The St. Louis Cardinals have reacted quickly to Matt Holliday’s injury, trading last night for Cleveland Indians’ outfielder/first baseman Brandon Moss. If Holliday, who already missed a month with a quad tear earlier this season, did not re-injure his quad in a game last night, the St. Louis Cardinals very well could have stood pat through the rest of the trading deadline. The team has had trouble all year finding production at first base, but had recently called up top hitting prospect Stephen Piscotty. With Holliday back from the disabled list, and the addition of Piscotty, the team hoped the offense would improve after experiencing some struggles heading into the All-Star break. The Holliday injury scuttled those plans, and they paid a fairly high price for a somewhat struggling Moss in Rob Kaminsky, a top-100 prospect heading into this season.

The move speaks to the lack of optimism that the Cardinals have about the return of Holliday. Already missing Matt Adams and getting little to no production from backup Mark Reynolds, the team was rumored to have been in talks with the Milwaukee Brewers for Adam Lind. Consecutive shutout losses to the Cincinnati Reds highlighted the Cardinals’ struggle to score runs, but the injury to Holliday created a real need. Even at 35, Holliday was likely going to be the Cardinals’ best hitter moving forward. His power had dropped off in the first half of the season just like it had in 2014, but a strong second half that included 14 home runs provided hope that Holliday’s bat could still do a lot of damage. His .290/.409/.420 line was still good for a 134 wRC+ and his projections for the rest of the season were in line with those numbers.

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Late on Monday night, the team with the best offense in baseball and a questionable pitching staff made a blockbuster trade, but not for the frontline starting pitcher that everyone expected. Instead, Toronto Blue Jays GM Alex Anthoplous used one of his best trade chips — 2014 first round pick Jeff Hoffman — to acquire Troy Tulowitzki from the Rockies, adding another legitimate offensive weapon to a team that has had no problems scoring runs thus far.

In my write-up of the trade, I primarily focused on drawing attention to the non-linear nature of run scoring, noting that adding a good hitter to an already high scoring offense produces a larger benefit than importing that same hitter into a weak offense. Good hitting begets good hitting, and with another good hitter in the mix, there will be more at-bats with men on base — when nearly every hitter performs better than he does with the bases empty — and the addition of Tulowitzki to the Blue Jays offense should have a positive effect on the other hitters in Toronto’s line-up as well.

But there is one aspect of the decision to go after Tulowitzki, instead of a guy like Johnny Cueto, that I didn’t address; the postseason effect. After all, the Blue Jays are giving up significant parts of their farm system not just for the hope of getting to the playoffs, but of advancing deep into October, and constructing a roster for the long haul of a 162 game regular season isn’t the same thing as constructing a roster for the postseason. Due to the drastic differences in off-days during the playoffs, teams can allocate a much larger percentage of their innings pitched to their best arms, making the impact of a premium hurler larger in October than any pitcher can have from April through September. For a recent example, simply recall what Madison Bumgarner did for the Giants last fall.

Bumgarner’s dominance, and other performances like it, have given rise to the idea that pitching is what wins in the playoffs; if you’ve watched baseball for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly heard the “good pitching beats good hitting” truism. The Blue Jays are clearly not buying into that cliche, and are betting on a great offense to make up for a mediocre pitching staff. But does that kind of team actually win in October? Let’s look at some data.

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The Dodgers have an apparently endless supply of cash, and are using it to run the largest payroll in baseball this year, so naturally, any time a prominent and expensive player is rumored to be trade bait, LA is one of the first teams mentioned. They’ve been linked to Cole Hamels all year. More recently, they’ve been tied to David Price. They needed pitching, they had the money to afford those guys, and so the fit seemed to make sense.

But we should perhaps note that, since Andrew Friedman took over the reigns of the Dodgers baseball operations department, that’s not really how the Dodgers have used their resources. They haven’t been at all shy about throwing money around, but they haven’t yet shown any willingness to spend big money on Major League veterans. Despite a roster that they wanted to completely turnover, they only signed two prominent MLB free agents over the winter, and both Brandon McCarthy and Brett Anderson were more mid-level value plays than the buy-stars-with-cash approach.

When they needed a catcher, they traded for Yasmani Grandal, who they saw as an undervalued player they could acquire at a good price, and managed to dump a lot of Matt Kemp’s overpriced contract in the deal. They wanted a new middle infield, but targeted production-over-flash with Howie Kendrick and Jimmy Rollins, solid role players on short-term commitments who could provide value while waiting for the team’s up-and-coming prospects to develop. They needed better relievers to get them to Kenley Jansen, so they traded for Juan Nicasio and Chris Hatcher, then went with a bunch of youngsters after guys like Yimi Garcia dominated spring training. The Dodgers have had plenty of opportunities to use their ample payroll to acquire marquis players, and at every chance, they’ve gone another direction.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that, when it came time to replace McCarthy and Hyun-Jin Ryu in the rotation, they looked for alternatives to the go-get-the-most-expensive-guy plan. That isn’t to say that they won’t still end up with Price– we’d be fools to ever assume the Dodgers are done working on things, given the number of moves they’ve made in the last year — or some other big name player before Friday’s deadline, but today’s move is probably the most Dodgers transaction we’ve seen since Friedman and Farhan Zaidi were given unlimited funds and told to do what they do best.

The deal, as we understand it at this point.

