On Friday night, the Angels landed the big prize of this trade deadline season, acquiring Zack Greinke from Milwaukee in exchange for shortstop Jean Segura and pitchers Ariel Pena and John Hellweg. Given all that the Angels have invested in their current club, pushing the team forward with another big upgrade makes sense on paper. In fact, given that they’ve cut the Rangers lead down to five games in the AL West, the value of a marginal win for Anaheim is extremely high, as the difference between a division winner and a wild card is enormous.

So, acquiring an impact player makes sense given the Angels position in the standings and their desire to win in the short term, but in looking at the specifics of the Angels roster, I wonder if they won’t realize a smaller improvement than one might expect from a team acquiring a top flight starter.

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There have been a lot of surprising developments in baseball this year — the Pirates and Orioles are contenders, Carlos Ruiz is an MVP candidate, and Josh Reddick is among the Major League lead in home runs. Baseball is really good at constantly surprising us with things that you just couldn’t have predicted.

But, even by the unpredictable standards of MLB, there’s probably nothing more shocking than the ongoing career rebirth of Oliver Perez. Perez was last seen in the Majors in 2010 with the Mets, falling apart in year two of an ill-fated extension granted to him by Omar Minaya. In the first two years of that three year deal, he issued 100 walks in 110 innings pitched, and was so bad that he didn’t even get to stick around for the final year of the contract. Perez ended up spending 2011 in Double-A Harrisburg, the Nationals affiliate in the Eastern League, and he wasn’t even particularly good there.

Coming into the year, Perez was a 30-year-old washout who had essentially been laughed out of the big leagues and then struggled to get 22-year-olds out in a level two steps below the Majors. There was just no reason to think we’d ever see Oliver Perez in the Majors again.

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Last year, Jose Bautista went absolutely bananas to start the season, prompting me to write a post entitled Jose Bautista Facts. Unlike the Matt Wieters Facts meme, all of those facts about Bautista were actually true. It was part information, part reverence.

That format is the only one I can think of that will do justice to what Mike Trout is currently doing. This has gone beyond “wow, he’s having a nice year” territory – now it’s all just getting silly. So, here are a few actual true facts about Mike Trout’s performance this year. A few of them will probably make you laugh.

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On Monday, the Marlins traded Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante to the Detroit Tigers for highly thought of pitching prospect Jacob Turner and a couple of other prospects, admitting that their grand experiment hadn’t produced a contender in 2012 as they had hoped. That deal didn’t generate much controversy, as Sanchez is a free agent at the end of the year and Infante is a role player without much name value.

Late last night, however, they agreed to ship Hanley Ramirez to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Nathan Eovaldi, and the internet exploded.

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The Phillies had a decision to make — give Cole Hamels a really big contract or trade him for prospects and watch him sign with someone else over the winter. They chose Door #1, giving Hamels a six year, $144 million contract that is the second largest deal for a pitcher in Major League history, coming in only behind the seven year, $161 million deal for CC Sabathia. As with any big contract (especially for a pitcher), this is a pretty big risk, but answering the question of whether it was worth it requires a look at the specifics of both Hamels and the Phillies situation.

There’s no question this is close to the going rate for premium pitchers. At $24 million a year for six years, this puts him in the same AAV tier as Sabathia and Cliff Lee and just a notch above the deal that SF gave Matt Cain a few months ago. Hamels wouldn’t have gotten less than this in free agency, so it’s not an overpay in terms of what the market would have yielded. The price for premium pitching has been firmly established at $22 to $24 million per year for five to seven years.

So, for this to be an overpay, you have to believe that Hamels is not actually a premium pitcher. And, really, the only way to come to that conclusion is if you still judge pitchers by wins and losses.

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Yesterday, the Marlins officially declared themselves sellers, as they shipped Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante off to Detroit for a group of prospects headlined by pitcher Jacob Turner. Within hours of completing that deal, rumors began to swirl that teams were also scouting Josh Johnson and that the Marlins were definitely open to moving Hanley Ramirez. Johnson makes sense for contenders shopping for a non-rental starting pitcher, and I expect he’ll be in heavy demand over the next week, with the Marlins able to command a strong return for their ace if they do decide to move him. However, when it comes to their mercurial third baseman, finding the right fit for a deal isn’t going to be quite as easy.

The primary issue with trading Ramirez is that he simply hasn’t been very good for a couple of years now. Since the start of last season, he’s hit just .245/.328/.405 in 776 plate appearances, good for a .323 wOBA that puts him in the same class of hitter as guys like Jeff Francoeur, Bobby Abreu, and Johnny Damon. That’s a far cry from the .393 wOBA he posted from 2006 to 2010, when he was on the same level as Mark Teixeira, Jim Thome, and Ryan Braun.

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Over the weekend, Vince Gennaro — president of SABR, author of Diamond Dollars, and friend of FanGraphs — launched his own blog. For his first post, he talked about the second wild card and it’s effect on the upcoming trade deadline. In that post, he said some of the things that I’ve been thinking lately, so instead of just repeating those ideas, I’ll quote him instead:

What are the implications for trade deadline deals? Since we know the real financial payoff for a team’s performance results from a run through the postseason—the deeper the run, the richer the pot of gold—teams will need to shift their mindset to not treat all postseason qualifying positions as “equal”. In the new system, it may make more sense to fortify your ballclub when your playoff status is assured, but being anointed a division winner is still in question—think Texas or even the Angels. However, a team fighting for a wild card berth should think twice before they go all-in for the privilege of potentially extending their season for one more day. This is the exact opposite of the old mindset—do everything you can to qualify for the playoffs, but don’t worry too much about winning the division.

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FanGraphs is proud to be a sponsoring promoter of the second annual Saber Seminar, a baseball analytics conference in Boston on the first weekend in August where 100 percent of the proceeds benefit cancer research. Mitchel Lichtman (creator of UZR) and I will be speaking and answering questions together in the final Sunday afternoon spot, and several FG authors – including Dark Overlord David Appelman – will be in attendance, so we encourage you to consider attending this event and helping raise money for The Jimmy Fund. For more information, please read their release below.

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