One need only glance at the Marlins’ projected starters over the next few days to determine where the team could use an upgrade. Jose Urena, a hard-throwing right-hander whose stuff hasn’t translated to strikeouts out of the bullpen or in the rotation, will pitch tonight’s game. Tomorrow, Jarred Cosart is scheduled to pitch — and he has a 15% strikeout rate and 11% walk rate over his career. The Marlins apparently didn’t like the look of that situation going forward, especially if Jose Fernandez’s innings need to be managed and/or if Wei-Yin Chen is unable to return from the disabled list soon.

So, they’ve conducted a trade, which reportedly includes the following pieces (arranged in approximate order of name-recognition):

The Marlins get:

• Andrew Cashner
• Colin Rea
• Tayron Guerrero

The Padres get:

• Jarred Cosart
• Carter Capps
• Josh Naylor
• Luis Castillo

As for the Marlins, they receive an immediate boost from adding Cashner to the rotation. While his season numbers (which include a 4.76 ERA and 4.94 FIP) look pretty ugly, Cashner seemed to have boosted his trade value over the last few weeks. As August Fagerstrom noted recently, he’s been much better since coming off the disabled list:

Cashner’s picked up a half-tick on his average fastball. Pre-disabled list, 15% of his fastballs went 96 or harder. These last four starts, he’s reached that upper-tier of velocity on 21% of fastballs. The walks are down from a bit over 9% to a bit under 6%. The strikeouts are way up, from 15% to 28%, because Cashner is missing plenty more bats. He’s missing more bats inside the zone, perhaps due in part to the added life on the heater, and he’s missing more bats outside the zone, and that’s because of the slider. The slider is really what this is all about.

Cashner’s slider has been more effective of late, and if he can maintain his current run, he should be able to hit his roughly league-average projections and represent an improvement over where the team stands right now. If the playoffs started today, the Marlins would be in, playing in a one-game playoff with the Cardinals for the right to play the Dodgers in another one-game playoff to qualify for the divisional series.

However, the projections see the Cardinals as the better team going forward. They actually see the same for the Mets, who are a game and a half behind the Marlins and Cardinals. The chart below shows the playoff odds before the trade for the teams that look to be in the hunt for the second wild card. The Marlins are in orange, essentially in a dead heat with the Mets and behind the Cardinals.

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Twenty-eight year old rookies on non-contending teams tend not to generate a great deal of attention. Maybe free agents from Japan who are technically rookies might get some publicity, but guys like Ryan Schimpf? Not so much.

Nevertheless, the San Diego Padres second baseman has had a debut worth noticing. Schimpf has recorded just 115 plate appearances as a major leaguer, but has already produced nine homers and .371 isolated-slugging mark — or, about 40 points higher than David Ortiz’s league-leading number right now. Will it continue? Of course not. But it could be an interesting exercise to figure out exactly how Schimpf got here.

In 2009, Schimpf was on a Louisiana State University team that won the College World Series. That team included future major leaguers Louis Coleman and DJ LeMahieu — as well as first-round picks Mikie Mahtook, Jared Mitchell, and Anthony Ranaudo. Schimpf was taken in the fifth round by the Blue Jays in 2009 and given a low-six-figure bonus. He hit pretty well in the New York-Penn league.

At the conclusion of the 2009 season, Schimpf, a 5-foot-9 second baseman with some power, drew a Dustin Pedroia comp from Baseball America, who ranked him as the Blue Jays’ 16th-best prospect in the organization:

He has a short stroke and surprising power for a guy his size. He projects to hit lots of doubles, and the Jays think he could produce 15 or more homers per season. He should also steal 15 or more bases annually with his tick above-average speed. Schimpf is reliable if not spectacular at second base. He has a fringy arm and needs to get a better feel for the position, starting with turning double plays. He could open his first full pro season in high Class A.

That was the last time Schimpf ever appeared in Baseball America’s organizational rankings. He started the next season in Low-A and didn’t really distinguish himself, recording a .240/.332/.418 line over 395 plate appearances. He walked a lot (10% BB rate), but also struck out a lot (24% K rate), and when he did receive a promotion to High-A that August, he struck out in 27 of 74 plate appearances. This left him off the radar as a 23-year-old in High-A and, radar-wise, that’s basically where he has been the last half-decade.

To recap his seasons briefly:

2011
Started the season on the disabled list and, in 228 plate appearances at High-A, hit a lot of homers (10), walked a lot (10%), and struck out a lot (23%).

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It could be argued that, when Atlanta sent Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton Jr. to San Diego last April, it was neither Matt Wisler nor Jordan Paroubeck nor the draft choice they received from the Padres which represented the greatest benefit of the deal for the Braves, but rather the relief from Upton Jr.’s salary. At the time, Atlanta owed more than $45 million to Upton Jr. through the 2017 season. Getting out from under the contract made sense for a club that appeared unlikely to contend anytime soon. Upton Jr., who possessed negative trade value, was nevertheless traded.

