The Chicago Cubs and Kansas City Royals completed a trade Monday evening, with the Royals sending starting catcher Martin Maldonado to Chicago in return for swingman Mike Montgomery.

While Montgomery was never part of the team’s stable of frontline talent, he’s been a useful role player for the Cubs since being picked up from Seattle in the Dan Vogelbach trade. Since that 2016 swap, Montgomery has put up a 3.68 ERA across 38 starts and 81 relief appearances for the Cubs. The idea of having a pitcher in a long-term role as a swingman/spot-starter is something largely dead in 2019 baseball, so Montgomery was a bit of throwback in this sense. He filled in admirably with a 3.69 ERA as a starter in 2018 with Yu Darvish injured and Tyler Chatwood issuing more walks than a corrupt local judge.

2019 has been a struggle for Montgomery, with shoulder and finger injuries limiting his availability and moderate control issues hampering his effectiveness. Montgomery is still likely a useful player over the long haul and isn’t a free agent until after the 2021 season, but the Cubs are quite rightly taking “now” as a priority over “later.” That Montgomery is the player heading to Kansas City is also fueled by the fact that Montgomery requested a trade this season. From a career standpoint, it makes sense for Montgomery to get an opportunity to start full-time; a starting pitcher is going to do better in free agency no matter how the CBA changes between now and the end of 2021.

If for nothing else, Montgomery will always possess a unique place in Cubs history as the pitcher who threw the final pitch of the 2016 World Series.

And in the “now,” the Cubs had other priorities. Catching has been a strength for the team, but Willson Contreras heading to the injured list with a foot issue creating some unwanted uncertainty at the position. Without Contreras, the Cubs only had a single healthy catcher on the 40-man roster in Victor Caratini. This close to the trade deadline, with no guarantee that Contreras would be back after the minimum IL stay, so the Cubs were put into a position where they couldn’t wait and see how his recovery goes. Remember, July 31 is now the trade deadline in Major League Baseball starting this year, which means that the Cubs can’t count on picking up a cheap catcher in mid-August if something unexpected happens in Contreras’s recovery. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles completed a trade over the weekend, with Baltimore sending pitcher Andrew Cashner to Boston in return for center fielder Elio Prado and third baseman Noelberth Romero.

At 28-65, the Orioles appear likely to be eliminated from the playoff race sometime in August. Andrew Cashner is a free agent at the end of the season, and even if Baltimore had a less implausible shot at the playoffs, it makes a lot of sense to get something in return for the right-hander while the getting is good. In this case, the getting is two very deep dives into the Red Sox organization. Prado and Romero are both 17 year-olds out of Venezuela. Neither player is anywhere near the top of the prospect radar at this point. To grab a couple of lottery picks, the Orioles agreed to pay half of Cashner’s salary to the Red Sox, a figure just a bit under $2 million. If either prospect works out, it won’t be a new experience for Cashner, who has been swapped for Anthony Rizzo and Luis Castillo in previous trades.

Cashner has had a decent season on paper, but the Orioles’ return suggests that there is a good deal of skepticism surrounding his 3.83 ERA and 4.25 FIP. The bump in Cashner’s peripherals in 2019 is at least enough for ZiPS to think of him as a one-win player. That’s par for the course for a fifth starter, and it just so happens that’s exactly what the Red Sox were in the market for. It isn’t something that will show up well in playoff projections, but remember that teams can no longer pick up major league-caliber fourth and fifth starter types in August, which means that teams ought to take more care to prepare for emergencies now. And pitchers famously have lots of emergencies. Brian Johnson is currently out due to an intestinal issue, and given that he’s been out for weeks, it seems to be something a good bit more serious than overindulging in spicy chili. He has thrown a couple of bullpens, but his trip to the IL creates some uncertainty, which isn’t a good state of being for a contending team. And Cashner is likely a safer below-average pitcher than Hector Velazquez. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Release the Chaten!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Intrigued by it, but haven’t dipped my toes in yet. HS has been fun!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: You should see a WAR update in the trade value series. I may do something more substantial before the offseason.

Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Semien is having a moment. Semien finished the 2018 season with 3.7 WAR, nearly doubling the next-best total of his career. There was a catch, however, in that Semien’s WAR was largely fueled by a sudden jump in his defensive numbers. While the numbers for Baseball Info Solutions and Ultimate Zone Rating never completely agreed on Semien, they both thought he was a below-average defender at short. Coming into 2018, per 1350 innings, BIS had Semien at -2.7 runs, while UZR had him at -7.6 runs. In 2018, those numbers were +8.5 runs and +7.9 runs respectively, numbers that, if believed, meant that Semien had added 10-to-15 runs of value from somewhere very unexpected.

