Join us as we spend the afternoon talking rumors, trades, and all things deadline related.

In almost every mainstream write-up of a trade involving a minor league prospect that is consummated, the author will reference the prospects off-season ranking by Baseball America, and for good reason – BA is the market leader in prospect analysis. John Manuel, Jim Callis, and the rest of the crew over there do really good work, and have established themselves as the best source of information on prospects around.

However, I’m beginning to feel like the reliance on a ranking compiled months ago is carrying too much weight when discussing current trades. Let’s use last night’s Wilson Ramos/Matt Capps trade, for instance. The normal reaction is that the Twins overpaid, trading a “top catching prospect” for a useful but not elite reliever. Many Twins fans are outraged that they would give up such a valuable trade chip in exchange for a one inning guy, especially after he was rumored to be part of the package that would bring them Cliff Lee a month ago.

A lot of the perception of Ramos’ value comes from the fact that BA rated him #58 on their pre-season Top 100 and #2 overall in the Twins system. However, since those rankings occurred, baseball has been played, and Ramos’ value has diminished. He hasn’t hit at all in Triple-A this year, as more advanced pitchers are taking advantage of his aggressive approach. He also hasn’t shown much in the way of power, as only 19 of his 67 hits have gone for extra bases.

If BA were to do re-do their Top 100 today, I guarantee you that Ramos wouldn’t rank #58. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t even be in the Top 100. He’s has a bad year, and the things that were questions about him last year are problems this year, giving teams reasons to think that his bat might not be enough to make him more than a defensive-minded backup. So, his pre-season ranking does not really reflect his value at the moment. Things have changed.

We saw this last year as well, when Tim Alderson (#45 pre-season prospect) was traded to the Pirates for Freddy Sanchez. The reaction at the time was that the Giants were crazy to give up a top pitching prospect for a decent, but not great, infielder. However, Alderson had spent the previous four months without any velocity, showing almost none of the stuff that made him a first round pick to begin with. The Pirates received a significantly lesser version of Alderson than had been assumed based on his prospect status, and that’s continued to carry over as Alderson has fallen off the prospect map at this point.

In prospect land, things can change a lot in a short period of time. A year ago, Mike Trout went 25th overall in the draft, but if you gave teams a do-over today, he’d go #2, as he’s now the consensus best prospect left in the minors. His stock has risen dramatically in the last four months, and his pre-season Top 100 ranking of #85 is now as outdated as shag carpet.

The guys at BA do great work. You should subscribe to their magazine and follow them all on twitter. But, don’t be slaves to pre-season rankings when trying to determine a player’s value. Things change between the time those lists get made and the time those prospects become trade chips.

Reports are that the deal is done, and the Phillies have acquired Roy Oswalt. Regardless of why it was necessary, this looks like a pretty big win for Philadelphia.

In exchange for J.A. Happ, Anthony Gose, and Jonathan Villan, the Phillies get Oswalt and a reported $11 million to offset a large part of the money he’s still owed. As a result, it looks like Philly will get Oswalt through 2011 for about $12.5 million total. Even with his back problems, he’s worth quite a bit more than that.

Oswalt isn’t the workhorse ace that he used to be, but the Phillies already have one of those. On a inning by inning basis, he’s still one of the better pitchers in baseball. After years of decline, he’s actually posting his highest strikeout rate since his rookie year. He won’t throw 220 innings a year anymore, but when he’s on the mound, he’ll get hitters out with regularity.

I’d estimate that Oswalt should give the Phillies about +5 wins of value over the next year and a half. Given their status as a playoff contender on the bubble, the marginal value of a win to their franchise is higher than the league average as a whole. So, while they’re paying about $2 million per win for Oswalt, they’ll be getting something closer to $5 or $6 million per win in on field value, thanks to their increased playoff odds.

Overall, Oswalt should add $10 to $15 million in value above and beyond what the Phillies will pay him. For that value, they surrendered Happ and the two minor leaguers. I’ll let Bryan Smith tackle the prospects with more depth, but suffice it to say that no one thinks they mortgaged their future here. Happ is a back-end starter, and while he has some value as a league minimum guy for the next couple of years, he can be replaced.

Oswalt represents a significant upgrade to their rotation, and gives the Phillies a legitimate chance of running down the Braves for the NL East title. Because they were able to get Houston to cover so much of his salary, he’ll also reinforce their ability to contend again next year. That’s a lot of improvement for not much surrendered from Philly’s perspective.

