Nearly a month ago to the day, Dave Cameron wrote an article for this very site praising the Washington Nationals for their patience regarding Trea Turner’s place as the club’s shortstop of the future, in deference to veteran Danny Espinosa. Espinosa had hit well up to that point, and has long graded not only as a plus defender at a premium position, but as a plus base-runner as well. In other words, Espinosa’s play at short was as good or better than what could’ve been reasonably expected from the rookie Turner, validating the team’s decision to hold Turner down in the minors for further development and/or for service time reasons.

Since that post was published, Espinosa’s been on fire. He’s essentially had the best 20-game offensive stretch of his career, putting up a 144 wRC+ over 79 plate appearances, and if it wasn’t clear already that Turner wouldn’t be taking over shortstop anytime soon, it is now. Espinosa is in no position to lose his job. Neither is Daniel Murphy, the club’s second baseman (the only other position at which Turner had played at the time of Cameron’s article), who’s arguably been the National League’s best hitter.

Turner couldn’t appear more blocked, which is why, even though he was recalled from the minors two weeks ago when Ryan Zimmerman hit the disabled list, manager Dusty Baker offered the following quote:

“Right now, there’s no real place for Trea to take.”

Except, something else has happened since the publication of Cameron’s article. Turner began to learn the outfield. He made his center-field debut in Triple-A on June 27, and started six games in center before his recall to the majors. He worked with minor-league outfield coordinator Gary Thurman on deep routes, playing balls off the wall and reading spin. He went errorless in his six games and recorded an outfield assist to third base following an overthrown caught stealing attempt at second.

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The first sure-fire sign of any good, impending mid-season selling frenzy is upper-management coming out and insisting to the public, “Who, us? No, no way. We’re definitely not selling. Which, that’s fine. Makes sense. Job of upper-management is to make money, and letting all the fans know a month in advance that the team is throwing in the weol of the now for a towel of the future isn’t a great way to keep fannies in the seats, even while the team’s still intact. Despite those claims, though, word always gets out, and the second sure-fire sign of any good, impending mid-season selling frenzy is the resignation that, “Yeah, OK, you caught us; we’re probably sellers.” The third sign is the sale itself.

The New York Yankees have exhibited the first two symptoms of fire-sale fever. After dropping the first series out of the All-Star break to the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees are now 45-46, fourth place in the American League East, and owners of a 6.1% chance to make the postseason, according to our playoff odds. The last three days have represented the club’s lowest points of the season.

And, given the unique construction of the Yankees’ roster, the club seems poised for a rare sell-off, one that, if executed to the fullest extent, could have the second-half version of the team appearing unrecognizable to the first. It seems likely that very few players of the next good Yankees team currently exist on this one. The Yankees are going to make some moves. The question is: how many? Let’s take the lever and push it all the way up. Just for fun, let’s imagine what a complete Yankees teardown looks like.

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Luis Valbuena has a 157 wRC+ since the beginning of June playing third base for the Houston Astros. Super-prospect Alex Bregman is beating down the door with his performance at Triple-A. Perfect fits be damned. Try and tell a contending club it’s got too many good players. They’ll find some room.

MLB.com’s Jesse Sanchez just broke some news:

Source: INF Yulieski Gurriel agrees to 5-year, $47.5 million deal with #Astros #Cuba More on https://t.co/mkcBseoZWQ pic.twitter.com/6uj12AgGGL

— Jesse Sanchez (@JesseSanchezMLB) July 15, 2016

Let’s get brought up to speed. Gurriel (previously spelled Gourriel) is 32, and he’s been considered Cuba’s best baseball player for about a decade. He’s primarily played third base, and also kicked around at shortstop and, more recently, second base. In 15 years between Cuba and Japan, Gurriel hit .335/.417/.580 with 250 homers and 121 steals. In early February, Yulieski and his younger brother Lourdes Jr., 22, defected from the island. In June, Yulieski was declared a free agent, able to sign with any club free of international spending limits. He’d been linked to the Dodgers, of course. The Mets had shown some interest. The Angels seemed to make some sense. Now, he’s an Astro.

BaseballAmerica’s Ben Badler worked up a scouting report on Gurriel last April in which he called him a plus defender at third with quick reactions, athleticism, a 70-grade arm, and the occasional mental lapse. He’s a complete hitter who bats from the right side, able to hit for average and draw a walk, and scouts see good bat speed that should translate to plus power in the majors. At the time, Badler drew comps to Hanley Ramirez and David Wright, which don’t sound so great anymore, but remember this was before the beginning of the 2015 season; Ramirez was coming off a 135 wRC+ at third base with the Dodgers, Wright was still Wright. Brian Cartwright does good work translating international player’s stat lines to MLB equivalents, and he projected Gurriel for a .283/.330/.458 line back in February, good for a .340 wOBA. There’s no expectation that Gurriel won’t hit.

