Over the last 24 hours, as rumors circulated that the Mariners were leaning towards hanging onto Jarrod Washburn, the collective Seattle fanbase prepared for another trade deadline disaster. We were used to those, after all.

However, we can unplug our noses and breathe again, because Jarrod Washburn has been traded to the Detroit Tigers for Luke French and Mauricio Robles.

As a Mariner fan, this trade makes me want to jump up and down and hug someone. The M’s turned a 35-year-old lefty strike throwing flyballer who is due $3.5 million over the rest of the season and then becomes an expensive free agent into a 24-year-old lefty strike thrwoing flyballer who is due $0 over the rest of the year and won’t be a free agent until after 2015. And they got a 20-year-old lefty with huge strikeout numbers in A-ball to boot.

French isn’t going to be an ace, but let’s be honest, neither is Washburn. His value is entirely tied to an ERA that is, quite simply, a fluke. His 2.64 ERA is more than a run lower than his 3.75 FIP… and his FIP is deflated by an unsustainable 6.4% HR/FB rate. In reality, Washburn has pitched like a guy who deserves an ERA more like 4.4, but thanks to the wonders of good defense, a ballpark perfectly suited to his skills, and some good luck, he has the appearance of something more than a back-end starter.

A back-end starter, though, is exactly what he is. The addition of a sinker and confidence in his big slow breaking ball have allowed him to marginally improve this year, but the step up is in small percentages, not large gains. Tigers fans wondering what to expect from Washburn should be thinking a mid-4s ERA, as long as you put some good defenders behind him on days he pitches.

Worse for Detroit, Washburn is a Type B free agent, but offering him arbitration would be borderline insane. Coming off a career year, with a previous $10 million salary, he’d easily get $14 or $15 million if taken to arbitration, and he’s probably not even worth half that as a free agent. So, while the Tigers give up a couple of interesting young arms for a rental, they won’t even get draft pick compensation when he leaves this winter.

Mariner fans are rejoicing for good reason. They just moved an overvalued asset for a couple of interesting, cheap young pitchers. This is a great trade for Seattle. Detroit? I think you’re about to be disappointed by what you acquired.

Ruben Amaro has taken a lot of crap from the sabermetric community since stepping into the role of Phillies GM. He just built himself a really huge wall today, though, with the outstanding acquisition of Cliff Lee. Amazingly enough, he was able to get one of the game’s best pitchers without surrendering any of his highly coveted talents.

Instead of giving up J.A. Happ, Kyle Drabek, and Dominic Brown or Michael Taylor to get Roy Halladay, Amaro managed to hang onto all four and get Lee instead. This is simply a fantastic deal for the Phillies, who add a frontline starter for 2009 and 2010 without giving up any players that were going to help their team in the short term.

Lee, you know about – last year’s AL Cy Young winner, he reinvented himself and has sustained his excellence this year as an All-Star caliber LHP. The Phillies hold a no-brainer club option for 2010 at just $9 million, making him a massive bargain. He’s a top shelf starting pitcher making a fraction of his value and without a long term commitment required. He’s an extremely valuable asset.

To get him, they gave up a good teenage arm currently on the DL with shoulder problems in Jason Knapp, a solid pitching prospect that is a lower risk/lower upside guy in Carlos Carrasco, and decent-but-not-great infield prospects in SS/2B Jason Donald and catcher Lou Marson.

Put simply, the Indians should have done better than this or just kept Lee. For a +5 win pitcher, they got quantity over quality, and all four of the guys they acquired come with pretty significant question marks. Carrasco’s probably the best prospect of the bunch (his upside is lower than Knapp’s, but the risk is much, much lower), but none of these guys are premium, high value guys.

Sorry Cleveland – you got hosed here. This is just not a good deal for the Indians in any way, shape, or form. Ruben Amaro just cleaned Mark Shapiro’s clock on this trade.

It’s no secret that I’m both a Mariner fan and an Ian Snell fan, as I’ve been lobbying for the M’s to acquire the guy from Pittsburgh for the last two months. I laid my reasons for liking Snell at the time, and his Triple-A performance hasn’t lessened my enthusiasm.

So, when the Mariners actually go out and trade for Snell, you would think I’d be a happy man. However, my first reaction when I heard about the deal that sent Jeff Clement, Ronny Cedeno, Brett Lorin, Aaron Pribanic, and Nathan Adcock to Pittsburgh for Snell and Jack Wilson was “yuck”.