Quite a bit has changed in the meantime, it seems. Since arriving in San Diego, Upton Jr.’s on-field performance has improved as the total remaining cost of his contract has decreased. Once a liability, Upton Jr. became a hypothetically tradeable asset — one who was actually traded today, to the Blue Jays, for right-handed prospect Hansel Rodriguez.

There is, of course, some cost to the Padres, who will pay $17 million of the $22 million still owed to Upton Jr. through next season, per Jon Heyman. But that’s not entirely surprising: the trade market currently features a great number of outfielders, something that was true last summer and carried over into the free-agent market last winter. The cost to acquire outfielders simply isn’t very high, and Toronto is benefiting from that glut.

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The Seattle Mariners are in a tough spot. They’re not a bad team, sitting a game over .500. By both Pythagorean wins and BaseRuns, they profile a few games better than that. Over the course of the rest of the season, they’re expected to continue to be a bit above average and our projections have them finishing at 83-79 for the year. That’s not a bad season — and if the team made a few big moves and caught a few breaks, they might even sneak their way into the playoffs where anything can happen. Unfortunately for the Mariners, that scenario isn’t very likely.

The division-leading Texas Rangers hardly seem invincible, but they’ve accrued a decent lead on the Mariners, while other divisional-rival Houston possesses the advantage both of more wins than the Mariners and more talent. This makes the M’s current chances of winning the division rather low. (For an interactive version of the chart, click here.)

They’re not out of it, as you can see, but they do face difficult odds. And keep in mind: these odds are reflective of the talent each club currently possesses on hand. Both the Rangers and Astros are expected to be buyers, and further moves by those teams figure to push their odds higher and the Mariners’ lower unless they counter with a move of their own.

As for the wild card, the task is equally as daunting. The chart below shows the wild-card probabilities only and do not include a team’s chances at the division. (Interactive version here.)

If you’re willing to hand the American League Central to Cleveland, that leaves four additional available playoff spots. Seattle is seventh on that list, with less than a 10% shot. That the top three teams all play in the AL East — and also expected to be buyers before the deadlines — makes Seattle’s predicament all the more obvious. The team isn’t likely to win, so the team should sell. How they should sell, though, is a bit more difficult to decipher.

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Evan Longoria is the Tampa Bay Rays’ best player in franchise history. That’s not a particularly controversial suggestion: the franchise has only been around for 19 seasons and Longoria has been a mainstay on the team for nearly a decade. His 47 WAR bests Carl Crawford’s sum with club by 10 wins and, with 25 more games, he will secure the record for games played in a Rays uniform. Longoria is still going strong this season, and he has a reasonable contract. There are a lot of reasons not to trade Evan Longoria, but if the Rays were to consider trading him, now might be the best time.

Deciding to trade a franchise player isn’t an easy decision, and for a team that has a solid fan base — by television ratings, if not by attendance — moving a player like Longoria isn’t an easy choice. If Longoria were a pending free agent, the decision might be simpler. The Rays are 37-57 with no shot at the playoffs, and they’re likely to trade a starting pitcher before the deadline — and could sell more if they the deal were right. The team hasn’t played as bad as their record indicates — and, talent-wise, this is a roughly .500 team in need of a few tweaks for contention. In that light, it makes sense to keep Longoria and make a run next season. After all, he’s still producing.

Longoria has averaged over four wins above replacement over the previous three seasons. This season, at age 30, he’s putting together an excellent season, having recorded a 135 wRC+ and 3.8 WAR. That latter figure, plus his rest-of-season projection, places him in range of a six-win season. Given the year he’s having, he seems like a decent candidate to be projected for at least a four-win season next year. On top of that, Longoria has a team-friendly contract that will pay him just $99 million over the next six years, with $11 million deferred, reducing the cost further.

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Drew Pomeranz is in the midst of a breakout season. He’s already surpassed his season high for innings and his ERA is a very low 2.47, while his FIP is a low — if not quite as low — 3.15. Those very good numbers netted the San Diego Padres a very good pitching prospect recently in the form of Anderson Espinoza.

Much of Pomeranz’s newfound success has been attributed to the addition of a cutter to his repertoire, which Jeff Sullivan detailed just before the trade last week. One notes, however, that the success is aided by a .240 BABIP and 80.8% left-on-base rate. Even if those numbers aren’t sustainable, the 3.15 FIP indicates Pomeranz’s success is real. But there’s reason to believe that Pomeranz isn’t as susceptible to regression as the average pitcher. Or there’s reason, at least, to believe that the Red Sox believe he isn’t.

