Last week, Ken Rosenthal reported that the Padres could be getting ready to clean house. On Sunday, the Padres fired General Manager Josh Byrnes.

Ron Fowler, executive chairman of the Padres, bristled a bit Sunday when he was asked if the dismissal of Josh Byrnes as general manager was a step back for the organization.

“This is a reset,” Fowler said. “This is not a step back. We’re doing this so that we could move forward. We expect continuous improvement from the organization. We’re getting it in other areas. We are not getting it on the baseball field.”

There’s nothing controversial about this statement. At 32-44, the Padres have the third-worst record in baseball, and they’ll have to play better than .500 baseball the rest of the way just to finish with the same 76-86 record that they’ve recorded the last two years. While there are some individual success stories, this team is not any better than the mediocrity that they’ve been for several years now. But this isn’t necessarily just about not seeing improvement.

There had been rumblings and rumors locally that the team was considering changes, either up top with Byrnes or possibly manager Bud Black. Mike Dee, team president and CEO of the Padres, said the Padres will keep Black at least through the end of the season.

“This was a decision that was not made in a day or two or a week or two. The last couple months, we’ve seen a team we had high expectations for. Those expectations have not been reached,” said Dee.

It’s understandable to say that the Padres have not been good this year, and even that they’ve played worse than expected. But I guess my question would be this: if the management team had “high expectations” for this roster, isn’t that their fault? Because I can’t find anyone else who thought this team was any good.

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This afternoon, Jay Jaffe sent a tweet to DarenW, host of the always useful site Baseball Savant.

@darenw is there a quick way on your site to show an individual hiter's O-Swing% by month?

— Jay Jaffe (@jay_jaffe) June 20, 2014

The answer was no, because while Daren has coded up some really neat stuff over there, he doesn’t have that specifically. But it occurred to me that Jay probably asked Daren because he looked for it on FanGraphs and couldn’t find it here, and he’s probably not the only person who has wanted to see monthly plate discipline splits and couldn’t find them here. But we actually do have them.

Here’s how you get them, as well as other splits not listed on a player’s individual splits page.

Go to our leaderboards. Scroll down to the bottom, where you see the custom player box. It looks like this.

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Yesterday, the Cubs reportedly offered Jeff Samardzija a five year, $85 million extension, a deal that would allow him to remain in Chicago rather than get traded at some point in the next five weeks. Samardzija turned it down without even countering, and it’s now basically guaranteed that he’ll end the season in another uniform. Samardzija’s rejection of the Cubs offer does raise an interesting question for interested buyers, though; just how much is he going to cost in order to sign with a team that trades for him?

The Homer Bailey contract is reportedly the benchmark deal that Samardzija’s agents are working off of, which covered $105 million over six seasons. Because Bailey was already in line for a $10 million arbitration payday regardless, the extension was for five free agent years at a total cost of $95 million, but any new deal for Samardzija would buy out his final year of arbitration as well, making the total contract the more relevant figure for comparison. And it would make sense that his agents would use that deal, as it is a very recent deal for a pitcher with a very similar career. Behold.

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Because Hanley Ramirez sucks at playing defense, baseball will not officially recognize Clayton Kershaw’s effort tonight as a “perfect game”. But I would like to submit that if this doesn’t qualify as a perfect game, nothing should.

28 batters came to the plate; 15 of them struck out. Of the 13 who managed to put the ball in play, nine of them hit the ball on the ground. One of the four balls hit in the air didn’t leave the infield. His FIP for the game was -0.24, because the model isn’t designed to handle dominance at this level. His xFIP was 0.19.

Here is the full list of nine inning outings with a Game Score of 102 or better, since 1914.

Kerry Wood: 105 (9 IP, 1 H, 0 BB, 20 K)
Clayton Kershaw: 102 (9 IP, 0 H, 0 BB, 15 K)

That’s it. That’s the entire list.

Clayton Kershaw did not retire every single batter he faced tonight, so technically, he wasn’t perfect. Screw technicalities, though; what Clayton Kershaw just did was far more impressive than going 27-up, 27-down and relying on your defense in order to do it. Clayton Kershaw just threw one of the most dominant performances in the history of baseball.

It might not have been perfect. It was better.