Let’s start with what the Mariners are getting. Wilson is a really good defensive shortstop who can hit well enough to justify his place in the line-up. Despite a lack of power and an aggressive approach at the plate, he’s still been a +1.5 to +2.5 win player for most of his career. He’s essentially a league average shortstop, and at $7.25 million in salary for 2009 with a team option at $8.4 million for 2010, he’s not overly expensive for what he is. He’s a solid role player who does enough things well to earn his contract and won’t hurt the team he’s playing for.

But he’s also 31 years old, and while he’s not overly expensive, he’s not a bargain either. Adam Everett is a similar player and signed a 1 year, $1 million deal with the Tigers last winter. Wilson’s salary makes him a small asset, not a big one. He’s not the kind of player the Mariners should be giving up significant pieces to attain.

So, that leaves Snell as the main piece of value coming back. While I’m a fan, I also saw him as a buy-low opportunity, as he was done in Pittsburgh and everyone knew it. He’s not an ace – he’s a guy with good stuff and average to below average command and some well documented issues with his prior organization. I don’t like the word headcase, but when you’re talking about a guy who would rather pitch in Triple-A than the majors, it’s hard to argue with.

Snell’s contract is better than Wilson’s, as he makes just $4.25 million next year and then has two club options for 2011 and 2012 that could be bargains if he rebounds to prior form. But there’s obviously the risk that he won’t, and then you’re looking at getting one year of Snell and letting him leave. He may be a long term asset… or he might be a one year flop.

For two guys with minimal value, the Mariners parted with five young players.

Clement’s the big name of the bunch, as a LH DH/1B/C? with power who had no future with the Mariners. He can hit righties, but his ability to do anything else is questionable. His knee problems have kept him from catching, and the bat might not be good enough to make him more than a solid 1B/DH type, especially if he can’t figure out LHPs.

Cedeno is a solid utility infielder who plays good defense at SS/2B, but can’t hit. He’s a nice role player, but basically the definition of replacement level.

It’s the three pitchers that the team gave up that pushes the deal in Pittsburgh’s favor. Pribanic and Lorin were the teams 4th and 5th round picks in 2008, and both had impressed in their first year as professionals.

Pribanic’s an extreme groundball guy who throws strikes but lacks an out-pitch, so he profiles as a #5 starter or a good reliever. If his breaking ball improves, he could beat that upside, though.

Lorin’s a good command guy with a nice breaking ball and an average fastball, plus some projectability as a big guy (6’7/250) who hasn’t had much experience on the mound. If he adds a couple of MPH to his fastball, he could be a mid-rotation starter.

Adcock had struggled of late with his command, but as a 21-year-old with a decent fastball-curveball combination and the ability to get groundballs, he’s also an interesting arm. Getting him out of High Desert should give Pittsburgh a better idea of where he stands right now.

They’re all just decent pitching prospects instead of good ones, so the M’s gave up quantity over quality, but the old cliche about building a rotation by getting a ton of arms and seeing who sticks is really true. The M’s had done a good job of collecting an inventory of decent arms, and they just depleted that fairly heavily, while also giving up a LH power bat, for two guys with marginal value.

Pittsburgh is the easy winner of this deal, as they get some interesting young talent and shed some salary without losing much that will hurt them. The Mariners could still salvage this by moving Wilson before Friday’s deadline for a younger SS with more long term potential, but if they stand pat with Wilson as the team’s shortstop for 2009 and maybe 2010, color me disappointed.

With trade winds swirling around him, Scott Kazmir had his best start of the season last night, shutting down the Yankees over seven strong innings. It was the first time all year he’d managed to complete the seventh inning, and only the fourth start where he’d walked less than two batters. His velocity was still down compared to previous years (topping out at 93), but several ticks above where it was when he landed on the disabled list.

Over the six starts Kazmir has made since coming off the DL, Kazmir has thrown 35 1/3 IP, walked 12, struck out 27, and allowed just five home runs. Before landing on the DL, he had a 29/35 BB/K in 45 innings over nine starts. The rest certainly did him some good.

The question for Tampa Bay and potential Kazmir suitors is what they should expect going forward. ZIPS is extremely bullish on Kazmir, but that’s mostly based on his strong strikeout rates from 2007 and 2008, which probably went away with his velocity. Even the post-DL Kazmir is only averaging 6.95 strikeouts per nine innings, way down from his whiff numbers the last two years.

