For the last few years, Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams have been steadily rebuilding the White Sox base of talent, and along the way, they’ve acquired a few cornerstone players that are the envy of every other franchise in baseball. Chris Sale continues to get better by the year, and is probably the best pitcher in the American League at this point. Jose Abreu was a monster from the minute he arrived in the big leagues. Jose Quintana went from minor league free agent to rotation stalwart. The team’s struggles allowed them to be in a position to draft Carlos Rodon, who got to the big leagues less than a year after being drafted, and they just selected Carson Fulmer, another polished college pitcher who Kiley McDaniel believes could get to the big leagues very quickly as well. There are the makings of a very good team here.

Unfortunately for the White Sox, having a few star players just isn’t enough, and even with Sale dominating every fifth day, the 2015 season has been a disaster on the south side of Chicago. After pulling within two games of .500 after an early-June sweep of the Astros, the team has now lost nine of their last 11 games, including a 13-2 drubbing at the hand of the Twins yesterday. As they enter play today, they stand at 30-39, the second worst record in the American League, and even that overstates their performance to date; by BaseRuns, their expected record is 24-45.

Six weeks ago, I noted that the White Sox faced a “looming decision”, as the team’s poor start would test their conviction that this really was a roster built to contend in the short-term; since then, the White Sox have played roughly .500 ball by getting some clutch hits and stranding runners, but they haven’t really done anything to show that this is a team capable of running down the legitimate contenders in the American League this year. At this point, it’s pretty clear that the White Sox should probably be sellers in July.

But the more I look at the White Sox roster, the more I think that they probably shouldn’t just stop at moving Jeff Samardzija before he hits free agency. It might really be time for the White Sox to blow up their roster.

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On late Saturday night, the Diamondbacks and Braves made a trade, but while players were sent in both directions, this was really more of just a sale. Sure, the Braves did give up a player — replacement-level utility guy Phil Gosselin, currently on the DL — in the swap, but they traded Gosselin for a legitimate prospect and a Major League pitcher, which only makes sense when you add in the financial aspects of the deal. In taking on the remainder of Bronson Arroyo’s salary — roughly $10 million, including the buy-out of his 2016 option — the Braves essentially bought pitching prospect Touki Toussaint from the Diamondbacks for that $10 million figure.

While this isn’t an entirely new type of trade — the Dodgers essentially did this same thing a few months ago when they bought a draft pick from the Orioles by taking Ryan Webb off their hands — it’s still a little unusual to see a team make a trade that can so clearly be broken down as a legitimate asset for just straight cash. And in this case, it’s made even more unusual because the team selling the prospect is in rebuilding mode, so we have an organization focused on the future selling an asset with future value in exchange for short-term financial relief.

But it shouldn’t be a big surprise that the team doing the unexpected is the Diamondbacks, who have been marching to the beat of their own drum ever since Tony La Russa and Dave Stewart took over. The D’Backs don’t operate like the other 29 franchises do, and they don’t see things like everyone else, so they make moves that cause a lot of heads to be scratched. This move is no different, with the trade drawing near total criticism from Arizona’s perspective. At its heart, though, this is simply a question of how to value an A-ball pitching prospect, so let’s break this down and see if the D’Backs really did get fleeced on this deal.

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If there was a seminal moment in the movement towards statistical analysis in Major League Baseball, it may very well have been the 2001 publication of Voros McCracken’s research on Defense Independent Pitching Stats, which he shortened to DIPS. In a series of articles over the course of a few years, McCracken demonstrated that Major League pitchers were more or less equal when it came to preventing hits on balls in play. While there were huge and sustained differences in walks, strikeouts, and home runs allowed, the same did not hold true for the rate at which balls were converted in outs when a pitcher gave his defense a chance to get involved. Whether it was Pedro Martinez or Aaron Sele, roughly 30% of all balls in play went for hits, with minimal variation between pitchers.

McCracken’s idea was so antithetical to general wisdom about evaluating pitching that the subject became a primary source of research in the analytical community, but guys like Tom Tippett (now working for the Red Sox) and Keith Woolner (employed by the Indians) mostly ended up confirming McCracken’s original thesis. Despite a conclusion that seemed absurd, for the most part, pitchers really didn’t appear to have much control over whether balls in play went for hits or outs.

Tippett did manage to find a few types of pitchers who could somewhat break the mold, most notably knuckleballers, and further research showed that the data suggests more that pitchers have “little control” rather than “no control” over their hit rates on balls in play, but even with a more muted conclusion, the reality is that most big league pitchers end up in the range of a .280 to .320 Batting Average on Balls in Play, or BABIP as it is usually called these days. There are differences in pitchers in that range, but by and large, that’s mostly where everyone fits.

