Last night, the Dodgers and Phillies made a deal that, on the surface, is your typical minor August move of minor role players. The Dodgers landed Carlos Ruiz, a 37 year old catcher, in exchange for A.J. Ellis, a 35 year old catcher, and a prospect of dubious quality. The impetus for the trade seems pretty clear; Ruiz can still hit lefties a bit, and so he’s a better fit as Yasmani Grandal’s platoon partner in the postseason. Ellis isn’t much at the plate these days, so by adding Ruiz, the team has slightly upgraded their offense against left-handed pitching.

But the trade was a big deal because, as was immediately apparent given the reaction to the news of the deal, A.J. Ellis was beloved by his teammates, and especially, by the team’s ace.

Ellis described Kershaw as “shocked” by the trade. The two men wept together, he said.

— Andy McCullough (@McCulloughTimes) August 25, 2016

Ellis and Kershaw are obviously quite close, but other members of the team also showed their support for Ellis, and made it clear they will miss him.

It’s rare that a player can wholly embody a club’s energy and ideals. Dodgers inside and outside the clubhouse walls will miss @AJEllis17

— Brandon McCarthy (@BMcCarthy32) August 25, 2016

By trading away a beloved part of the clubhouse for a minor bench upgrade, the media has been handed a very simple narrative: nerd-run team doesn’t value chemistry, tears apart clubhouse in the process. The fact that the Dodgers were one out away from being no-hit on the night Ellis got traded didn’t do anything to slow that story down. But of course the Dodgers do care at least a little bit about chemistry, or Yasiel Puig wouldn’t be hanging out in Triple-A right now. So, six days away from roster expansion, when Ellis could have kept hanging around the team even after they acquired Ruiz, why did the Dodgers trade A.J. Ellis?

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On July 31st, the Royals were basically dead in the water. On the day before the team had to make a final buy, sold, or hold decision, KC stood at 49-55, 12 games out of first place in the AL Central. They’d been outscored by 59 runs. And to top it off, Wade Davis had to go back on the DL with a flexor strain, signaling that he hadn’t been able to get past the arm problems that had already cost him part of the season. The Royals hadn’t been very good with him in 2016, and now were looking at likely spending the rest of the season without one of the main reasons they’ve been able to win the last few years.

And yet, despite four months of struggles and Davis’ absence, since the calendar flipped over to August, the Royals have been almost unbeatable. They’ve reeled off 16 wins in 21 games, including their last nine, and have breathed some life back into a season that looked to be dead and buried. The graph of their end-of-season expected record tells the story pretty well.

In a season of ups and downs, August has been the biggest up so far, and unsurprisingly, the Royals have been winning games with the same kind of crazy formula that allowed them to make a couple of postseason runs the last two years.

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Despite internally high hopes after some notable acquisitions over the winter, the Diamondbacks season has simply been an unmitigated disaster. As we head towards September, they have a 51-73 record, second-worst in the National League, and they’ve played every bit as poorly as their record indicates; they also have baseball’s second-worst run differential (-129) and third-worst BaseRuns expected run differential (-138). Basically every single thing that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and instead of becoming a contender, the team has fallen apart.

The lousy results might end up costing many of the high-ranking front office personnel their jobs. The team has yet to exercise their 2017 options on GM Dave Stewart or AGM De Jon Watson. Tony LaRussa’s contract also expires at the end of the year, and reports suggest that the team is considering another front office overhaul. Unsurprisingly, Stewart and LaRussa feel that they deserve more than just two years on the job and don’t think basing an evaluation of their job performance on the team’s 2016 record is fair.

“We had one good year, and if you look at what’s happened on the field this year, then one bad year,” Stewart said. “I think we deserve a tiebreaker.”

…

“I think our group has earned the benefit of the doubt,” La Russa told USA TODAY Sports, “but it’s their decision. The way I look at it, if you get an opportunity, you don’t complain about the length of the opportunity. So I don’t complain about that.

“This is a game based on results. There was good improvement in ’15, and in ’16, was the opposite of that. It’s disappointing. We’re all upset about it.

“If somebody in charge is upset enough, they’ll make a change.”

In a rare case of agreement, I’m actually with LaRussa and Stewart on the idea that they shouldn’t be fired simply because the team performed badly in 2016. The results of one season, whether positive or negative, don’t provide enough information about the quality of the decisions made, and especially not the quality of the decision makers.

But I think the Diamondbacks should clean house anyway.

