The Cardinals are reportedly kicking the tires on David Price and Jon Lester, and presumably, they’ve probably at least inquired about Cole Hamels. It’s no secret that they’re looking for pitching, and they both the means and the motive to make a big move. And not surprisingly, trade rumors with the Cardinals inevitably invoke Oscar Taveras‘ name.

According to all the prospect guys, Taveras is the Cardinals best prospect, and one of the best prospects in the game. But while I’m not a prospect expert by any means, I will say that I hold some reservations about Taveras’ long-term value, as I think he fits the mold of the hitter that prospect analysts miss on the most often.

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While this is definitely a gross simplification, there are essentially two competing schools of thought on how to construct a roster: emphasize talent at the top of the roster — the Stars and Scrubs approach, as it is often called — or spread the wealth around to limit glaring weaknesses. To be sure, either approach can work, as the reality is that the total production level is more important than the distribution of that production within the roster, but there are certainly differing camps who prefer one strategy or the other.

The argument in favor of the Stars and Scrubs approach has a lot of overlap with the argument for the non-linear valuation of WAR. As the argument goes, one +6 WAR player is worth more than two +3 WAR players, because it is easier to upgrade on a +0 WAR player than a +3 WAR player, so if you start out with +6 and +0, you can upgrade the +0 guy to a +1 or +2 WAR player and come out with a higher overall level of production.

I think the theory has a few problems, however.

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Here at FanGraphs, a normal post runs in the range of 1,000 words. We’re wordy folk, basically. But sometimes, we have things that might be interesting at 200 words and would be ridiculously boring at 1,000 words. Maybe it’s a link to something someone else wrote, or simply a fun little tidbit from the leaderboards. Or, hey, the Astros just offended someone else, but what else is new? These things are worth pointing out, but not worth writing eight paragraphs about, so they’ve generally ended up on the cutting room floor. Or Twitter.

Over the last few months, I did a few experiments with shorter posts on the site, and the reaction was mostly positive, so today, we’re launching a dedicated section for these kinds of posts, and we’re calling it InstaGraphs. Essentially, this will be the place for things that are interesting enough to note but aren’t full articles, though maybe eventually they’ll turn into one. Or maybe not. Maybe they’re just interesting standalone items that don’t need extrapolation.

InstaGraphs will be part of the main FanGraphs blog, but we wanted to make it a little more clear when you should expect 200 words and a GIF instead of 1,000 words and a formula, so you’ll note the new InstaGraphs box on the home page; the most recent articles will show up there, and you’ll be able to click through straight from that dedicated box.

Overall, we think InstaGraphs will be a fun place to note things that otherwise probably wouldn’t have turned into content, and hopefully you guys will enjoy the extra pieces each day. Just a heads up, though: it will probably mean more Cistulli GIFs of mediocre curveballs from the California League. You’ve been warned.

Over the last few weeks, the Dodgers have been one of the primary suitors linked to a potential David Price trade, along with the Mariners and Cardinals. However, the Rays hot streak has made Price’s availability an open question, and now, perhaps the more likely scenario is that the team could trade for Jon Lester instead. The Red Sox playoff odds are down to about 3%, and Lester has publicly said that he won’t hold it against the team if they trade when it comes to offseason negotiations for a new contract. Given those two variables, trading Lester makes a lot of sense, and the Dodgers are apparently quite interested in him as well.

I’d like to make a suggestion to Ned Coletti, however: you don’t need to do it. In fact, you probably shouldn’t.

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As Jeff noted the other day, there stands to be a very good chance that Jeff Samardzija is the only real impact pitcher traded this month. The Rays keep winning, which reduces their incentive to move David Price. The Red Sox still say they want to re-sign Jon Lester, so trading him mid-season would be counterproductive to that goal. The Royals still think they’re contenders, so they aren’t going to move James Shields. The Padres want to keep Ian Kennedy. Right now, the best pitcher who is actually available is probably Bartolo Colon, who remains an average pitcher by FIP and xFIP but has apparently lost his runner-stranding fairy dust, and so he’s running a 114 ERA- at age-41 and is under contract for another $11 million next year, when he’ll be 42.

If ever there was a time to sell high on a starting pitcher, this would be it. This is maybe the most obvious seller’s market for arms we’ve seen in some time. And yet, in the middle of a golden opportunity, the Phillies have apparently taken this stance:

To date, Phillies telling other teams Cole Hamels is not available.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) July 22, 2014

I get that the Phillies have their own way of doing things, and they see themselves as a franchise that should reload and not rebuild, but at some point, they have to accept reality.

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The Tigers, as they seemingly always do, have a bullpen problem. They rank 26th in the majors in bullpen ERA (4.37) and 25th in FIP (3.92), as Joe Nathan has been a disaster in the ninth inning, and Al Albuquerque, Phil Coke, and Ian Krol haven’t been very good at protecting leads before Nathan takes the hill either. When your most reliable reliever is Joba Chamberlain, you know there’s some issues.

So on Wednesday night, the Tigers did what contending teams with bullpen issues do; they paid through the nose — giving up Double-A starter Jake Thomspon and rookie reliever Corey Knebel — to get an experienced, high-quality closer, acquiring Joakim Soria from the Rangers. Soria has been fantastic this year, posting a ridiculous 1.07 FIP, thanks to the lowest walk and highest strikeout rate in his career. Oh, and the fact that he hasn’t allowed a home run yet. That helps too.

