With still roughly two weeks left in the regular season, the divisional races across the major leagues have sputtered and nearly died. Three divisions have already been clinched. The Los Angeles Dodgers have already guaranteed themselves a playoff berth and should secure the National League West in short order. Beyond the Wild Card races, then, the NL Central and AL East remain the only hope for meaningful baseball over the season’s closing weeks. The Cubs have a four-game lead in the former and 96.6% odds of taking the division. The Red Sox, meanwhile, possess a three-game lead in the latter and 89.6% odds.

The Cubs have four games this week with the Brewers in Milwaukee. That series has a chance to facilitate some of the season’s most consequential games, provided Milwaukee can remain within striking distance of Chicago in the meantime. As for the Red Sox, though, don’t play the second-place Yankees again, which will make it tougher for the latter club to make up ground.

The bright side of having these races more or less decided is that we can start to look at the potential rosters for the League Division Series a little sooner. I’ll begin today with the American League. For the purposes of this exercise, I’ll proceed by the odds and regard the Red Sox as the presumptive winners of the East. If that turns out not to be the case, feel free to come back here in October and squawk at me.

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No respectable prospect list has ever read as a leaderboard of minor-league on-base percentages. There are a million other important considerations, details that help to fill out a profile. That being said, the best hitting prospects tend to avoid making too many outs, and when you don’t make outs, you get a high OBP. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.‘s OBP this year was .425. Bo Bichette‘s OBP was .423. Lewis Brinson’s OBP was .400, and Rhys Hoskins‘ OBP was .385. Scouts are always repeating that minor-league numbers aren’t that important, but then, minor-league competition is awfully good, and the numbers show who’s most often winning the battles.

Guerrero and Bichette are both in the Blue Jays organization, and they’re considered two of the better position-player prospects anywhere. They wrapped up their seasons with High-A Dunedin, but the teenagers opened with Single-A Lansing. Down there, they were the stars of the roster, but they had one particularly unusual teammate. A teammate who fell short of Guerrero’s OBP by only four points. This player reached base in more than two-fifths of his plate appearances. He also registered a hit in barely one-fifth of his at-bats. He knocked all of one single home run, out of just about 300 opportunities. There’s nobody else quite like Nick Sinay.

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On August 1st, our Playoff Odds gave the Twins a 3.6% chance of winning one of the two AL Wild Card spots. The team had briefly flirted with contending, acquiring Jaime Garcia from the Braves, but then they flipped him to the Yankees a week later when the team began to struggle. They also traded away closer Brandon Kintzler to the Nationals, acknowledging that the team’s strong first half was probably not going to end with a postseason berth.

But despite the front office’s rational evaluation of their team’s abilities, the Twins have actually gotten better in the second half, and with their strong play the last six weeks, have now put themselves in prime position to capture a Wild Card spot.

How have the Twins turned their season around after selling at the deadline? By finally not hitting like the Twins.

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Even though they’re only five games removed from a playoff spot in the American League, you could be forgiven for not having dedicated much thought recently to the Kansas City Royals. Prior to the trade deadline, they were playing a little over their heads, exiting July in possession of a 55-49 record and the second Wild Card spot — this, despite having recorded roughly equal runs scored and allowed totals. They became moderate buyers, picking up Melky Cabrera and holding on to soon-to-be free agents Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, and Jason Vargas.

In the meantime, however, they’ve struggled, going 18-27 since August 1st. With a .490 winning percentage, the club now possesses just a 1.8% chance of making the playoffs.

Because the Royals have likely flown under your baseball radar, it’s quite possible that this bit of news did, too:

The Minor to whom Flanagan refers here is Mike Minor, a name that, prior to this April, hadn’t graced a major-league box score since 2014. The last any of us had probably heard, Minor was signing a two-year deal with Kansas City last spring. At the time, the left-hander was coming off a torn labrum that led to shoulder surgery and, ultimately, his release from the Atlanta Braves.

The thought of Minor returning to form after such a serious injury was, while not ridiculous, still optimistic. However, despite some false starts and a rough stint in Triple-A Omaha last year, Mike Minor has reemerged as an effective relief option out of the Kansas City bullpen, exhibiting both increased velocity and a greater reliance on a reinvigorated pitch.

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After the Houston Astros elected to part ways with eight scouts last month, I wrote a piece on whether scouts and Statcast could coexist following the move by Jeffrey Luhnow. (Luhnow said the vacancies would ultimately be filled.)

Carson Cistulli was also interested in this idea of redundancy, asking both Dave Cameron and Eric Longenhagen about it on different episodes of FanGraphs Audio. Dave was optimistic about the future role of scouts, while Longenhagen reported on some of the anxiety in the scouting community — anxiety with which I’m also familiar to some degree.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Astros’ almost insulting infield alignment against Albert Pujols and minor league hit-by-pitch machine Nick Sinay, then welcome on MIT draftee/new Mariners front-office addition David Hesslink and, later in the episode, YouTube baseball-highlight creator Andrew Vargha, proprietor of the newly anointed official baseball YouTube account of Effectively Wild.

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This past Wednesday, I talked to Oakland A’s pitcher Chris Smith for the first time in close to a decade. After we’d exchanged pleasantries, I asked the now-36-year-old right-hander how he’d describe his career. His answer came as no surprise.

“Oh, man, how about rollercoaster?,” suggested Smith. “It was a rollercoaster early on, and it’s continued to be a rollercoaster.”

That’s an apt assessment. Since being selected by the Red Sox in the fourth round of the 2002 draft, Smith has experienced ups and downs worthy of Six Flags. A dune buggy accident compromised his 2003 season, and he’s bounced — mostly in the minors — from Boston to the Brewers to the Mariners to the Padres to the A’s.

And then there was his three-year hiatus away from affiliated ball.

“When the Mariners let me go (in May, 2011), I thought I was done,” admitted Smith. “I got released because of my performance — not because of health — and I was OK with that. If I wasn’t good enough, it was time to move on. I went back to UC-Riverside and became the pitching coach there.”

It turned out that he wasn’t done after all. After a year spent coaching at his alma mater, Smith was convinced to make a comeback in independent ball. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter (one last time) about Cleveland’s winning streak, Lenny Harris and an Ichiro record, Jeff’s successful search for the fly-ball revolution, and the increasing difficulty of scouting position players, then draft the World Series contenders that would be the best (and worst) stories.

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