If he’s a 4 BB/7 K/1 HR per nine inning guy, that’s about a +1.5 to +2 win pitcher. Kazmir is under contract for $20 million in 2010/2011, and then a team option of $13.5 million for 2012 or a $2.5 million buyout. So, he’s either going to cost $22 million for two years or $33 million for three years.

+1.5 to +2.0 win pitchers aren’t worth $11 million a year. However, there is of course the chance (however small) that Kazmir’s stuff and strikeout rates rebound, and he gets back to something more like the +4 win pitcher he was from 2005-2007. That built-in upside has to be factored into his cost, and probably pushes his true market value to somewhere in the $10 to $11 million neighborhood on a short term deal.

In other words, Kazmir’s deal isn’t a terrible one. It’s not a bargain in any sense, but it’s probably not that far off what he’d get if he was a free agent. Given the ratio between his talent level and cost, he should have trade value right around zero. He’s not a boat anchor that teams won’t touch, but the price tag is high enough that the Rays shouldn’t expect any real talent coming back in return.

If Tampa wants financial flexibility, they can probably dump Kazmir on someone with the payroll space to take a risk. Given their budget issues and pitching depth, it’s probably not a bad idea to move him now.

The Giants finally ended their long pursuit of a first baseman, acquiring Ryan Garko from the San Francisco Giants, reportedly for LHP Scott Barnes. Garko is a clear upgrade and should boost the San Francisco offense, but the price is really steep for what Garko is.

As a 28-year-old right-handed first baseman with limited defensive value, Garko has to really mash in order to maintain his value. His entire value is wrapped up in his performance at the plate, but Garko’s bat is just good, not great. He has power, but isn’t a pure slugger. He makes solid contact, but doesn’t walk all that much. The total package has added up to a career .352 wOBA, which makes him a solidly above average bat, but when that’s the only thing you bring to the table, the overall value is just okay.

Garko’s been worth +4.0 wins over his 1,587 major league plate appearances, which makes his contributions thus far a little bit below average. At 28, he’s in his prime, but there doesn’t seem to be much upside beyond what he is now. ZIPS projects a .344 wOBA going forward, though that would jump with a move to the weaker National League. Overall, he’s probably a +2 win player.

He replaces Travis Ishikawa, who is certainly an inferior player to Garko, but not without his uses. Ishikawa’s a solid fielder, which helps make up a bit for his lack of offense, but Ishikawa shouldn’t be starting for a contending team. However, since he’s not a total black hole (+0.9 wins in 237 PA this year), this upgrade seems fairly minor. Especially over just two months, the upgrade from Ishikawa to Garko is in the fractions of a win.

To get that upgrade, the Giants had to part with Scott Barnes, a 21-year-old LHP who Baseball America rated their 9th best prospect before the season and has impressed with his performance in the hitter friendly Cal League this year. He’s a good command lefty with better stuff than your average good command lefty, and he was considered a 2nd-3rd round talent last year before falling the Giants in the 8th round of the draft. He’s not one of the premier pitching prospects in baseball, but he’s the kind of good arm that could turn into a quality pitcher down the road.

Barnes is a high price to pay for an average-ish first baseman like Garko. He is under club control for 3+ seasons after this one, but as an arbitration eligible player this winter, he’s about to stop being cheap, and he’s not the kind of player you want to be spending significant money on. The Giants will pitch this as more-than-a-rental, but finding a RH first baseman who can hit a little bit isn’t that difficult, and whether Garko will be worth much more than his arbitration salaries going forward is a real question.

This isn’t a terrible trade for San Francisco – they did improve their team, at least a bit, and they get back a player that they control past 2009, but they paid a premium for that upgrade, and Garko’s probably not going to be enough to put them over the top. This seems like going half way – giving up part of your future for a move not quite good enough to make the present much more interesting.

For the Indians, they get another look at Andy Marte and a nifty pitching prospect for a guy that is fairly easily replaced. Good move for Cleveland – not as big a fan of San Francisco’s end of this.

Over the last few weeks, a couple of players with disputed defensive reputations have been traded. Nyjer Morgan was posting crazy good UZR numbers as a left fielder in Pittsburgh, and his outfield defense was the primary reason the Nationals acquired him. However, when the deal went down, a decent contingent of people claimed that Morgan’s numbers were inflated due to park effects in Pittsburgh that weren’t accurately being accounted for. The claim was that Morgan’s defensive numbers were inflated due to the context he was playing in.

