Heading into last week’s July 31st trade deadline — not to be confused with an actual deadline after which you can no longer make trades, because MLB doesn’t really have one of those — the Phillies were expected to be one of the primary sellers. They had expensive veterans who had openly talked about playing elsewhere in Jonathan Papelbon and A.J. Burnett. They had a right-handed hitter with some power in Marlon Byrd, and there were a bunch of teams looking for right-handed power. They had Jimmy Rollins, an above average big league shortstop, who turns 36 in a few months and could have helped a number of contenders.

And they had Cole Hamels, one of the game’s best left-handed starting pitchers, signed through the 2018 season at salaries that look downright reasonable in baseball’s current economy. Well, it’s now August, and not only do they still have Papelbon, Burnett, Byrd, and Rollins, but they still have Hamels too. The team with the seventh-worst record in baseball did not make a single trade in the month of July, and soldiers on with Hamels surrounded by a group of mostly over-paid under-performers.

Because of their contracts, it remains quite likely that the Phillies can still trade Papelbon, Burnett, Byrd, or Rollins over the next few weeks — or, if someone puts in a waiver claim on any of them, just let them go and be free of the remaining contractual commitment — but Hamels is unlikely to pass through waivers, and the team’s decision to not trade him last week is tantamount to a decision to not trade him during the season.

As Rob Neyer argued last week, there’s merit in keeping Hamels.

If you’re the Phillies, you trade high-priced (or for that matter, low-priced) players who won’€™t be around when you’€™re ready to win again. That’s why you trade Cliff Lee and, of course, you trade Ryan Howard just because. You trade Cliff Lee because he’s locked up through just 2015 (with a team option for 2016), and you trade Ryan Howard because he’s probably never going to do much in terms of actually winning baseball games.

Cole Hamels, though? Cole Hamels is locked up through 2019. That’s one-two-three-four-five seasons after this one. And considering the Phillies current financial edge over much of their competition — thank you massive television moneys! — if they’re not competitive again at some point in the next two or three years, then someone in the front office is probably doing a lousy job…

… Could a trade make sense? Sure. If you’re the Phillies, you ask for the earth and the moon and the sun and the stars. And maybe you can do without the moon.

Otherwise, though, Cole Hamels is the one guy you keep if you’re serious about winning again in this decade.

Now, I like Rob, and we agree on a lot of things — which is probably why I like him so much — but I don’t really agree with the words above, or the Phillies decision to keep Hamels in general. So let me try and lay out the opposing case.

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If you’re a regular FanGraphs reader, you probably know that I’m somewhat fascinated by market valuations, and have spent a decent amount of time talking about the price of a win in the baseball economy. Most of that effort is concentrated around the off-season, when teams are signing free agent contracts, since that is the most obvious place where a team is buying expected future wins with cash. However, free agency isn’t the only market, and the prices paid in free agency don’t necessarily apply to the other markets where teams can acquire talent.

We can say with some confidence that the average price per win in free agency last winter was around $6 to $7 million. What do they pay to add wins mid-season, though? We’re pretty sure the price is higher based on observation, and realistically, it should be higher; buyers have more information and more certainty about their playoff chances, and can assume that they are at a different point of return on investment than they can over the winter, when their playoff odds are lower. The value of a win doesn’t inherently change, but contenders now know which wins they’re likely to be buying, and the premium value of the marginal wins that get you into the playoffs push prices up.

But how much higher is the cost of a win in July versus in the off-season? This isn’t an an easy question to answer, because teams are generally not just exchanging expected future wins for cash, but are exchanging one player for several other players. Instead of having the known cost in dollars, we’re now mostly dealing with unknown values on both sides of the ledger, so this exercise will necessarily be less precise. But it still might be worth doing, even if we have to put a lot of caveats on the data in the process.

So, while admitting that this is about as inexact as science can get, let’s try and figure out what the market price of a win was in July.

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Note: This morning, I noticed that Baseball Prospectus did a piece with the same basic premise. We aren’t trying to copy their content; both of us just had the same idea. Go read their piece too.

Yesterday, a bunch of teams made trades, and a bunch of conclusions were drawn about what these trades mean. The Angels did nothing and are now screwed! The Cardinals will now run away with the NL Central! Good luck competing with the Orioles now, Blue Jays!

As we’ve written countless times over the years, though, one individual baseball player doesn’t matter very much in the grand scheme of things, and two months of one individual baseball player really doesn’t matter all that much. As you might expect, the postseason odds from today look an awful lot like the postseason odds from yesterday, even after all the trades were processed and the depth charts updated. Good teams got a little more good and bad teams occasionally got a little worse, but there were no seismic shifts in our future expectations.