While a White Sox prospect, it was thought that Semien would likely struggle playing shortstop in the majors. In the minors, he made 60 errors in 2203 innings (37 errors per 1350 innings), which led the White Sox to find as much time for him at second and third base as possible. And while error rates usually come down in the majors, Semien committed 35 errors in his first season as the A’s shortstop. You could argue that errors can be overused as a method of defensive evaluation — and you’d be correct — but there are limits. UZR actually had Semien as slightly above-average in range, with the -11.7 total run estimate coming from a brutal -12.6 runs from errors. That’s not a run-of-the-mill error-prone season, either:

Read the rest of this entry »

If the other projectionators are anything like me, the projections going awry, afoul, or askew is always something in the back of their minds. Ideally, one should make projections, let the rubber hit the road, and then worry about what actually happened in the fall post-mortems. As much as I’d like to do that, when ZiPS makes an aggressive projection in one direction or the other, especially one that departs from the consensus of the other projection systems, I can’t help but look over my shoulder. Yesterday, I looked at pitchers for whom ZiPS missed the mark. Today, I consider the other side.

Among hitters, no projection has haunted my dreams as much as Juan Soto’s. Yes, Juan Soto was a superstar in 2018. Yes, he was just 19 when he destroyed the National League. Yes, everybody loves him as a player, not just the projection systems. However, in this case, ZiPS went out on a bit of a limb with Soto. Rather than the typical curmudgeonly regressing-toward-the-mean, ZiPS saw Soto playing even better, projecting a ninth-place finish in WAR among position players. Soto hasn’t been a disappointment, and ZiPS hasn’t been totally wrong, but the modest 23-point differential between ZiPS and reality grows larger once you consider that ZiPS missed low on the level of offense around the league.

It’s interesting to see where ZiPS differed the most from the other three projection systems used here. Do note that the “Consensus OPS” will vary slightly from what you see in the following tables, as ZiPS is not included in these consensus stats. ZiPS in 2019 tended to like a lot of the mid-20s “interesting” power prospects while simultaneously liking middling young catchers less than the other systems. That’s something that hadn’t come up in previous seasons, so I’m curious to see whether it continues and what it means. The data used by ZiPS versus that used by the other systems means it isn’t always going to be an apples-to-grenades comparison.

As with the pitchers, ZiPS is very close in accuracy to the consensus projections, but slightly behind (again, as I expect it to be). For the bias-adjusted projections, the consensus has an RMSE (root-mean-square error) of 0.1072 in OPS compared to ZiPS’ .1076. If these were the end-of-year results, we’d all be very depressed, but half-year stats are quite volatile!

Everyone liked Fernando Tatis Jr. over the long haul prior to his debut, but it was an open question whether or not everything would click in 2019. Everything has clicked in 2019. It’s easy to forget that Tatis only played a little more than half of a season in Double-A in 2018, and missed significant time due to a broken thumb. That he has succeeded does not mean it was a certainty coming into the season, so I’ll live with being wrong here. In a way, Tatis’ explosion reminds me of Hanley Ramirez’s back in the day. Not that Tatis and Hanley are or were comparable players, but the magnitude of their respective rookie explosions is similar.

What will haunt me is the Gurriel projection. The consensus was wrong on Gurriel, but if you scroll up to the first chart, ZiPS was really, really wrong on Gurriel. What makes it even more maddening is that I’m still not sure why. Gurriel’s launch angle is up and he’s hitting more barrels, but he’s also exhibiting this weird combination of swinging at fewer pitches and making even less contact than in 2018. ZiPS is coming around on Gurriel, and his rest-of-season projection now stands a stunning 73 points of OPS above his preseason projection. If we used the full-on ZiPS rather than the simpler in-season model that increase would be 94 points! The computer understands the improvement better than I do apparently.

ZiPS liked Joey Gallo more than the consensus, but still undershot Gallo’s OPS (so far) by more than 100 points. I can at least get my head around Gallo’s improvement. While a .391 BABIP is unlikely to be sustainable, there’s been a real change in his approach at the plate. In 2018, Gallo swung at 32.2% of pitches outside the strike zone; that ranked him 152nd in baseball if we use 300 plate appearances as our cutoff. In a single year, he’s cut off nearly a third of that, with his 22.5% ranking 21st-best among players with 150 plate appearances. While he’s also swinging at fewer pitches in the strike zone, the dropoff isn’t to the same degree. Even if his BABIP drops precipitously from .391, it may not drop down to previous levels. Gallo had a .250 BABIP in 2017 and a .249 BABIP in 2018, but the ZiPS model for BABIP that uses hit ball data thinks he “ought to” have put up a .301 BABIP over that period. That’s the largest deviation among hitters, suggesting that there was some hidden upside in there. ZiPS only projected a .273 BABIP — the longer a player underperforms, the more likely ZiPS is to believe reality rather than the estimate — but now thinks he’s somewhere around .300 again.

