The Seattle Mariners are in a tough spot. They’re not a bad team, sitting a game over .500. By both Pythagorean wins and BaseRuns, they profile a few games better than that. Over the course of the rest of the season, they’re expected to continue to be a bit above average and our projections have them finishing at 83-79 for the year. That’s not a bad season — and if the team made a few big moves and caught a few breaks, they might even sneak their way into the playoffs where anything can happen. Unfortunately for the Mariners, that scenario isn’t very likely.

The division-leading Texas Rangers hardly seem invincible, but they’ve accrued a decent lead on the Mariners, while other divisional-rival Houston possesses the advantage both of more wins than the Mariners and more talent. This makes the M’s current chances of winning the division rather low. (For an interactive version of the chart, click here.)

They’re not out of it, as you can see, but they do face difficult odds. And keep in mind: these odds are reflective of the talent each club currently possesses on hand. Both the Rangers and Astros are expected to be buyers, and further moves by those teams figure to push their odds higher and the Mariners’ lower unless they counter with a move of their own.

As for the wild card, the task is equally as daunting. The chart below shows the wild-card probabilities only and do not include a team’s chances at the division. (Interactive version here.)

If you’re willing to hand the American League Central to Cleveland, that leaves four additional available playoff spots. Seattle is seventh on that list, with less than a 10% shot. That the top three teams all play in the AL East — and also expected to be buyers before the deadlines — makes Seattle’s predicament all the more obvious. The team isn’t likely to win, so the team should sell. How they should sell, though, is a bit more difficult to decipher.

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Winning a championship is great — for about 48 hours or however long it takes for the parade to end. Then the page turns to the next season and it’s time to figure out how to win all over again. The Kansas City Royals just won their first championship in 30 seasons less than a year ago, but right now, it’s not enough. If the 2015 championship is the only one they win with this current core of players, they’ll eventually be able to look back with fondness on the achievement. Now isn’t the time for reflection, however: it’s the time to make every effort to add even more glory to this era of Royals baseball.

Unfortunately, the Royals haven’t put themselves in a strong position to contend in 2016. They’re at an even .500 record despite a negative-33 run differential and currently sit nine games behind first-place Cleveland. Our playoff odds currently give them just a 1-in-50 chance of making it to the divisional series. If they “buy” over the next week and a half, it stands to reason they can increase their odds slightly, but they face an unavoidably great uphill climb. In order to claim a wild-card spot, they’ll have to leapfrog five other teams.

It’s certainly possible that they can pull off a surprise run in the second half – the Royals have made an impressive habit of foiling projections in recent years, after all — but if I were the one calling the shots in Kansas City, I’d find it irresponsible to make moves focused solely on 2016 success.

Note how I phrased that, though: I didn’t say that I wouldn’t be a “buyer” this month, only that I wouldn’t focus on 2016.

There’s a maddening and inaccurate oversimplification which inevitably occurs each July that there are two groups of teams: those trying to win now and those who should sell off all players without long-term value. The Royals shouldn’t be buying for 2016, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be “buyers” in the current trade market.

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The trade deadline is a week from Monday, and between now and then, we’re probably going to see a lot of moves. Not a lot of big moves, necessarily, but with a lot of buyers in the market for bullpen upgrades, we’re probably looking at a large number of depth acquisitions. Just for the fun of it, let’s wildly speculate on where the biggest name guys might go before August 1st. Keep in mind that no one really knows what is going to happen, so this is more of an exercise in frivolity than a serious attempt at forecasting the deadline moves. Let’s see how many wild guesses I can get right.

Big BuyersCleveland Indians

The Indians have put themselves in a strong position to make the playoffs, and with the fickleness of starting pitching — see Mets, New York — they will try to take advantage of this opportunity. Generally reluctant to trade their best young prospects, I think they’ll back off that stance this year, and move either Clint Frazier or Bradley Zimmer, plus some lower level pieces, to make the big league team as strong as possible.

Predicted Additions
Jonathan Lucroy, Will Smith, Daniel Hudson, Coco Crisp

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition 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 who (a) received a future value grade of 45 or less from Dan Farnsworth during the course of his organizational lists and who (b) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo, and John Sickels, and also who (c) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on a midseason list or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

*****Rookie Davis, RHP, Cincinnati (Profile)
Davis was a fixture among the Five last year, tying for 11th on the arbitrarily calculated Scoreboard by way both of an excellent strikeout- and walk-rate profile at High-A and a fastball that sits at 93-95 mph. Traded to Cincinnati this offseason as part of the deal that sent Aroldis Chapman to the Yankees, Davis has stalled a bit — so far as his statistical indicators are concerned, at least. His most recent starts have been encouraging, however: the right-hander has produced a 13:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 39 batters over his last 11.0 innings.

Why he appears here now, though, is because of a different leaderboard on which he’s recently appeared — namely, the secret and proprietary one the author utilizes to track each minor league’s top fringe batters. Through his first 20 plate appearances this year — which also represent the first 20 plate appearances of his career in affiliated baseball — Davis has recorded a walk, two strikeouts, and four extra bases (essentially, extra bases minus hits). That’s a 20% extra-base rate versus only a 10% strikeout rate. For context, between 2011 and -15, only 43 batters produced even a positive differential between extra-base rate and strikeout rate — out of 335 qualified batters total during that interval.

Here are the top-10 batters by that measure between 2011 and 2015:

That’s a collection of basically the league’s top batters. The bottom of the list, meanwhile, includes most of the league’s worst ones. A combination of extra bases and strikeouts serves as a good proxy for success — and each has the benefit of stabilizing long before the typical slash stats.