Everyone, that is, except Chris Young.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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The Boston Red Sox 2015 season is starting to look like an abject failure. A week ago, they were not too far from pulling back up to .500 and were only five and a half games back of first place in a weak division, and they had an upcoming six game stretch against the Orioles and Blue Jays that presented a real opportunity to gain some ground on two of their competitors. Instead, the Red Sox lost all six games, are now 10 games under .500, and are eight games behind both the Yankees and Rays, and seven games behind the Blue Jays. In one week’s time, they’ve moved from being within spitting distance of first place to being equally far back of fourth place.

Nearly every move the organization made last winter is currently looking like a disaster. The big acquisitions of Hanley Ramirez (-0.4 WAR), Pablo Sandoval (+0.1 WAR), and Rick Porcello (+0.5 WAR) have resulted in a trio of highly paid replacement level performers, and the more minor acquisitions like Wade Miley (+0.5 WAR) and Justin Masterson (-0.2 WAR) have been just as ineffective. While the history of these deals won’t be written based on their first few months in Boston, it’s fair to say that things aren’t exactly working out according to the team’s plans.

And now the Red Sox are heading towards a crossroads. This experiment hasn’t worked, and with just six weeks to go before the trade deadline, the Red Sox have to start considering the fact that they may be sellers at the deadline. The upside of being terrible is that it’s a good year to be selling talent, but the Red Sox are struggling in large part because their big expensive acquisitions have been lousy, and it’s not so easy to dump $100 million contracts a few months after they were signed. The path forward for the Red Sox isn’t so obvious, but let’s try to figure out some priorities for this team’s short-term and longer-term future.

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MLB’s 86th All-Star Game is just over a month away, and if you’ve been paying attention to the early voting, you know you can actually skip the event and just watch any random Kansas City Royals game instead; it will basically be the same thing. The Royals have turned out their voting bloc in droves, and unless the other franchises make a late move, the American League is going to try and bunt, steal, and defend their way to a 1-0 win in Cincinnati next month.

Just as the game itself is an annual tradition, so too are summer columns suggesting ways to “fix” or “improve” the Midsummer Classic. Even Jonah Keri, an absurd optimist who probably has Everything Is Awesome as the only song in his Spotify playlist, hates the current All-Star format:

Jonah Keri: I’m the most positive guy you’ll ever meet. Also, I love baseball. Adore it. Bathe myself in it.

But All-Star week — the Home Run Derby, the actual All-Star Game, and especially the four days with no real baseball — are freaking terrible. Uh-oh. Here comes Angry Jonah.

Why the hell does this game “count”? It’s a total farce. AL All-Star manager John Farrell has already said he won’t use any pitcher for more than one inning under any circumstances. How is that managing to win? Why should that count?

I’m with Jonah. All-Star Week sucks. The Futures Game is fun and worth doing, but the rest of it doesn’t interest me at all. And MLB’s attempt to make the game “count” is silly, and has done nothing to change the fact that this is still an exhibition game designed solely to make a lot of money for the league. But I also recognize that it’s good for MLB to market itself on a large stage, giving people a mid-season event to turn into, especially where the game’s best players are all assembled together. But the All-Star Game isn’t really a baseball game, and it doesn’t show off what is good about the sport.

So I’d like to make a proposal to overhaul the All-Star Week. This idea still allows MLB to gather its best players in one location — in fact, even expands the number of players who get to participate — while also giving us three actual baseball games, with actual baseball rosters, played under normal baseball conditions. The concept? Battle of the Ages.

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With the draft officially in the books, we are now officially entering MLB’s trade season. Most teams prefer to take the first couple of months to evaluate what they have at the big league level, allocating their time and scouting resources to lining up their draft boards rather than considering significant trades in April and May. Once the draft ends, though, focus shifts to the 2015 roster, and teams begin to make decisions about their direction for the rest of the season.

In this age of parity, driven in part by the existence of the Wild Card play-in game, most teams now try to make a run at the postseason, or at the least, don’t surrender their chances unless they are left with no choice. And this year, the stars are aligning to create perhaps the most extreme seller’s market we’ve seen in a very long time.

In the American League, every single team still has a puncher’s chance at the postseason. The spread in the standings from the top spot (KC, .596 Win%) to the 14th spot (BOS, .450 Win%) is only 8.5 games, and while the A’s would normally be assumed to be dead in the water with a .393 winning percentage, their BaseRuns Win% is .556, 8th best in baseball; this is not a team that is going to continue losing six out of ten games going forward. They’ve probably dug themselves too large of a hole to climb out of, but it wouldn’t be that surprising to see them win 15 of 20 and climb right back into the AL West race.