Setting aside all the context that made the Phillies need Oswalt in the first place, this has to be seen as a good move for their franchise. They got a quality pitcher at a below market price without putting the long term future of the franchise in danger. Kudus to Ruben Amaro for this deal.

I’d imagine most of us have probably lived on a shoestring budget at one point in our lives, buying what we can afford rather than what we’d actually like to have. Top Ramen has built an empire by capitalizing on people in that situation. So, while the Dodgers acquisition of Scott Podsednik may not be the sexiest move ever, it’s what they can afford. And, for what it cost them, it’s a deal worth making.

Podsednik is more of a role player than an everyday guy, but he’s good enough to be a useful part timer on a team that needs one. And, more importantly, he gives the Dodgers a reason to stop using Garret Anderson.

It’s hard to overstate how bad Anderson has been this year. He’s been worth -13.8 runs in just 112 plate appearances, a historically awful offensive performance. He’s just completely finished as a major leaguer, but because he has the veteran label, Torre has continued to use him.

When Manny Ramirez returns, Podsednik will be able to fill the role that Anderson has been taking up, and he’s good enough to give them a decent fill-in while Manny’s on the shelf. He’s no kind of star, but his combination of speed and contact skills make him a decent enough hitter, and he’d be a pretty nifty pinch-runner if the team makes it to the playoffs.

I’m sure the Dodgers would have preferred to be in on Dan Haren, Cliff Lee, or Roy Oswalt, but the divorce kept them from shopping in the high rent district. Given the minimal financial cost and what looks to be a low price in terms of prospects, this is a pretty decent job of bargain shopping. The Dodgers get something that makes them better, even if only incrementally, without paying a high price.

According to a report out of Houston, the Astros and Phillies have agreed on a deal that will send Roy Oswalt to Philadelphia, pending his approval. Details of the deal haven’t been released yet, and we don’t know if Oswalt will accept it anyway, but with a trade potentially looming, I figured I’d put some somewhat scattered thoughts to the online version of paper.

Writing about any move the Phillies make is hard. On the one hand, it is impossible to escape the overarching truth that anything they do now will be less effective than simply keeping Cliff Lee would have been last winter. That trade was inexplicable from the beginning, and has not looked any better for the Phillies since it was made. Now, four months into the 2010 season, making a move for Oswalt to upgrade the rotation is a tacit admission that they would have been better off keeping Lee.

And yet, we preach the value of sunk costs and not letting bad decisions of the past force you into more bad decisions in the future, so by all rights, we have to talk about anything the Phillies do under the umbrella of the fact that the Lee trade can’t be undone. It’s in the past, and getting the game’s premier lefty back isn’t an option. The choice faced by Ruben Amaro here is Oswalt or not Oswalt, not Oswalt or Lee. We should examine any trade the Phillies make in isolation from the deals that they made last winter.

And yet, we can’t simply look at an Oswalt acquisition on its own, because most accounts suggest that the team will have to move Jayson Werth in order to be able to afford Oswalt’s salary. It’s not a straight forward transaction, where the Phillies are giving up some future value to make the current team better. Depending on what they end up doing with Werth, they might actually make their 2010 team worse and their 2011 team better – not exactly the kind of deal you normally see from a team that is in the thick of a pennant race.

Some will try to paint this as a simple Roy Oswalt/Domonic Brown versus J.A. Happ/Jayson Werth battle of pairs, but even that breaks down, because the Phillies don’t have to trade Werth to get Brown into the line-up. With Shane Victorino on the DL, Brown is already in the big leagues, and there’s no reason that they couldn’t play him over Raul Ibanez when Victorino returns.

Trying to sort out this jumbled mess will not be easy. Oswalt would make the Phillies better. Losing Werth would make them worse. If they can make a good deal for Werth, who will leave this winter, perhaps it’s a deal worth making. Of course, Werth wouldn’t have to be leaving this winter if their moves of the past had left them with more flexibility in the present. But, again, what’s done is done, however it’s still hard to overcome the context of why this deal needs to be made in the first place, and what kind of deal it may lead to tomorrow.

There will be no easy way to analyze a Roy Oswalt to Philadelphia trade. If this deal happens, it will not lend itself to sound byte analysis, and no one will be able to sum up what is going on in 50 words. It’s complicated, perhaps more so than any recent trade. In the end, it may end up as just a part of one of the most interesting, confusing, and talked about series of acquisitions and departures in baseball history.