Baseball’s having a low-ball moment. Using Statcast’s strike zone, the rate at which home runs are being hit on low pitches is up 62% from 2018. 409 balls below the strike zone were hit for homers last year; this year we’re already at 347! Does this have an effect on the projections? Looking at the projections as a whole, there’s a real relationship between a hitter’s low-ball hitting ability and him beating the 2019 projections. This is something to come back to in the season’s post-mortem. The number of golf ball homers being hit would make a 1970s hitting coach cringe!

Oh, J-Ram, did you anger a sorcerer? Unless I missed something, if Ramirez’s season ends up with this OPS, it will be the least accurate projection for a batter coming off a five-WAR season in ZiPS history. Now, ZiPS only goes back to the early years of the millennium, but still, that’s not a feather in ZiPS’ cap.

Naturally, coming off a drug suspension, there are eyebrows being raised at Robinson Canó’s disappointing season in New York. It’s tempting to take the bait and worm out of a bad projection, but with nearly 15 years of drug testing, ZiPS still can’t find a pattern of group over-performance or underperformance based on the timing of a drug suspension. I think the more boring story — that a 36-year-old middle infielder is declining rapidly — is the more accurate one.

Danny Jansen fits in the category of “wrong, but in a very weird way.” ZiPS was relatively negative on Jansen coming into the season, projecting a .243/.332/.385 line, a full 61 points of OPS below what the fans estimated. Coming off a .247/.342/.432 debut and a strong performance in Triple-A, people expected more. Readers north of the border let me have it (though politely, because Canada). ZiPS turned out to be wrong, but in the opposite direction: Jansen now at .196/.278/.314 for the Jays.

If the other projectionators are anything like me, the projections going awry, afoul, or askew is always something in the back of their minds. Ideally, one should make projections, let the rubber hit the road, and then worry about what actually happened in the fall post-mortems. As much as I’d like to do that, when ZiPS makes an aggressive projection in one direction or the other, especially one that departs from the consensus of the other projection systems, I can’t help but look over my shoulder.

Two of the projections keeping me up at night the most from the preseason are those of Shane Bieber and Giovanny Gallegos.

Coming into 2019, ZiPS projected Bieber to go 13-8, with a 3.71 ERA, a 3.49 FIP, and 3.8 WAR. Those numbers were a bit sweat-inducing given that 3.8 WAR was enough to rank Bieber 13th in the majors entering the season. Bieber had a 3.23 FIP in his rookie season, but posted a 4.55 ERA and appeared to lack an out pitch against left-handed batters. Players with fewer projected wins included reigning AL Cy Young winner Blake Snell, Stephen Strasburg, German Marquez, and Patrick Corbin. Thankfully, this was one projection where ZiPS had company, with the rest of the projection systems housed at FanGraphs (Steamer, THE BAT, ATC) joining in. Whether your preferred quote about friendship is “I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light,” or the considerably darker “Misery loves company,” we all went down the Bieber road together.

But ZiPS went out on the Giovanny Gallegos branch nearly alone. Gallegos was in the top 10 of pitchers ZiPS was the most optimistic about. Indeed, with a 0.57 ERA difference between ZiPS and the consensus, ZiPS was only more optimistic about three other pitchers: Brad Brach, Mychal Givens, and Juan Nicasio. ZiPS is losing those battles so far, but Gallegos has been terrific for the Cardinals, striking out 13 batters a game; he was recently moved into higher-leverage spots. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: CHAT IS HERE

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Oops, scroll

12:04

Dan Szymborski: They probably should. While I wasn’t the least bit crazy about the Archer trade, my belief was for it to work out, it had to mean that they were going to double-down and finally adopt a win-now priority in the offseason.

Read the rest of this entry »

2018 was the end of an era for the Washington Nationals. After failing to get Bryce Harper to agree to a long-term contract with the organization, his final year in D.C. appeared destined to have something of a valedictory nature, a long farewell to the player who was drafted to be the face of the franchise. The script seemed to be in place for one last hurrah. After all, this was a team that during the Pax Brycetania won the NL East four times in six seasons, with their 555 wins second only to the Dodgers. 2018 would be the year they finally got over the playoff hump and won the World Series, after which the credits would roll, and captions would indicate what had happened to each of our favorite characters.

Oops.