Dodgers Acquire:

LHP Alex Wood
RHP Mat Latos
RHP Jim Johnson
LHP Luis Avilan
2B/OF Jose Peraza
1B Michael Morse

Braves Acquire:

2B/3B Hector Olivera
LHP Paco Rodriguez
RHP Zach Bird
Competitive Balance Pick (#35 overall, currently)

Marlins Acquire:

RHP Jeff Brigham
RHP Victor Araujo
RHP Kevin Guzman
Corporate Profits

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We’ve all been there. Our buddy down the street is somehow beating us at “RBI Baseball,” even though we own this game. We always beat him! What is going on today? Well, no matter, we’ll just press the reset button and start over. That’ll teach him. This is my house.

That might not be precisely what the Detroit Tigers have been thinking this season, but it’s not far off. The Royals are good again? Exactly how are the Twins winning games? Detroit kept sinking further and further this year until they were far closer to last place than they were to first. And with their rest of season’s projection not that rosy anymore, the Tigers are bowing out. From Jayson Stark’s report yesterday: Read the rest of this entry »

What a time to be alive. In a span of hours, Carlos Gomez was almost traded to the Mets; Wilmer Flores cried on the field; and the Dodgers, Braves and Marlins all but completed a deal that seemingly involves dozens of players. But most exciting of all, Cole Hamels is heading to the Rangers in an eight-player deal that also includes Jake Diekman, Matt Harrison, Nick Williams, Jorge Alfaro, Jake Thompson, Jerad Eickhoff and Alec Asher. Here’s what my fancy computer math has to say about the five prospects headed to Philly in the trade. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed it, I’ve broken down the prospects in the Tyler Clippard (A’s to Mets) deal, the Troy Tulowitzki (Rockies to Blue Jays) trade and in one post yesterday covered the prospects in the deals of Ben Zobrist (A’s to Royals), Jonathan Papelbon (Phillies to Nationals), David DeJesus (Rays to Angels), and David Murphy (Indians to Angels) trades. It sounds like there’s still a few more deals to come, but last night’s huge deal sending Cole Hamels to the Rangers has plenty of interesting young players to cover.

In short, scouts were surprised that the Phillies sent Hamels to Texas without getting 3B Joey Gallo, RHP Alex Gonzalez or RF Nomar Mazara, but by paying down Hamels and taking Matt Harrison’s contract, Philly got three prospects from Texas’ top tier, which makes it a nice trade for both teams at this point. You can see Eno’s take on the deal from a big-league perspective and also see my preseason reports on the Rangers deep system and my preseason Top 200 for more notes/context on these players.

Jorge Alfaro, C, Philadelphia Phillies, FV: 55

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A lot of pitchers are flashier than Cole Hamels, and every year, a few new guys pop up and post better seasons, only to disappear again into the night not long after. Hamels doesn’t throw 100 and his out-pitch is a change-up instead of a highlight-friendly breaking ball, but with his command of a full repertoire and remarkable consistency, Hamels has established himself as one of the game’s best pitchers.

After a decade in Philadelphia, Hamels now heads to Texas to try and help turn another team into a winner. After a long time on the trade block, Hamels will reportedly be shipped to the Rangers — along with lefty reliever Jake Diekman — for outfielder Nick Williams, catcher Jorge Alfaro, and pitchers Jake Thompson, Jerad Eickhoff, Alec Asher, and Matt Harrison, though the latter is in the deal for contract reasons rather than as a future asset.

The focus will likely be on the the package coming to Philadelphia, given all the words that have been written estimating what Hamels would command as a trade chip, but while the Phillies didn’t get Joey Gallo, Nomar Mazara, or Alex Gonzalez, the Rangers depth of prospects means that the Phillies still got real talent back even without demanding a team’s best young players. The three primary prospects in the deal were all ranked in the team’s top 10 by Kiley McDaniel this spring, with Alfaro and Thompson both grading out as 55 FV guys, and Williams at 50. Kiley has provided a thorough examination of the players going to Philadelphia. The bottom line, though: these are good prospects that the Rangers surrendered.

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Ben and Sam banter about history, etymology, lexicography, and Nolan Arenado, then discuss the Ben Zobrist, Jonathan Papelbon, and Mat Latos trades.

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Last week, we took a look at each AL and NL club’s arsenal of minor-league prospects, with which they could pursue coveted established big leaguers at the deadline. A number of transactions have been made since then, so an update would be useful in advance of the anticipated storm of moves likely to take place before the sands run out of the hourglass on Friday. Which teams are best positioned to acquire the remaining plums on the market?

As we did last week, we’ll rank the 30 minor-league systems based upon my midseason position-player and starting-pitcher rankings. If you aren’t familiar with my minor-league lists, here is a brief refresher. They aren’t pure top-prospect lists; they basically serve as follow lists, after which traditional scouting methods are used to tweak the order. Qualification for my lists are based upon a combination of performance and age relative to league/level. The younger a prospect is at each level, the less production is required to get him onto the list. At level-specific “optimal ages” (22 at AAA, 21 at AA, 20 at High-A, 19 at Low-A), a player qualifies regardless of performance. At level-specific, much older ages (26 at AAA, 25 at AA, 24 at High-A, 23 at Low-A), you can’t qualify for the list no matter how loud your performance. Only full-season league prospects are considered.

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