However, there were some changes, and it’s worth looking at what changed the most. To note; we ware not isolating the effects of solely the trade a team made, but the entire effects of all of the moves on the league yesterday, as well as the games played last night. So, it’s not quite correct to say that the complete difference in odds from yesterday to today was due to Player X’s acquisition, since we’re also incorporating some changes in the standings from yesterday morning as well.

Caveats aside, let’s get to some data.

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Well, that’s about the most active trade deadline I can remember, though it might not feel that way if you live in Philadelphia, Colorado, or Toronto. Still, some big deals happened, some small deals happened, and a bunch of players are changing uniforms. We’ve written about most of the deals, with multiple angles on all the big ones. To make them easy to find, here’s one big post to find all our reactions in one spot. As we add more write-ups, we’ll add them here as well.

Thanks for hanging out and breaking all kinds of FanGraphs traffic records, everyone.

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The last two years, the Tigers have beaten the A’s in the American League Division Series. In both years, it went the full five games, with the A’s falling just short. The A’s have spent the last month trying to make sure that doesn’t happen again, loading up their rotation with Jeff Samardzija, Jason Hammel, and now Jon Lester.

Maybe the Tigers would have done this anyway. We’ll never know, of course, but what we do know is that the Tigers acquired David Price this afternoon, bolstering their own rotation to make a pitching staff that is unlike anything we’ve seen in a while.

This is what their current starting five has done over the last calendar year.

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An hour ago, we posted Paul Swydan’s review of the Jon Lester/Yoenis Cespedes swap from the Red Sox perspective, noting that Boston chose a shorter term big leaguer over a deal for prospects who were likely going to be several years off. And now, they’ve made a second deal — shipping John Lackey to the Cardinals for Allen Craig and Joe Kelly — that reaffirms that this is not a team looking to do any kind of rebuild.

This one isn’t quite as straight forward as the Lester-for-Cespedes deal, since that was a rental for not-a-rental, while the Red Sox could have held onto Lackey for 2015 due to the clause in his contract that gave the Red Sox a league minimum option on his deal due to his 2011 Tommy John surgery. However, there was legitimate concern that Lackey wouldn’t actually pitch for the league minimum next year, and given that he’ll be 36 in a few months, he had some leverage in the form of retirement. If Lackey really didn’t want to take the mound for the same salary as some guy from Triple-A, he could have walked away, leaving the Red Sox to either give him a raise/extension or to get nothing for the option.

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Well, this was probably not what we thought a Jon Lester trade was going to look like. After speculating about which team would unload their farm system for a rental, the answer is none of them; instead, the A’s used Yoenis Cespedes to land the Red Sox ace, and picked up Jonny Gomes as a replacement for the right-handed slugger they just traded away. This is a fascinating deal from a lot of angles, but let’s focus on the A’s side of things for a second.

Very clearly, the A’s believe that they can win the World Series this year, and are aligning their roster to give themselves the best chance to do that. And this is probably the perfect storm for the a team in the A’s position to go for it; the Red Sox are bad, the Yankees are mediocre, the Phillies are awful, and the Cubs and Mets are still rebuilding. There is no $200 million behemoth standing in the A’s way this year, at least not unless the Dodgers get to the World Series, and it isn’t clear that the Dodgers are better than the A’s anyway. The Angels and Tigers are still around, but the Angels might have to play their way in through the Wild Card game, and the Tigers pitching staff looks a little less fearsome than it has in past years.

The A’s are in go-for-it mode not just because of their own roster this year, but because this is the kind of year in which it makes sense for a small-market team to push their chips and try to take advantage of the league’s parity. It’s why Jeff wrote that Lester to Pittsburgh would make sense. The door is open for a low-revenue team to have a parade this winter, and the A’s are responding to that opportunity by trying to kick the door in.

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This is an exciting week in baseball, especially for those who are into speculation and rumor, as the July 31 trade deadline is coming up Thursday. Over the next 24 hours, we should see some pretty significant moves, with Jon Lester looking like the biggest name to join a contender, but potentially being joined by the likes of David Price and Cole Hamels. Where these players end up may very well decide which teams make the playoffs, or in some cases, which teams get to bypass the wild card game and advance right on to the real postseason.

Of course, Thursday’s deadline isn’t an actual trade deadline in the literal sense of the word. Trades can still be made next month, and they can even be made in September, right up until the end of the year. Thursday is just the end of the rules that make it easy to make a deal, because once the calendar flips over to August, waivers become involved and things get a bit more complicated. The guys who get moved in August are usually those who have big, expensive contracts, so Thursday’s deadline doesn’t really apply to guys like Cliff Lee, Matt Kemp, or Jonathan Papelbon.

This brings up a question, though: Why do we have a trade deadline that is only a deadline to trade some players and not others? And, while we’re at it, why is the deadline July 31 anyway?

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