Of course, not allowing home runs in Texas is a neat trick that Joe Nathan pulled off last year, and that hasn’t really carried over to his pitching this year in Detroit, but even when the home runs return, Soria should still be pretty big upgrade for the Tigers relief corps. However, even very good relievers only pitch about 10 innings per month, and with just a little over two months left in the season, there just aren’t that many innings left for Soria to make a significant difference in the standings. Besides, the Tigers were extremely likely to win their division even without Soria, as they currently hold a 6 1/2 game lead over the Indians and a 7 game lead over the Royals.

In terms of moving the playoff odds needle, perhaps no significant trade made this month will have less of an effect that the Tigers acquiring Soria. But this trade isn’t about the regular season. This trade is about the postseason, and the potential impact Soria could have in October.

We’re all pretty familiar with the fact that relievers just don’t pitch enough innings to be highly valuable in the regular season, but the game is played differently in the postseason. The increased frequency of off days makes it easier to lean on your best relievers more often, and the importance of each game provides an incentive to make sure that the best pitchers are on the mound the most often. And this shows up in their usage patterns.

For illustration, the most frequently used relievers throw about 5% of a team’s total innings over the course of the regular season; that’s ~75 innings out of around 1,450. Most are a bit under that, but if you’re really aggressive with your closer usage or have a relief ace working in a setup role, you can give him 5% of the total innings pie from April through September.

Now, let’s take a look at the percentage of innings pitched by elite relievers in last year’s postseason. Eight of the top 20 relievers in 2013 WAR made it to at least the division series and pitched in multiple games. Here are their percentages of innings pitched for last postseason:

After throwing 5.1% of the Red Sox innings in the regular season, Uehara threw nearly double that amount in the playoffs. For reference, 9.6% of a team’s total regular season innings would equal out to about 140 innings per year. Based on the fact that the average leverage index when Uehara entered the game was 1.76, you could equate the impact of the innings he threw in the postseason to a starting pitcher that threw 246 innings in the regular season.

Yeah, elite relievers can matter an awful lot in October, which is why teams continually trade legitimate prospects to acquire them in July. Of course, Uehara carried the heaviest workload of the elite relievers, so this is basically the absolute best case usage scenario for a relief ace in October. The A’s managed to use Doolittle similarly, but only through one round, and every other team who advanced beyond the division series gave a lighter workload to their best bullpen arms. The average percentage of innings pitched for these eight relievers was 6.5%, which still translates a regular season workload of about 95 innings, but doesn’t match what Boston got out of their closer.

But, again, we have to factor in that while these pitchers are throwing fewer innings, they are pitching in innings that have a greater impact on wins and losses than a starting pitcher does, and we can’t simply equate one reliever inning with one starting pitcher inning. The way this is handled in reliever WAR is through chaining, which gives the reliever credit for pitching in higher leverage situations but doesn’t incorrectly assume that those innings would have gone to a replacement level reliever instead.

So, yes, Soria might only throw a handful of postseason innings, and reliever performance is volatile enough that perhaps he won’t end up making a significant difference for the Tigers. In that case, they’ll have just punted one of their best pitching prospects and a power arm who might have been a useful reliever himself. Certainly, this is the kind of deal that could easily backfire, and the Tigers may very well regret this deal in the long run.

But they made this because of the potential for an Uehara-style impact. Uehara’s dominance over a very large workload was one of the primary reasons the Red Sox won the World Series last year, and despite their diminished importance in the regular season, relievers can matter an awful lot in the postseason. We shouldn’t diminish Soria’s potential impact on the Tigers playoff run just because individual relievers don’t matter as much in the regular season.

If Brad Ausmus learns from the mistakes Jim Leyland made last postseason — note the very low percentage numbers for Benoit and Smyly on that list above — and aggressively uses Soria this October, this trade could end up being a significant difference maker for the Tigers. The idea that relievers don’t really matter that much holds up to scrutiny in the regular season, but the postseason is a different game, and it’s one where guys like Joakim Soria can matter a lot more.

As we head into play on Wednesday, 12 of the 15 teams in the American League are within six games of a playoff spot. This is great news if you were a member of Bud Selig’s Blue Ribbon Committee, tasked with bringing parity — competitive balance is the preferred MLB jargon, I believe — to a sport that has seen its fair share of dominant dynasties. The addition of a second wild card, along with rising television revenues that have shrunk the gap between the haves and the have-nots, means that more teams are fancying themselves as contenders now than ever before.

The Royals, a game below .500, are reportedly more interested in acquiring a hitter to bolster their offense than in selling off the final few months of James Shields‘ contract. The Rays are five games below .500, but have won six straight and might just be talking themselves out of trading David Price, given their recent surge. Even the Red Sox, who looked dead and buried a few weeks ago, have now won eight of their last 10, and can probably make a case for keeping their team together to make a last ditch run at defending their championship.

However, I’d like to make a suggestion to American League teams chasing the second Wild Card spot: proceed with caution.

The reward for even winning the Wild Card used to be a best-of-five series that would likely result in at least two home playoff games, a nifty little reward for a team’s fan base. Under the new system, however, the carrot at the end of the Wild Card stick is just a single game winner-take-all affair, with the loser only extending their season by one additional day, and maybe not even playing that game in front of their home crowd.

And the news gets worse for the second Wild Card entry in the American League this year; not only are you going on the road for an elimination game, but you’re almost guaranteed to be going up against one of the very best teams in baseball.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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