Likewise, when the Mariners traded Yuniesky Betancourt to Kansas City, Dayton Moore caused quite the stir when he stated that he had no faith in metrics like UZR due to their unreliability. Betancourt is kind of the anti-Morgan, with horrifically terrible UZR numbers, but enough defensive talent that he should be better than what the metric indicates he’s performing at. Again, the question of context was raised – would Betancourt’s UZR improve once he got out of Seattle?

So far, we’ve only got a couple of weeks of data to look at, but the answers to date are resounding.

In 160 innings in center field since being traded to Washington, Morgan has a +4.9 UZR, which translates to +26.5 UZR/150. That’s actually higher than his UZR/150 while playing left field for the Pirates. If there was something about playing half his games in Pittsburgh that inflated his numbers, it apparently went with him to Washington. Or, more logically, it never existed in the first place. In reality, he’s just a fantastic defensive outfielder, no matter where he plays.

Betancourt? Still terrible. In 81 innings for KC, he’s posted a UZR of -1.8, which is a -25.2 UZR/150. That’s even worse than the level he was playing at for Seattle. Since Moore claimed it was obvious which players are good with the glove when you watch them on the field, I wonder how he’s felt about his new shortstop the last week and a half, where he’s been failing to get to balls and costing his pitchers outs. But hey, at least he’s posting a .156 wOBA, so it’s not all bad right? Oh.

As we talked about a few days ago, Matt Holliday is a good player, and he’s really going to help the Cardinals down the stretch. That said, I have to wonder, is St. Louis trying to copy the Milwaukee model of right-handed only offenses?

With this deal, the Cardinals regular line-up when everyone is healthy shakes down something like this.

1. Skip Schumaker, 2B, LH
2. Colby Rasmus, CF, LH
3. Albert Pujols, 1B, RH
4. Matt Holliday, LF, RH
5. Ryan Ludwick, RF, RH
6. Mark DeRosa, 3B, RH
7. Yadier Molina, C, RH
8. Pitcher, P, ?
9. Brendan Ryan, SS, RH

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to match-up with that kind of line-up in a playoff series. You leave your lefty starters at home, throw as many RH starters as possible, and use your LOOGY to go after Schumaker and Rasmus, before throwing a bunch more right-handed relievers to finish out the game. Pretty basic stuff.

Maybe LaRussa mixes up the line-up come October, moving DeRosa up and Rasmus back to add a little more balance, but even that only does so much – with six right-handed bats and just two left-handed bats in the regular line-up, the Cardinals are going to see a bunch of RH pitching if they make the playoffs, no matter how they arrange the batting order.

The Brewers tried this last year, with a quality offense overloaded with RH bats. They couldn’t figure out Brett Myers or Joe Blanton in the first round, and they went home. It’s tough enough to beat quality teams in a playoff series without making the match-ups easy on the opposing manager.

I get that there wasn’t a big LH bat out there that fit the Cardinals needs, but I have to wonder whether St. Louis would have been better off going after a LH third baseman instead of DeRosa if they felt like they were going to make a run at Holliday as well. As is, they’ve paid a pretty steep price in young talent to build a line-up that will hit the crap out of left-handers, but they might not see more than one or two in the playoffs. And whether this line-up can muster a bunch of runs against RH pitching remains to be seen.

Before heading over to Greensboro last night to watch Andrew Brackman pitch for the Charleston RiverDogs, I checked out his line here on FanGraphs to see how he’d been pitching as of late. It was ugly – a BB/9 over 6 was the main culprit of a FIP near 5.00 in low-A ball. That’s not good, but plenty of pitchers have struggled in the minors while coming back from arm surgery. More than the results, I was interested to see what he was throwing.

In the first inning, he sat 90-92 with the fastball, going to the outside corner against RHBs. The pitch had some decent movement down and away, and profiled as the kind of pitch that could get groundballs. His command was poor, as expected, walking the leadoff batter, but even once he got ahead in the count, it became obvious he didn’t have anything else besides the fastball. On an 0-2 count, he threw a 73 MPH curve with no tilt that bounced about a foot in front of the plate. He came back with another weak 72 MPH curve that just hung in the strike zone begging to be hit. He went back to the fastball and got through the first inning, but wasn’t impressive.

Then came the second inning. The fastball dipped down to 88, but he still popped 92 occasionally, but the breaking ball was just awful, and the Greensboro hitters were sitting on his fastball. His command went in the toilet, and the movement on his fastball ran right into LHBs wheelhouse, giving them a chance to take batting practice. Kyle Skipworth, who isn’t exactly a good hitting prospect, launched one of Brackman’s fastballs deep into the night sky. Every left-hander just pounded the fastball, and the curve simply wasn’t good enough to keep hitters off balance.

