the second-best strikeout-walk differential among all qualified Triple-A pitchers is a matter of record. Precisely how he’s done that — as a 33-year-old who was considerably less effective last year in the minors and also throws just 90 mph — that’s a greater mystery. Wada’s major-league debut July 8th at Cincinnati was a success; he recorded a 3:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 19 batters over 5.0 scoreless innings (box).

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Chicago NL Television.

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