While the trade deadline in recent years has proven anticlimactic and at times outright boring, this year is going to be different. This year, the best pitcher moved at the deadline won’t be Jake Peavy or Matt Garza. With no offense intended to either, neither one is a real frontline arm like the crown jewel of this summer’s trade season: Tampa Bay Rays ace David Price.

With the Rays all but officially out of playoff contention — they currently hold just a 1.7% chance of reaching the postseason — it’s essentially a guarantee that Price will be moved before the trade deadline. And Price is going to be the best pitcher traded mid-season in years.

Sure, Zack Greinke was dealt from Milwaukee to Anaheim in 2012, but Greinke wasn’t quite at the level that Price has established over the last few years. Not only has he been one of the game’s best pitchers, but Price has done it in the AL East, and while the division might not be what it once was, teams won’t have to worry about whether Price can handle pitching against the best hitters in the American League. Left-handed #1 starters don’t hit the market very often, and Price even comes with an extra bonus; he’s not an impending free agent.

Often, players of this caliber are only traded with a few months to go before they reach free agency. Greinke was shipped from Milwaueke to Anaheim with just a few months left on his contract, for instance, and the mid-summer market is often flooded with rentals who will only be around for half a season. Price, however, won’t be a free agent until after the 2015 season, and so any team acquiring his rights won’t just get him for this playoff race, but for next year as well. And that extra year of team control is going to allow the Rays to ask for the moon.

If your favorite team wants to acquire David Price this summer, I hope you’re not too attached to any or all of their best young players, because the Rays are going to demand a king’s ransom in exchange for a year-and-a-half of Price’s services. But there’s a catch, and it’s one of the reasons why the Rays didn’t accept of the offers they received for Price over the off-season. While any team that acquires him will own his rights for 2015, the arbitration process has ensured that a large percentage of teams wouldn’t be able to afford him next year anyway.

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Occasionally, writers or commentators who are not fans of WAR will talk about how the concept of a replacement level player is a fabrication, a subjective threshold determined in some arbitrary reality. It’s not a real baseline, they argue, and thus corrupts the entire model.

Well, helpfully, the A’s and Brewers have just completed a transaction that defines replacement level spectacularly well.

#Athletics acquired Mills from #Brewers for $1. Expected to move into rotation shortly.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) June 17, 2014

A dollar. The A’s cost to acquire Mills from the Brewers was the same as a gas station cup of coffee. While Mills wasn’t in their organization, he still served as a source of organizational depth because there was basically no frictional costs in obtaining his rights. This is the thing about replacement level players; they are so plentiful that you don’t even have to have one in order to have access to its utility. When you need one, you can go get them, and for little or no cost.

By the way, in his Major League career, Brad Mills has thrown 53 innings. His career WAR? 0.0. I guess the definition of replacement level isn’t so theoretical after all.

The All-Star Game isn’t for another 28 days, but with the voting in full swing and enough of the season under our belts, I figure it’s time to weigh in on how I’d fill out the roster if I were Grand Poobah and had the final say on all 34 players. I will note up front that I believe the All-Star Game is an annual affair, and we shouldn’t simply have the same collection of players every year just because those are the “true stars”.

The All-Star Game is best when it serves as both a platform for the game’s greatest players and recognition for those who have earned their way in. I will not be putting players on the roster who have not performed well in 2014, even if they are bonafide stars, with just one exception: people want the chance to honor Derek Jeter on a national stage, and an exhibition game is as good a place to do that as any.

We’ll start with the American League, with the NL to follow tomorrow. As a reminder, the rosters now comprise 34 players, which I’ll be splitting as 21 position players and 13 pitchers, as that has been the final tally for the game most of the last few years. And, yes, we’re honoring the rule requiring every team to be represented. I’ll list each player by the tier of how they got selected, then put the final roster down below. On to the picks.

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Last night, Mike Minor made a mistake that Mike Trout crushed. It looked like this.

That was an 84 mile-per-hour slider that broke down and in and ended up on the inner half of the plate, towards the bottom of the strike zone. Here’s where the PITCHF/x cameras said that pitch was located.

Inner half of the plate, but elevated enough to be right in the middle of Trout’s wheelhouse. He didn’t miss it, and it ended up in the seats. On the one hand, Trout’s really good, and he’s going to hit home runs. On the other hand, maybe it’s time for pitchers to stop throwing Mike Trout so many down-and-in breaking balls?

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