Projected to go 89-73 by ZiPS, the Nats underperformed by seven games, finishing 82-80. Thanks to the Braves misbehaving and butting into contention before their number was called, Washington fell out of the postseason race for good by the All-Star break. There was a silver lining in the emergence of Juan Soto, who somehow needed just a month more seasoning to turn from a South-Atlantic League star into a major league one, effectively becoming better at being Bryce Harper than Bryce Harper. The way forward in 2019 was clear: a full season of Soto and Victor Robles, together with Patrick Corbin, would make up for the loss of Harper, and constitute enough of a gain that it wouldn’t be a major problem that Brian Dozier was a poor replacement for vintage Daniel Murphy. ZiPS even projected the Nats to be better in 2019 than it did in 2018.

Oops.

An 8-18 run from mid-April to mid-May left Washington rubbing elbows with the Marlins in the wastelands at the bottom of the NL East. The team’s gone 20-9 since, but that’s only been enough to get them to the precipice of a .500 season, rather the edge of greatness. At 39-40, they still stand eight games behind the Braves, a team with a lot more prospect currency to trade for short-term improvement at the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Cardinals announced Monday afternoon that their closer, Jordan Hicks, has torn the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. The news didn’t immediately come with a prognosis, a course of treatment, or a timetable for his return, some of which we’ll likely find out in the coming days. With a healthy elbow being a highly useful part of the body for a pitcher to have, there certainly isn’t much in the way of optimism that can emerge from this development.

While the news about Hicks has not been highly specific as of yet, I have not seen the word “partial” used to describe the tear. Assuming, for the sake of pessimism, that Hicks’s injury will require Tommy John surgery, the typical recovery time quoted these days is 12-15 months for a pitcher. That quite obviously would put 2019 out of the question and, given that we’re almost into July, would also seriously threaten all of 2020.

A lot of the initial buzz surrounding Hicks’ injury focused on his status as the hardest-throwing pitcher in baseball today, with fingers pointed at his velocity as a key factor in his injury. According to Statcast, of the 100 hardest-thrown pitches in 2019, 94 were thrown by Hicks. The only pitchers to intrude on this list are Tayron Guerrero (Nos. 24, 31, 54, and 70), Aroldis Chapman (No. 87), and Thyago Vieira (No. 61). 45% of all 100 mph pitches this year were thrown by Hicks. The fastball cred is real. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the more interesting league. Back in 2015, ZiPS saw two very different leagues — an American League in which most of the teams were competitive, and a bifurcated National League that featured a stronger line between the haves and the have-nots than 1780s France. By mid-September of that year, just one team in the the American League (the Oakland A’s) was positioned to finish with a sub-.500 record; only two were on track to reach the 90-win mark. As for the Senior Circuit, ZiPS thought that six of baseball’s best eight teams resided there, as well as five of the six worst.

In four years, these positions have done a Freaky Friday switcheroo. The AL is now home to six of the eight teams with the best projected rosters and six of the eight with the worst, with only three AL West teams (the A’s, Rangers, and Mariners, in that order) representing the middle class. The average NL trailer is 9 1/2 games back in the division and 3 1/2 back of a wild card berth compared to the AL’s 14 games and 8 1/2 games respectively.

So how do the ZiPS in-season projections work? For the Big, Official projections, I use the full ZiPS model rather than the comparatively simple in-season version in an effort to get the best estimates possible. Each player receives a percentile projection, with ZiPS randomly selecting from each player’s distribution to get a range of the expected roster strength for each individual team. Then each team is projected against every other team in their schedule a million times for the rest of the year. All this has the benefit of getting more accurate tails, as opposed to the binomial distribution you get when you’re working with an assumed roster strength; one of the most important things about ZiPS is that on all layers, it’s designed to be skeptical about its own accuracy.

According to projections, the eventual NL Central winner will be under 95.3 wins 90% of time, assuming a strange world in which we can play out the final three months of the season a million times. That barely gets you the home field-advantaged wild card spot in the American League half the time. If the National League doesn’t have an exciting trade deadline, maybe we should start to think that something’s up, given that mid-to-upper 80s in wins makes you a serious wild card contender. Only two teams in the league ought to actually be sure about throwing in the towel right now: the Marlins and the Giants.

Back in April, this race projected to be the second most exciting in baseball after the NL Central, with four teams projected between 87 and 93 wins and the fifth projected to, well, complete the 2019 season without folding (I’ll leave the identities of these teams for you to figure out). Instead, with a 16-5 record in June, the Atlanta Braves have put some real daylight between themselves and their rivals. Dallas Keuchel is not a superstar, but he also represents the biggest addition to an NL East team so far, one which addressed a significant team worry. With the deepest farm system in the division and a likely willingness to add salary for the right player, the “intangible” projections may be even better than what my computer spits out.