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Yesterday, Kris Bryant did what he’s best known for; hit the crap out of the baseball. In the Cubs 9-6 victory over the Brewers, Bryant went 5 for 5 with a double and a pair of home runs, giving him 30 homers for the season. The big day raised his season line to .296/.392/.564 and pushed him up to a 152 wRC+, second in the NL, behind only Daniel Murphy. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but Kris Bryant can really hit.

But Kris Bryant is also really good at a bunch of other things that don’t get as much attention, and given his monstrous production yesterday, I thought it would be a good time to talk about all the other reasons why Kris Bryant might be the best all-around player in the National League.

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Let’s go back in time nine months. Fresh off the Royals World Series victory, MLB teams were making plans for how to reshape their teams for 2016. And for many of those teams, those plans included making a run at one of the many quality players available in free agency. After some years of slim pickings on the open market, there was suddenly a pretty terrific crop of players available to sign, with the market being especially deep in starting pitching and outfielders. And with teams flush with cash, a lot of players changed teams this winter, getting big paychecks in the process.

Seven players signed deals worth at least $100 million in guaranteed salaries. Eight players signed contracts that gave them the right to opt-out of their deal at some point and re-enter the free agent market if their value goes up. Middle relievers and bench players made multi-year deals a standard for players who used to have to go year to year. This past winter was, by any definition, a league-wide spending spree.

But as we approach the end of the first year of these contracts, there seems to be one developing theme; the teams that spent the most money in free agency probably wish they hadn’t.

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On Sunday, and for the second time this season, Mookie Betts launched three home runs in a game. He now has 26 home runs on the season; for comparison, Giancarlo Stanton has 25, Chris Davis has 24, and Mike Trout has 23. Mookie Betts has a higher isolated slugging percentage this season than Miguel Cabrera, Ryan Braun, or Carlos Gonzalez. This is not what anyone expected.

I’ve long been one of Betts biggest supporters, but it’d be dishonest to pretend that we saw this coming. Even back in 2014, when I wrote the “Don’t Trade Mookie Betts” post extolling his value, I included the following paragraph.

Due primarily to his size (5-9) and the potential limits that puts on his power, Betts has not generally been viewed as a franchise cornerstone type of prospect the way Xander Bogaerts was as he ascended the ranks. And while it might seem unfair to make generalities about Betts’ future based on his height, there is merit to the idea that he probably won’t become a big-time power hitter in the big leagues.

In that piece, I noted that Betts’ combination of a low swing rate and a high contact rate put him in the company of mostly low-power slap hitters, but noted that it looked like he had enough doubles-power to become a Matt Carpenter or Ben Zobrist type of hitter, and those guys were worth holding onto. I liked Betts a lot, but I liked him because of the overall game, not because I thought he was going to turn into a slugger.

Even the following spring, when Betts went bananas in the Grapefruit League, his teammates sought to praise him by comparing him to Andrew McCutchen. And those comparisons were met with pushback, even by myself, as I continued to not see that kind of power development as Betts’ likely path to success. But now, a year and a half later, the McCutchen comparison looks wrong not because Betts didn’t develop McCutchen-level power, but because he’s already surpassed McCutchen-level power, and has become a very different player than he looked like coming up through the minors.

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Yesterday, I listed off my favorite win-now moves of the trade deadline. Today, we’re going to lavish some praise on some teams who also made good moves, but did so by looking to the future. These are the five moves I liked the most from the seller’s perspective.

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The 2016 trade deadline season culminated with 18 trades on Monday, wrapping a month that saw 45 different deals struck over the course of the month. We wrote about basically every trade, often from multiple angles, and attempted to break down each team’s expected return for each deal. Now, as a bit of a recap, I’m going to look at my favorite acquisitions over the last month. Today, we’ll focus on the buyer side of things, looking at the teams that I think did the best in upgrading their roster for the stretch run. Tomorrow, we’ll tackle the seller side of things, looking at who looks to have gotten the most future value, relative to what we expected, by moving veterans for younger talent.

Keep in mind that I’m not just looking at the teams that improved themselves the most, but also at the acquisition cost; you can make a big splash and add a few wins to your roster while still hurting your franchise long-term. Of course, it’s also easy to make a minor deal that doesn’t cost you much and doesn’t improve your chances of winning all that much either, so while there were some smaller deals that I liked, I gave preference to the deals that I think could have a real impact on the playoff races. These are the deals that I think helped contenders upgrade in a significant way without sacrificing too much long-term value in order to do so.

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