When people dole out credit for the White Sox 33-15 run since the beginning of June, most of it usually goes to the pitchers. The team is headlined by John Danks, Mark Buehrle, Gavin Floyd, and Matt Thornton, all of whom make it tough on opponents to score many runs. However, after having watched a lot of the White Sox in the last week, I think that the real key for their success is the guy that never gets any notice – Alexei Ramirez.

Chicago’s shortstop has flown under the radar, but he’s quietly putting together a pretty terrific season. As a guy who played second base as a rookie and made a lot of errors last year after moving to shortstop, it can be easy to see his +10 UZR and assume it’s mostly small sample noise. Watching him defend the position, though, he’s earning every bit of love that the metric is throwing his way.

In the half dozen or so games that I’ve seen the pale hose play over the last week, Ramirez has made three or four plays that were legitimately shocking. He has been routinely ranging into the hole at shortstop to get to balls that looked like sure hits off the bat, showing far more ability at the position than I assumed he had. I’m not saying he’s a true talent +15 defender at short, but he’s far from the defensive liability he was made out to be his rookie year. This kid can play shortstop, and play it really well.

Unlike a lot of the other good glove guys in the AL, though, Ramirez can hit too. He started the season on the wrong foot, putting up just a .241 wOBA in April, but his wOBA has jumped to .345 since then, including a scorching .422 this month. Even though he’s extremely aggressive at the plate, he’s wiry strong and makes good contact, allowing him to hit for enough average and power to offset the lack of walks.

The total package has been worth +2.5 WAR so far this year, putting him ahead of more heralded teammates like Buehrle and Paul Konerko. Ramirez has been the White Sox shining star in July and their unsung hero for most of 2010.

The trade deadline is just four days away, leaving teams until just 4 pm eastern on Saturday to complete deals before the waiver period commences. Normally, we don’t post much on weekends around here, giving our authors the time off to go enjoy their lives, but since the deadline falls on a Saturday this year, we’ll be putting in overtime to cover all the action.

As usual, we’ll cover any trades of note with posts of their own, offering analysis on the deal from each team’s perspective. We’ll supplement this on Saturday with a live chat kicking off at 2 pm eastern time, so that we can sit around and talk about the rumors as they come down the pipe in real time. Pat Andriola, Joe Pawlikowski, and Zach Sanders will be rotating through the chat, so we’ll always have someone taking your questions and offering instant analysis while the rest of our crew writes up the deals as they go down.

Join us on Saturday for hours of hot stove talk and reactions to the deals. Should be a good time.

Most of the conversations about the Dan Haren trade boil down to how a person feels about pitcher evaluation. There are clearly still a lot of people that simply believe that whatever happens is the pitcher’s responsibility, so if he gives up a bunch of hits and some home runs, he’s doing something wrong and that should be held against him. High BABIP or HR/FB rates are evidence of throwing too many hittable pitches, or that his stuff has deteriorated, or that his command isn’t as good as it was, or some other explanation that we haven’t yet figured out. But, whatever it is, it’s definitely something, and it’s definitely real.

These opinions are generally held because of the outright refusal to accept randomness. The idea that something could happen repeatedly, without cause, is very hard to for a lot of people to swallow. But it’s true, and it’s a very important concept to buy into when trying to project the future performance of baseball players. Random happens.

For instance, did you know that the NFC has won 14 consecutive coin-tosses in the Super Bowl? Since 1997, the AFC has been on the losing side of the flip every single time. The odds of that happening are 1 in 16,384, and yet, it’s happened. Do you think the NFL is weighting coins? Do you think the AFC is perpetually hiring players who are terrible at guessing coin flips? Or do you think it’s just luck?

I’d imagine that most of us agree that it’s the latter. Because a coin has no ability to control what side it lands on, we are willing to agree that the results of what happens when it is flipped is random. However, as a culture, we don’t like to apply that same belief to people. They can make choices, adapt, and do things that affect the outcomes they are involved in, and so many of us assume that nothing that happens to a person is ever random.

Haren’s BABIP has been abnormally high in four of the last five months, dating back to last September. For many people, that’s enough to say that there’s a pattern that rules out any kind of randomness, and that the fact that he’s been giving up hits for what amounts to 2/3 of a season is evidence enough that he’s doing something wrong. However, when you look at the actual odds of that happening by random chance to some pitcher in MLB, you’ll find that it’s not unusual at all.