Five years for a 32-year-old is perhaps a bit scary, and it’s a little more than what Dave Cameron estimated he might get last month, but Gurriel makes the Astros better now. Or, more accurately, in three weeks or so, which is when FOXSports’ Ken Rosenthal reports he’ll be ready to join the club. The Astros plan to keep Gurriel at third base, which creates an interesting positional logjam in Houston.

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Congratulations on your brand-new time machine! Don’t press any buttons just yet. There’s a reason you’ve been given this time machine.

See, A.J. Preller’s done some things, and they’ve been fascinating. Fascinating because, since he took over as general manager of the San Diego Padres nearly two years ago to the day, he’s been like the Two-Face of GMs, just the handsome and less-deformed and evil version. OK, maybe it wasn’t a great analogy.

But there have seemingly been two Prellers! And they’ve each been fascinating in their own right. Preller 1.0 wanted to put a stamp on his new club, wanted to contend right away, and made a flurry of trades in an attempt to do so that now seems ill-advised. Plenty of young, intriguing, cheap talent went out, and plenty of once-enticing-but-not-so-much-anymore, ill-fitting, expensive veteran talent came in. Things didn’t go well, the Padres were bad, and Preller soon reversed course. That first season looked like a disaster, and if the egg wasn’t already directly on Preller’s face, it was at least cooking in the pan.

Since then, Preller’s done a 180. Plenty of that older talent that meant nothing to the Padres’ future has gone back out, and plenty of new, again-intriguing young faces have been brought in. Just as the majority of Preller’s first-wave moves were seen at the time as questionable, the majority of his recent moves have been regarded well. The Craig Kimbrel return was seen as a positive for San Diego. Folks were surprised at what Preller received for Fernando Rodney. Anderson Espinoza is now a Padre. Which brings us to the present. The Padres farm system is starting to look real interesting again. However far back Preller set the Padres with the first year’s moves, he’s been doing his damnedest to make it up.

And so here’s what’s got me interested: you’ve got a time machine, and your goal is long-term success with the Padres. You can erase all of Preller’s moves, pretend he was never even hired, and start over again with the 2014-15 future core players and build from there. Or, alternatively, you can take the ones they’ve got now.

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A few months back, Jeff Sullivan asked me what type of baseball dork I am. A big one, is probably the answer, but Jeff was inquiring on a more specific level. He asked: hitting or pitching? I answered: defense. It’s what I was best at when I played the game. It’s what my favorite players did best growing up. It’s the area of the game, analytically speaking, which most interests me. I derive more pleasure doing deep dives on defense in cases of dissenting opinion — talking about guys like Eric Hosmer, Jose Iglesias, or Jay Bruce — probably moreso than any other type of post I write. This won’t be a super deep dive. This is more of an observation, some video, and maybe a few chuckles. With Bartolo Colon, there’s always some chuckles. We’re all Bartolo Colon dorks.

Because I’m a defense dork, I hand out my own Gold Glove Awards at the end of each year, which really are just the numbers’ Gold Glove Awards, because all the different defensive metrics in one is all I use for those posts. And so, because I do that at the end of each season for the posts, I often find myself doing it at the midway point of each season, as well, just to see. I bring this up because I just did it, and that’s why this post exists. Because here’s how the pitchers currently grade out:

Total Defensive Runs, Pitchers

1. Bartolo Colon, +3.8 runs saved
2. Zack Greinke, +3.6
3. Dallas Keuchel, +3.2
4. Tyler Chatwood, +3.0
5. Justin Verlander, +2.9

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The Cleveland Indians had a pretty good rookie last year. Francisco Lindor: pretty good! Led all American League rookies in WAR! Didn’t end up winning the award — that went to Carlos Correa — but, boy, did Lindor have a strong case. Cleveland had been anticipating the arrival of Lindor for some time, as he’d long been viewed as the type of prospect that would make an immediate impact. The type of prospect that one might expect to compete for the Rookie of the Year. You don’t see too many prospects burst onto the scene the way Lindor did.

Bradley Zimmer and Clint Frazier aren’t expected to debut until at least 2017, so no one would have expected another Cleveland player to be competing for the Rookie of the Year in 2016, yet here we are at the All-Star Break, and another Indian sits atop the rookie WAR leaderboard for position players. This time, it’s Tyler Naquin.