Speaking with WEEI’s John Tomase, former major-league pitcher and current Red Sox assistant pitching coach Brian Bannister has indicated that Pomeranz’s cutter makes it more likely that he’ll sustain some of his batted-ball suppression in Boston.

From Tomase’s piece:

[Bannister] explained that like knuckleballers, whose BABIP numbers tend to skew low, pitchers who feature cutters tend to outperform league average on balls in play. He knows this because he did it over his first two years in the big leagues, posting BABIPs between .239 and .249.

“I was an example of it,” Bannister said. “[Cutters] generate a different batted-ball profile. There’s just different weak contact in there. Some guys it’s popups. Sometimes you get gyro-spin and it’s almost like a knuckleball. I mean, knuckleballers beat BABIP. It’s not always a given that a full regression is going to occur. When I look at a guy, if there’s a cutter involved or a knuckleball involved, you just can’t say for sure. I know a lot of people look at those two numbers — left on base percentage and the BABIP — and say, ‘Oh, he’s going to get worse in the second half.’ It’s not always a given.”

While we know pitchers tend to gravitate towards league average when it comes to BABIP, some pitchers are better than others at limiting hits on balls in play. Pop ups, like Bannister mentioned, can be a good way to induce easy outs. Fly balls and ground balls have different expected batting averages. Given a large enough sample size, we might be able to deduce which pitchers have these type of skills. With a smaller sample, perhaps looking at pitch types would help us determine which pitchers are likely to produce low BABIPs and thus more likely to outperfrom their fielding-independent numbers.

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Carlos Correa placed second last week on the trade-value list that Dave Cameron puts together every season. That placement seemed to surprise some, given that Correa is having a very good, but not great season. Correa’s 120 wRC+ is hardly spectacular, even if that number increases to 150 if you start with the latter part of May. He has improved over the last few months, but even with that improvement, the placement might seem high. What definitely seemed high was Correa’s ZiPS projections over the next five years, starting at 7.9 WAR next season and totaling more than 40 wins from ages 22 to 26. Cameron, too, was surprised, and in the comments, his explanation caught my eye:

I was shocked by the Correa forecast myself, and asked Dan to double check that there wasn’t an error in the code or something, given how bullish it is on Correa’s future. But Dan said the system just loves Correa, as the history of guys who can hit like this at 20/21 in the big leagues is almost universally fantastic. The age really is the key thing to keep in mind here; it’s easy to forget how big of a leap guys can make early on, and at 21, there’s still a lot of room for growth.

Carlos Correa is currently in the midst of his age-21 season, and he’s accumulated 820 career plate appearances. Over the last 100 years, only 59 players have received at least 800 plate appearances before the end of their age-21 season and then eventually made their way to a Hall of Fame ballot. One finds that — without regard for how they played or for how long — an astonishing 36% (21) of those players eventually made in the Hall Of Fame. If you move the bar up to 1,000 plate appearances, 21 of 44 players are in the Hall of Fame. Of more recent players, it looks like that trend might continue. Edgar Renteria, Starlin Castro, and Elvis Andrus probably will not make the Hall of Fame and Justin Upton and Jason Heyward have a ways to go, while Alex Rodriguez, Ivan Rodriguez, Miguel Cabrera, Adrian Beltre, and Andruw Jones all have at least decent statistical cases.

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Of all the statistical advances made in the recent past, exit velocity seems to get the most attention. Broadcasts that still shy away from discussions of WAR or wRC+ or UZR are readily using exit velocity on batted balls. Part of that could be the novelty of it, and part of it is just a fascination with how hard and how far a ball is capable of being hit. Part of it could also be a sort of familiarity. Home-run distance has long been included in broadcasts, as has been a pitcher’s velocity. Exit velocity is an easy expansion of those numbers.

That said, exit velocity isn’t just a novelty. Despite issues with the data and the importance of launch angle and batted-ball data as a means to providing context, a player’s average exit velocity can tell us a decent bit of information about a player. With another half of data available (thanks to our own Jeff Zimmerman for his assistance gathering data), we can attempt to determine whether exit velocity from last season carried over to this season.

When I looked over the winter, the correlation on an individual player level between wOBA and exit velocity was relatively strong (r=.61) over the course of 2015 for players who had played a majority of that year. That number is not as strong so far this year (r=.50), but we are also dealing with a larger (237) universe of players with a lower level (200) of plate appearances over the first half of this season. It will be interesting to see if the correlation climbs a little higher as the season continues.

