Last week, in this space, I wrote about Dave Dombrowski’s Achilles Heel in the wake of the Tigers letting go of their long-tenured General Manager. Yesterday, another long-term General Manager was relieved of his duties, as the Brewers have moved Doug Melvin “into an advisory role”, opening up their GM position for the first time since 2002.

Like Dombrowski’s start in Detroit, Melvin’s first few years in Milwaukee were pretty rough. The team lost 94 games in both 2003 and 2004, then hung around .500 for the next three years, so it was five years of laying the groundwork for a competitive team. But in 2008, things started to come together around a strong young core that included 24-year-old sluggers Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun and 25-year-old middle infielders J.J. Hardy and Rickie Weeks. To supplement the team’s homegrown core of All-Star hitters, Melvin made a big mid-season trade for CC Sabathia, whose dominant performance helped carry them to the team’s first postseason berth since 1982.

While Sabathia was just a half-season rental — and predictably signed for big money in New York that winter — the Brewers retained the young core that looked like it should form the foundation of a perennial contender. However, since the start of the 2009 season until Melvin’s resignation, the team went just 540-545 and only made the postseason in one out of those seven years. While Dombrowski is leaving Detroit on the back of a long run of success that may just now be coming to an end, Melvin’s track record is more of a long string of unfulfilled potential.

So why weren’t the Brewers able to turn one of the best young groups of home-grown hitters into a consistent winner? Unlike with Dombrowski, Melvin didn’t have one glaring flaw that came back to haunt him on an annual basis. Instead, the Brewers lack of success can be chalked up to three significant organizational failures over the last seven years.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

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As we head into mid-August, there are roughly 50 games left for each team on the schedule, and we’re reaching the point of the season where we can begin to cull the list of potential candidates for the three major awards. So, today, let’s take a look at the legitimate MVP candidates in both leagues, and handicap how this might play out over the next six weeks.

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Just before the trade deadline, the Braves, Marlins, and Dodgers struck a big deal, at least in terms of quantity of players and money being moved around; 13 players changed uniforms, and when the dust settled, the Dodgers came away with a trio of pitchers to upgrade their staff: starters Alex Wood and Mat Latos, along with reliever Jim Johnson. While they had been a heavily-rumored destination for frontline pitchers like David Price, Johnny Cueto, and Cole Hamels, the Dodgers ultimately decided to with depth over star power, adding multiple good arms rather than one great one.

Of course, a large driver of that decision was the relative cost, as they could acquire these kinds of pitchers without surrendering any of their best young talents, and they’ll also control Wood’s rights through the 2019 season; he won’t even be eligible for arbitration until after next year, so he’s going to make something close to the league minimum next year. So, while no one thinks Wood is on David Price’s level as a pitcher, he offered a better value when future years of control and financial obligations are factored in.

But choosing Wood and Latos over one better pitcher wasn’t just about getting a cheaper pitcher, or even just about getting a guy they could control for multiple years. In Alex Wood, the Dodgers were attempting to buy low on an asset with significant upside, which is exactly the kind of move that they’ve been making ever since Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi took over the baseball operations department last winter.

If you want to know why the Braves were willing to trade a 24 year old pitcher with four years of control remaining after this season, you can essentially sum up their reasoning in one easy table.

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Just days after completing a pair of trades, sending both David Price and Yoenis Cespedes out of town for five pitching prospects, Dave Dombrowski was “released from his contract” by Tigers owner Mike Ilitch. The timing of the move was perhaps more surprising than the end result, as Dombrowski’s contract expired at the end of the season, and Jon Paul Morosi had speculated that this might be his final season with the Tigers a month ago. After 14 years at the helm, perhaps it was time for both sides to get a change of scenery.

Certainly, Dombrowski’s legacy in Detroit is already secure. He took a moribund franchise and turned it into a perennial winner, putting together rosters that managed a .500 or better record in eight of the nine seasons after they posted the worst record in baseball history. They made the playoffs five times during that stretch, and went to the World Series twice. Unquestionably, Dombrowski’s tenure with the Tigers was a smashing success, even without bringing Detroit a championship that has eluded Mr. Ilitch for so long.

The foundations of this nearly decade-long run of success was built on the back of some of the most successful trades in baseball during his tenure. While many organizations preach the value of building from within, Dombrowski put good teams on the field that were often pieced together with players extracted from other organizations. Whether it was outright heists for quality players like Carlos Guillen, Jhonny Peralta, or Doug Fister, or blockbusters like his deal for now franchise icon Miguel Cabrera, Dombrowski seemed to come out on the winning end of more than his fair share of trades.

And even when ownership boxed him in with a bad free agent signing — like the nine year, $216 million commitment to Prince Fielder that forced Cabrera to masquerade as a third baseman — Dombrowski figured out how to salvage that deal, picking up a valuable contributor in Ian Kinsler while dumping the majority of Fielder’s remaining contract on the Rangers. Certainly, he wasn’t perfect — his deal sending Doug Fister out of Detroit was as bad as his original deal to acquire Fister was good — but Dombrowski’s trade record can stand up next to any other executive in baseball.