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It’s still rather difficult to craft an argument against the Chicago Cubs as the best team in baseball, at least in my opinion. I mean, shoot, they’ve outscored their opponents by 139 runs for the season, and that’s 34 more than the next-best team, and 50 more than the next-next best team. They’ve got an MVP candidate (favorite?) in Kris Bryant, and they’ve got perhaps the second-best pitcher in the world in Jake Arrieta. The lineup’s still deep, the rotation’s still deep. They still play defense, and they still run the bases. It’s the same roster that was undoubtedly the best roster just a month ago, and the same roster that the projections, whether it be ZiPS, Steamer, or PECOTA, think is clearly the best in the sport.

But, here’s the thing. The Cubs no longer have the best record — they’ve barely got the second-best record — and that’s kinda crazy, considering it was barely a month ago that they had the best record in the sport by 6.5 games, with an even better BaseRuns record at the time.

Except, lately — and pretty much since that moment — things haven’t been going so hot. I created a little infographic to help put things into perspective. Hope this does the trick:

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It’s important to note, considering the title of this post, that Jake Lamb is presently not a member of the National League All-Star team. It’s certainly not for lack of production. Lamb’s played enough to qualify for the batting title, and his 3.5 Wins Above Replacement rank 13th among all position players, right alongside All-Star third basemen Nolan Arenado and Matt Carpenter, the latter of whom recently switched back to second base. Of the 12 players above Lamb on the WAR leaderboard, 11 are All-Stars. (Sorry, Brandon Crawford.) So are the next eight after him. Chalk it up to a deep third-base pool in the National League, and a lack of name recognition for Lamb.

As long as he continues hitting the way he’s been, Lamb’s name will become known. Entering the All-Star break, he’s been one of baseball’s 10 best hitters. With 20 homers, 19 doubles and a league-leading seven triples, he’s been the best power hitter in the National League, and the best non-David Ortiz-division power hitter in all of baseball. Yep — Lamb’s .325 isolated slugging percentage easily topples the first-half marks set by prolific sluggers like Mark Trumbo, Kris Bryant and Josh Donaldson. This coming from a guy who last year was known for his defense.

For Lamb, this was all part of the plan. Of course, “be one of the best players in the sport” would be an ideal plan for anyone, but Lamb specifically entered the season looking to add more power. Inspired by Jose Bautista and teammate A.J. Pollock, Lamb re-tooled his swing in the offseason in an effort to create more authority on contact.

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Jay Bruce is going to be traded. That’s a near-certainty. He’s the only player on this year’s market to be (almost) traded not once, but twice by the team for which he still plays. The rumors have been persisting for more than a year now. Bruce is in the last guaranteed year of his contract, the Reds were never in contention, and he’s rebuilt his value with a great first half at the plate. Already, we’ve heard Bruce linked again to the Blue Jays, alongside the Indians, Nationals, Dodgers, and others. It will be an upset if he finishes the season wearing a Cincinnati uniform.

That much about Jay Bruce, we can be confident. We can be confident that he’s been a good hitter in the past, we can be confident that he’s been a good hitter in the present, and we can be confident that he’s likely to be moved within the next month. There exists an area of Bruce’s story that’s far more murky, though, and one’s perception of that area of Bruce’s game goes a long way towards one’s evaluation of Bruce. Despite a 120 wRC+ this season, Bruce has been worth 0.0 WAR, according to our calculations and 0.4 WAR by Baseball-Reference’s, and that’s all due to his defensive numbers.

The defensive numbers hate Jay Bruce this year. Ultimate Zone Rating calls him the season’s worst defensive right fielder, among 21 qualifiers. Defensive Runs Saved has him in a tie for last, with J.D. Martinez. Those negative marks stretch back a couple years now, but then you get recent tweets like this from Jeff Passan:

Bruce is 29 and has very reasonable club option at $13M for 2017. D metrics don’t like him, but two scouts say he’s avg to slightly > in RF.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 1, 2016

And quotes like this out of Buster Olney columns:

Bruce’s defensive metrics are not good, but some scouts believe that he’s better than those numbers indicate, and wonder if his skills are properly reflected in the stats — which some evaluators believe may be inexact.

And you begin to sense a divide on the evaluation of Bruce’s defensive ability. And it’s an important divide, because a Bruce with average-to-better defense is a useful player. A Bruce closer to what the defensive metrics suggest is a replacement-level designated hitter. Those two players fetch far different returns in a mid-season trade.

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