Using binomial distribution, we can see that the odds of a pitcher with a true talent level BABIP of .300 randomly posting a .350+ BABIP in any given month (of 115 BIP) is about 10 percent. Thus, the odds of that same pitcher posting a .350+ BABIP in any four out of five months is 1 in 2,200. Those seem like really long odds (though nothing compared to the Super Bowl coin, of course) until you remember just how many different five month stretches of pitching there are in Major League Baseball, especially once you introduce selective endpoints, where the time-frame is defined by looking for the beginnings of a potential pattern.

Given the number of potential different five month stretches we could look at across 350 pitchers using selective endpoints, it’s not a surprise at all that we can find a guy who has performed in a way that looks to be a rarity. The sheer quantity of players in the game, and the amount of games they play, means that we will always see performances that had little chance of happening. On its own, it is not evidence that randomness can be ruled out.

Maybe Haren is doing something wrong. Maybe there is a reason for all these no-hitters. Maybe there’s an explanation for Brady Anderson’s 1996 season. We don’t know enough to conclusively say in any of these cases, but neither can you rule out that it may just be randomness at work. If you’re not willing to accept that, you’re going to see a lot of patterns where they don’t exist, and create explanations for things where there are none.

When I was putting together my Trade Value series, my preliminary version included Dan Haren. A good pitcher on a good contract, not yet 30, and durable as can be, I figured he would draw a lot of interest if the D’Backs put him on the market. Then, while hanging out in Anaheim, I started talking to friends in the game about the list, and a consensus quickly emerged – they were not nearly as high on Haren as I was.

After a series of conversations that all went the same way – “He’s okay, but I wouldn’t give up any of those guys for him, or a bunch of other guys you didn’t include” – I dropped him from the list. It just became obvious that Haren’s trade value wasn’t as high as I thought it would be, given his performances the last few years. Regardless of where his xFIP ranks, he wasn’t seen as any kind of ace by the people who actually were putting rosters together.

Now, a day after he’s been traded for about the same amount of value as Philadelphia gave up to acquire Joe Blanton two years ago, it’s probably time to ask why. Why is there a massive divide between the teams and the online baseball community when it comes to how good Haren is and what he’s actually worth?

As best as I can tell, it comes down to two issues – velocity and home runs. While Haren’s walk rate and strikeout rates are excellent, his home run rates have always been a bit of a problem. Of the 56 qualified starting pitchers over the last three calendar years, Haren’s 1.11 HR/9 ranks just 40th. He has done a good enough job at limiting baserunners that his longball issues haven’t been a huge problem, but giving up bombs is one of the easiest ways to look bad in front of scouts.

To us, a home run is simply -1.4 runs in the ledger, a mistake that may or may not be predictive of future success. To a lot of scouts, allowing a home run is a sign that there’s a problem with what you’re throwing. Some pitchers, such as Josh Beckett, can overcome this stigma by impressing with raw stuff – a 95 MPH fastball, a big 12-6 curve that buckles knees.

Haren, on the other hand, doesn’t have that kind of repertoire. His fastball is more 88-92, and he relies heavily on a 86-ish MPH cut fastball to keep hitters off balance. So, when he centers one of his average velocity fastballs and it gets blasted over the fence, it’s easy for scouts to assume that Haren is always going to give up a lot of dingers. It’s hard to be impressed when the radar gun says 89 and the ball went 450 feet.

So, Haren gets lumped into a group of pitchers that includes James Shields, Cole Hamels, Javier Vazquez, and Ricky Nolasco – guys who some teams believe throw too many strikes. Several of these teams believe that these guys are too willing to throw one down the middle in order to keep their walk rates down, and it leads to too many home runs and a package that is viewed as more of a good pitcher than a great one.

There may be some truth to those feelings. Perhaps Haren would be better off walking a guy here and there rather than pounding the zone no matter the situation. Since he doesn’t throw 95, maybe putting a 3-1 fastball in the strike zone isn’t always such a great idea. I think they make an interesting argument.

I don’t agree with their assessment of Haren’s overall value, but as we saw yesterday, the actual price for Haren was far lower than the expected price. If you’re wondering why, this is the best explanation I can get. To MLB teams, limiting walks and striking out hitters are nice, but you can’t be an ace if you give up a lot of home runs.