It’s improbable, of course, that Davis will continue hitting like one of the top batters, literally, of the last half-decade. He needn’t do anything of the sort, of course, to offer some value. Madison Bumgarner and Zack Greinke, for example, have both produced more than three extra wins over the last five years on the basis of their offensive contributions alone — each while batting roughly 50% worse than a league-average hitter.

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Any team looking to acquire starting pitching at this year’s trade deadline is going to have to be prepared to take on some risk in the form of uncertainty. Rich Hill, long viewed as the prize of potentially available arms, is a 36-year-old former journeyman who only started pitching like the kind of arm you’d pay to acquire less than a year ago. Now, he’s recently been scratched from a start due to a blister, left the following the start after five pitches, and is doubtful for his next one. The next-most intriguing option was Drew Pomeranz, who’s been good for an even shorter period than Hill, and comes with potential workload limitations. Even the big names of the market, like Chris Archer and Sonny Gray, come with significant recent performance concerns, and both seem unlikely to be moved regardless.

The entire market being littered with question marks, in a way, makes the individual question marks less concerning. It’s just about choosing your question mark. Someone’s going to choose Andrew Cashner’s question mark. Take his word for it:

Andrew Cashner: “I know I’m going to be traded. It’s just part of the game, part of where the season’s at.”

— Dennis Lin (@sdutdennislin) July 22, 2016

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“You’re asking a lot of tough questions,” right-hander Lance McCullers laughed, before adding, “No, you’re good, you’re good.” We were talking about the role of health and confidence in his efforts to improve his command. To his credit, the young Astros flamethrower had stand-up answers, and wasn’t bothered. All of these things are related, and it’s easy to see for him. It’s just a question of getting right.

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Last October, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging Major League Baseball’s minor-league pay practices scored an important, albeit preliminary, victory when the court tentatively certified the case as a collective-action lawsuit. As I noted at the time, this meant that rather than have to file individual lawsuits for every player allegedly denied the minimum wage or overtime, current and former minor-league players could instead opt-in to the existing litigation and have their claims against MLB tried together in the existing case (a much more efficient and less costly proposition).

As I also noted at the time, however, this initial victory was potentially short-lived. Under the applicable legal rules, even though the court had preliminarily certified the minor leaguers’ case as a collective action, the court withheld a final judgment on the matter until after the parties had gathered more evidence regarding the extent to which the players’ legal claims were “similarly situated” to one another’s (i.e., whether the work experiences and legal claims of the plaintiffs already named in the lawsuit were roughly equivalent to those of the rest of the players who might join the case).

That additional evidence has now been collected and, on Thursday evening, the judge in the minor-league wage lawsuit ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to show that their cases were similarly situated. Thus, the judge “decertified” the case as a collective action.

This means that the roughly 2,200 current and former minor-league players who had joined the case since October have now been tossed back out of the lawsuit. These players must now instead file their own individual lawsuits against MLB should they wish to seek compensation for their alleged underpayment.

Perhaps more importantly, Thursday’s ruling also dramatically lowers the odds that the existing lawsuit will force MLB to make significant, league-wide changes to its minor-league pay practices. Thus, the decision represents a major victory for the league in the minor-league wage litigation.

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For months, people have been anticipating a terrible midseason market for starting pitchers. With the deadline right around the corner, some are offering that this is one of the worst markets in memory, in terms of how little is available. As the theory goes, when markets are this bad, teams selling get to over-charge, taking advantage of the limited supply and excess demand. What happens in reality is that an equilibrium is reached. Teams that might not have been inclined to sell find themselves intrigued by the market, so additional players become available. One such player at present could be Chris Archer.

The Rays have been thinking about selling for a while — they’ve lost way too many games, so rumors have surrounded arms like Drew Smyly, Jake Odorizzi, and Matt Moore. Archer is better than those guys, and he’s affordable for the next five years. Because of his contract, the Rays should feel no urgency to move him. But then, every pitcher is kind of a short-term acquisition, in a sense, and the market is what it is. Archer would make for a high-profile splash, and I don’t think he’d fit anywhere better than he’d fit with the Dodgers.

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If you’ve been following baseball over the last several seasons, you likely know at least two things about Jed Lowrie. The first is that he’s had some trouble staying on the field for a full season during his career; the second, that he wears a two-flap helmet in a league of men who insist they only need one. A slightly more dedicated fan could probably tell you that Lowrie has played for the Red Sox, Astros, and A’s during his tenure and would probably describe his performance as “fine.”

In his earlier days, Lowrie showed promise as a hitter. More recently, though, he’s settled in as something slightly below league average at the plate. His defense is something of a controversy, with Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) considering him to be a rather poor middle infielder and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) viewing his defense as something much closer to average. The collective eye test probably places him closer to his DRS than his UZR numbers, but there’s plenty of human disagreement as well.

This introduction, perhaps on purpose, paints Lowrie as exactly the kind of player who doesn’t get a lot of attention. Relative to his peers, Lowrie almost seems boring. Yet there’s a case to be made that he’s having one of the most interesting seasons of anyone in baseball.

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A few weeks back, we took a look at the 2016 contact-management performance of qualifying pitchers in both leagues. Since then, a number of new qualifiers have emerged. Today, we’ll utilize tools such as plate-appearance-outcome frequencies, exit-speed and launch-angle allowed to see how these hurlers have performed in this vital area.

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