At one point, with the bases loaded and nobody out, Brackman abandoned the fastball and threw nothing but curves. Foul, Foul, Roped down the line. That didn’t work so well. His breaking ball just wasn’t anything close to being a major league pitch.

Seven runs scored in the second, but Brackman came back out for the third. At least, until he walked a couple more hitters, and Charleston’s manager had seen enough. 2 1/3 innings, 6 hits, 5 walks… and he looked even worse than that.

Brackman needs a lot of work. His command is a 30 or 35 on the 20-80 scouting scale, and he’s currently pitching without good stuff either. He’s got nothing – no velocity, no breaking ball, no ability to throw strikes. If I didn’t know who Brackman was before the game, I’d have written him off as a very tall non-prospect.

Yankee fans hoping for Brackman to get to New York someday better hope he finds his velocity, because the current version is never going to get out of A-ball.

Congratulations Mark Buehrle. Now go buy Dewayne Wise a new car or something.

If you haven’t heard, Buehrle just threw the 18th perfect game in major league history. He was brilliant, putting a powerful Tampa Bay line-up to sleep, 27 up and 27 down. Well, sort of. He got 26 batters out. Wise got Gabe Kapler out.

Inserted as a defensive replacement in the 9th inning, Wise didn’t have to wait long to spring into action. Kapler was the first batter of the inning, and he launched a pitch deep into the left center field gap. Wise took off, got to the fence, and made a leaping stab to pull the ball down from over the top of the wall. Then, he crashed into the wall and a lost handle on the ball, finally bare handing it before he crashed to the ground. Instead of a home run, Kapler was simply out #25. You can see the video here.

Buehrle did the rest, capping off history by striking out Michael Hernandez and getting Jason Bartlett to ground weakly to shortstop. 27 months after he no-hit the Rangers, Buehrle one-upped himself, and wrote his name into the history books, with perfection.

His final line? 9 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 6 K. 76 of his 116 pitches were strikes. His WPA for the game was 0.29, mostly thanks to an early grand slam from Josh Fields that put an end to high leverage situations.

Congratulations to Mark Buehrle. From all accounts, he’s one of the good guys in baseball. You’ll never be forgotten now.

Here’s the quote of the year.

“Right now we do not envision [being a seller],” Minaya said. “If we’re 6 ½ [back] in the wild card with a couple of teams in front of us, we are still kind of trying to find out how we can improve this team, if we can improve it through trades.”

Jose Reyes hasn’t played a game since mid-May. Ditto Carlos Delgado. Carlos Beltran has been on the shelf for the last month. John Maine and J.J. Putz slightly longer than that. But now, with his team 10 games out of first place and 7 1/2 games out of the top spot in the wild card, having just watched his team lose back to back games to the Washington Nationals, Omar Minaya thinks it might be time to get his roster some help.

Someone buy the man a fiddle, because he needs something to do while watching the burning rubble that is his personal overpriced Rome. During one of the great buyer’s markets of all time, Minaya paid through the nose for a bad starting pitcher and bullpen help, while neglecting the fact that there was no organizational depth beyond the starting position players. If any of them got hurt, it was going to get bad in a hurry, but that apparently didn’t need to be addressed in his spending spree over the winter.

Maybe the Mets didn’t deserve to have all these injuries strike at the same time, but the resulting collapse is directly due to a lack of planning on the part of the guy in charge. Minaya has never been very good at this whole General Manager thing, but 2009 is his Little Bighorn. If he actually thinks there’s a season left to salvage, he’s crazy. The Mets have something like a two percent chance of making the playoffs. The Pittsburgh Pirates are more likely to be playing baseball in October than the Mets are, and they’re in total sell-off mode.

There’s a bit of self-preservation going on here, of course. Minaya has earned his way into a lack of job security, contract extension or not. In a world where baseball teams are getting exponentially smarter, he refuses to catch up. Perhaps he sees the writing on the wall – his days as a major league GM are numbered. If he doesn’t get fired this winter, it will just delay the inevitable. He’s not one of the 30 most qualified people to be running a baseball team, and 2009 should seal his fate.

Sorry Omar, but if you wanted to save your season, the time to improve the roster was in May, not in July. You’re too late.