But for his many strengths, Dombrowski’s Tigers had one critical weakness that he could seemingly never overcome. For whatever reason, Dave Dombrowski was absolutely terrible at putting together a Major League bullpen.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Three years ago, a struggling Red Sox team dumped a big part of their roster — and their payroll — on the Los Angeles Dodgers, shipping Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett to Los Angeles in exchange for a few prospects and a lot of financial relief. The deal freed up the team to reallocate a bunch of that money to free agents a few months later, and after hitting on signings like Shane Victorino, Mike Napoli, Stephen Drew, and Koji Uehara, the team celebrated a World Series title in 2013.

Things have fallen apart again since, however, and last winter’s free agent spending spree looks like a total disaster at this point. Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval have combined for -1.8 WAR while pulling in $40 million between them, and there’s no way the team can go into 2016 with this same defensive alignment. Ramirez is clearly not an outfielder, and Sandoval has been a bit of disaster at third base this year as well, leading to speculation that one of the two may move to first base next year. And that probably is the path of least resistance, but as rumors percolated of Red Sox-Padres trade discussion before last week’s deadline, I started wondering if there wasn’t an August deal to be made that might actually make sense for both sides.

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With last week’s additions of Troy Tulowitzki and David Price, the Toronto Blue Jays made themselves into a legitimate postseason contender, adding two of the game’s best players to a roster that was already pretty solid. Our rest-of-season forecast now has the Jays with the best projected winning percentage in the American League going forward, and while they’ll likely have to win their win into the division series through the Wild Card game, the Jays look like they could be a dangerous team in October. Price, along with bullpen upgrades Latroy Hawkins and Mark Lowe, gives them a good bit more pitching depth than they had previously, and Tulowitzki adds another quality hitter to a line-up that was already overflowing with offensive weapons.

But the more I look at this roster, the more I begin to wonder whether we’re overlooking one potentially significant flaw in this team’s construction, especially when it comes to the postseason. A week ago, when writing about the Tulowitzki acquisition, I noted that adding a good hitter to a good line-up could actually provide non-linear positive returns, above and beyond just that single player’s individual abilities, because getting guys on base leads to better outcomes for everyone else in the line-up. As I wrote then, we shouldn’t be too concerned about diminishing returns from the Blue Jays already having “enough” offense.

One aspect of the Jays line-up I didn’t talk about enough, however, was the fact that you can have diminishing returns based on line-up construction. Specifically, if you line up too many hitters from one side of the plate, your team will probably score fewer runs than would be expected based solely on overall batting lines, as a line-up that is dominated by same-handed hitters becomes a fairly easy match-up for the opposing manager in important situations. And while Troy Tulowitzki is an excellent player, the Blue Jays line-up may now lean too heavily to the right side.

Here is where the Jays non-pitchers stand relative to the rest of baseball in 2015 performance against RHPs and LHPs, to this point in the season.

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On the back of a terrific young rotation, the Mets are contender-ish this year, and so for the last few months, there has been a steadily increasing cry to improve the team’s feeble offense. After all, the Mets position players are 27th in wRC+, and even after acquiring Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson, this was an offense that didn’t really inspire much confidence. And so, the Mets have been looking for a slugger they can stick behind (or maybe in front of) Lucas Duda, and after walking away from Carlos Gomez on Wendesday night, they’ve reportedly landed Yoenis Cespedes right before the deadline.

The cost was a couple of solid but not spectacular prospects. Michael Fulmer is the headliner in the deal, and while Kiley McDaniel gave him a 45 FV grade before the season, he told me he’d bump him up to a 50 based on the improved slider and command he’s shown this year. Still, it’s mostly a toss-up whether he’s a starter or a reliever, and he’s sticking with his Joba Chamberlain comparison, so this isn’t exactly a premium pitching prospect that the Mets just surrendered. Luis Cessa, the second prospect, is more of just an arm-strength guy with average secondary stuff; Kiley mentioned he’s still a 40 FV and compared him to the pitching prospects the team gave up to get Uribe and Johnson last week.

The big concession here is that they only control Cespedes through the end of the season, as he’s not the multi-year player they were looking for earlier. After the Gomez deal fell apart, and they apparently decided not to meet the Reds asking price for Jay Bruce, rentals were really the only options on the table, so at least they got the best rental position player left. Cespedes is currently in the midst of the best season of his career, already putting up +4.2 WAR in the first 100 games of the year, though he shouldn’t be expected to keep playing at that level; the Mets are probably buying about +1.5 WAR over the remainder of the season.

In fact, for all the long-running talk about the Mets as a landing spot for Troy Tulowitzki, Cespedes actually projects to be a better player over the rest of the 2015 season. His combination of power and quality defense make him a well above average player even in a normal year, and the Mets are acquiring him when he’s performing at the peak of his abilities. And they got to keep most of the best parts of their future in tact in order to do it.

So, realistically, the questions are more about how Cespedes fits in New York than whether about this is a fair price to pay for a good player; it pretty clearly is, given the other trades we’ve seen this week. But while the Mets have long been searching for offense, Cespedes is still a bit of an awkward fit for New York.

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