Last year, there was a solid relationship between first-half and second-half exit velocity. To determine how much of last year’s numbers carried over to this season, I compared the 116 players who recorded at least 200 plate appearances in each of the last three half-seasons. First-half exit velocity from 2015 correlated well with first-half exit velocity for 2016 (r^2=.52), but not as well as second half of 2015 with first half of 2016 (r^2=.57). The strongest relationship between the periods was between the entire 2015 season and the first half of 2016 (r^2=.62).

If you want the best bet for what a player will do this year, looking at a full year of data is the way to go based on the information we have, but we don’t know if that is uniform for all players. What about the players who experienced changes from the first half of 2015 to the second half of 2015? Did those changes carry over? Yes and no.

• For the 33 players who had large increases in the second half last year (at least 1.5 mph increase), the second-half exit velocity had a slightly higher correlation than 2015 total (r^2=.51 compared to .47). A good second half of exit velocity might be a harbinger of continued higher numbers.
• For the 23 players who produced a decrease of at least 0.5 mph, the decrease seemed to have less bearing, as there was a smaller correlation (r^2=.38) for the second half of 2015 to the first half of 2016 compared to 2015 as a whole to the first half of 2016 (r^2=.44). A dropoff in the second half in terms of exit velocity is less important than the full year of numbers, it would seem.
• For the players who had relatively consistent halves in 2015, those numbers have carried forward to 2016 (r^2=.74).

When I looked at the numbers over the winter, I was hoping to find some sort of application for the data I found. Everything else is fun to figure out (depending on your definition of fun), but to find something with utility would be most interesting. I looked at the population of players last season whose wOBA seemed to underperform or overperform their exit velocity — i.e., players who’d recorded above-average exit velocity but below-average numbers, and vice versa. I found that those players who underperformed their exit velocity in the first half saw their offensive numbers rise in the second half. Similarly, players whose offensive numbers seemed to overperform their exit velocity tended to have weaker number in the second half. Taking a look at those players for the first half of the season is probably worth a post on its own, so we’ll hold off on that for now.

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You’ve probably heard the expression, “Don’t throw good money after bad.” Simply put, don’t waste more money on what is already a losing proposition. There might be an argument that this wisdom has some relevance to the Detroit Tigers, that the Tigers have reached the moment where it’s time to focus on the future instead of the present.

Consider: the club possesses a near-$200 million payroll but sits just three games over .500. They’re 6.5 games out in the American League Central and four games back of the second wild card. Going all-in for a shot at a one-game playoff seems like poor planning for an organization that has failed to prioritize the long-term for much of the past decade. However, with the way they have positioned themselves, the Tigers don’t have much of a choice.

It might not appear as though the Tigers’ season has gone according to plan given where they are in the standings, but in terms of reaching the playoffs, they sit not too far off from where they started the season. The chart below shows the FanGraphs playoff odds from the beginning of the season to the All-Star break for the eight American League teams with at least a 10% chance (with apologies to fans of the White Sox, Royals, and Yankees, who are not completely out of it).

While the Tigers appear to be the odd team out in the chart above, they would require two teams to falter a bit — while continuing to play to expectations themselves — in order to reach the playoffs. Consider that, prior to the Mets’ loss Matt Harvey for the season — and also the loss of their last three games — the team’s playoff odds were 69%, but now sit 30 points lower. Subtractions and additions to talent level can make a big difference in projections over the course of the rest of the season. If the Tigers were a truly small-market team who’d experienced some success over the years, but might benefit in the near future by reloading at the trade deadline, then a selloff might make sense. The Tigers are not that team.

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Despite Major League Baseball’s attempts to add urgency to the All-Star game, there are factors which ensure that winning isn’t the only objective for its participants. It is, after all, an exhibition game. And yes, while most of the league’s best players will be present, deserving players will be absent. Finally, managers will make an effort to use nearly all players on each roster — both for the players’ benefit and the benefit of those fans who voted on the players’ behalves. There are, in other words, expectations placed both on the players and managers which surpass mere winning or losing.

Even if winning were the only objective of either team — and if the players on each roster were deployed optimally — using the results of tonight’s game as a proxy for determining which league is stronger would be foolish, not unlike using World Series results to do the same. Calculating strength of league requires an evaluation of interleague records and some greater evaluation of entire group of players in each league. That would be the most equitable way of doing things.

However, given that the All-Star game is tonight and given that it includes an equal number of players on both teams, we can compare the respective talents of those squads as a small way of comparing the leagues. That’s the goal of this post.

While both teams have had injury replacements over the past week, the National League has been hit considerably harder, losing Clayton Kershaw, Madison Bumgarner, Noah Syndergaard, Matt Carpenter, and Yoenis Cespedes. Those players have combined for 18.1 WAR so far this season and Kershaw leads the NL and is tied at 5.5 with Mike Trout in MLB. Even with those losses, the NL has put together a talented squad.

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