The AL is the land of mediocrity, with no really great or terrible teams, and expected regression pushing things even more into the middle over the last few months. At least one or two teams will break out of this pack and win 90 games, but it’s pretty reasonable to think that any of these divisions could be won by a team that ends up with fewer than 90 wins. And along with two Wild Card berths serving as a fall-back plan, that possibility makes it unlikely that any non-Oakland AL teams decide to fold up their tents and move talent for prospects this summer.

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On Tuesday night, in just his second game since being promoted to the big leagues, Astros shortstop Carlos Correa launched the first home run of his Major League career. Houston fans certainly hope that it won’t be the last, as the first overall pick from the 2012 draft is now being looked at as a potential franchise cornerstone; an offensive middle infielder who impacts the ball on both sides of the game.

It is not too difficult to look at the 6-foot-4 Correa and envision the heir to Troy Tulowitzki’s throne. At the time of his call-up, Correa was the consensus best prospect in baseball, thanks mostly to his destruction of Double-A and a solid performance in Triple-A despite the fact that he won’t turn 21 until September. While Correa had certainly performed well climbing the minor league ladder the last few years, he really broke out at the beginning of this season by developing additional power.

In Double-A, 24 of his 45 hits went for extra bases, which is the kind of mark you expect from aging players who can’t hit singles because they pull all their ground balls right into the shift. When you see that kind of power from a middle infielder, especially one who isn’t yet of drinking age, the sky really seems to be the limit.

But as we discussed in this space a week ago, projecting future power output is a tricky business. While a player’s power production is perhaps the most important variable in determining offensive production, it’s also the most difficult to forecast. Especially for taller, skinny athletes, power can develop later on into a player’s career, well after his other tools have gotten him to the big leagues.

But it doesn’t always develop quickly, and sometimes it doesn’t develop at all. In talking with some people in the game about Correa, I was struck by how similar the descriptions sounded to conversations we had a few years back about another can’t-miss slugging shortstop: Xander Bogaerts. Like Correa, Bogaerts rocketed through the minors, getting to the big leagues as a 20 year old, and was considered the cream of the prospect crop at the time. And while he’s showing real improvement this year on both sides of the ball, we’re coming up on 1,000 at-bats in the big league career of Xander Bogaerts and he still has a grand total of just 15 home runs.

To this point, just 29% of his career hits have gone for extra bases. While he’s raised his average this season to .297, he’s slugging just .401, and his improvements have come entirely from reducing his strikeout totals. Rather than morphing into more of the slugging shortstop he was projected as, Bogaerts’ offensive profile now looks more like that of a traditional middle infielder. At just 22, it’s still far too early to declare that he’s a finished product, and Bogearts still has plenty of career left ahead of him, but he is a reminder that we can’t just assume every player is going to add power in a nice linear fashion as they get older.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

The Mets have, theoretically, too many starting pitchers. With top prospect Noah Syndergaard forcing his way into the rotation, the team experimented with a six-man rotation for a week, but has now reverted back to the standard five-man grouping, with Dillon Gee heading to the bullpen as a result. Gee is not particularly happy with this arrangement, and voiced his displeasure with the situation over the weekend.

“I’m almost at the point now where I just don’t even care anymore,” Gee said. “I mean, I’m kind of just over it all. I’ll do the best I can out of the pen now.”

…

Later, Gee was asked if he would have preferred being traded. “I mean, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a G.M., so I don’t know. I mean — I don’t know. I’m done trying to figure out this whole situation.”

But even with Gee demoted to the bullpen, the Mets still have too many pitchers. Beyond their three young studs in Matt Harvey, Jacob DeGrom, and the aforementioned Syndergaard, they also have Bartolo Colon and Jon Niese, both of whom are inoffensive back-end innings-eaters. With the first three guys locked in on talent and the latter two unlikely to get dumped for payroll reasons — Colon makes $11 million this year, while Niese is making $7 million and is due another $9 million next year — the Mets rotation remains full, even without considering pitching prospect Steven Matz, who is excelling down in Triple-A. Matz’s performances are forcing the team to consider promoting him sooner than later, even if they don’t have an obvious opening for him at the moment.

But despite the fact that there isn’t really a job opening for a starting pitcher in Queens, it’s become increasingly popular to suggest that the Mets are playing the Super Two game, holding Matz down to prevent him from reaching arbitration a year earlier, and keeping his future earnings down in the process. Joel Sherman, in this morning’s New York Post:

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