The Nationals have shown a pulse in June, enough to get them within a couple games of second place in the division. ZiPS still sees Washington as the team with the strongest overall 2019 roster in the East, with an 11-point edge in winning percentage over the Braves in a theoretical world in which the teams played identical schedules. But that margin is smaller than it was at the start of the season and it’s simply preferable to be the team with the 8 1/2 game advantage than the one that’s slightly better on paper. Start the grandmaster out without a couple of pawns, and a highly-skilled amateur chess player will probably win. If anything, it makes the decision to make trades in July a little trickier; it’s easier psychologically to shop Anthony Rendon or Max Scherzer if you’re not competitive. And with a weak farm system, the Nats don’t have a lot of ammo. Perhaps they’d be well-served to stop giving away interesting relievers.

As of this morning, the Mets were closer to the Marlins than the Braves in the division. The team made significant improvements in the offseason, but those moves also had the feeling of being half-measures, with team ownership still not wanting to spend money at the level you would expect from a team in a massive market (even if they do play second fiddle). The rotation’s 4.64 ERA left pitching coach Dave Eiland as the team’s designated scapegoat for its failings, but the real culprit here is the team defense. At -55 runs (if you believe the numbers from Baseball Info Solutions), a league-average defense would have the Mets at a 3.92 ERA, fourth in the National League. Even UZR’s less depressing estimates would place the Mets with a 4.27 ERA, better than the NL’s current 4.37 average. I’m sure threatening two or three more journalists will fix that right up.

I’m not going to fault the Phillies for Bryce Harper’s rather pedestrian offense. But I will fault them for their apparent disinterest in either Dallas Keuchel or Craig Kimbrel. While only one team could sign each player, none of the usual sources buzzing around the Phillies suggested that they ever had more serious interest than their public demeanor reflected. Losing Andrew McCutchen — even a post-star McCutchen — was a blow the team is ill-positioned to handle and one it can’t wait to address.

Caleb Smith is likely a real find, certainly more of one than I envisioned when the Marlins picked him up from the Yankees in 2017. Garrett Cooper is likely the only interesting player on the team’s offense (he’s 28, but a long way from free agency), which makes one ask the very real question of how Miami managed to get more for Mike King than for Chris Paddack, Josh Naylor, and Luis Castillo combined. Perhaps the Marlins tanking is somehow less depressing than the Marlins trying to contend?

The Central feels a lot like the division that nobody wants to win. Four of the five teams have held first place for multiple consecutive days, and not just at the start of the season when you have a bunch of 2-0 and 1-1 records floating around the league. While nobody has achieved any permanent daylight, I still think the Cubs have the best chance of doing so. Kimbrel may not be at his peak, but his signing and the theoretical return of Brandon Morrow would address what has been the team’s largest hole.

While the Brewers aren’t a depressing franchise, their use of Keston Hiura and Travis Shaw is a real head-scratcher. At the start of the season, I felt the team’s best use of Hiura would be to start him in the minors and have him bash his way into the majors, allowing them not to worry about having to make a difficult decision. The first part of that plan seemed to work out, but even with Shaw struggling and Hiura slugging .531, the Brewers haven’t been able to make the hard choice to turn Shaw into a reserve and make the team better right now. Yes, Hiura’s strikeout-to-walk ratio in the majors didn’t exactly scream Joey Votto, but he’s actually hitting the ball once in a while. ZiPS estimates that starting Shaw instead of Hiura over the rest of the season costs the Brewers about a tenth of a playoff appearance. That’s not negligible.

Who would’ve thought the bullpen would be the best part of the Cardinals? Yes, Paul Goldschmidt should be hitting better and Matt Carpenter should be hitting better and most of the rotation should be pitching better, but there’s no such thing as a Should NL Central winner. The Cards are a hard team to upgrade, simply because there aren’t many obvious places to give out pink slips. ZiPS is down to believing the Cards are a .510 team.

The Reds are a better team than their record, but the math remains daunting. How damaging was the team’s 1-8 start? They’ve gone 35-32 since, have a 43-33 Pythagorean record overall, and their 7.0% projected playoff chance is still behind their preseason projection of 11.5%. But at least they’re actually putting their best possible lineup on the field, with Jesse Winker, Nick Senzel, and Yasiel Puig as a fairly stable outfield. It would have been nice if they had just committed to this group from the start rather than trying to get Matt Kemp at-bats and seeing more in Scott Schebler than a fourth outfielder. Derek Dietrich’s offense has been encouraging, but it’s perhaps his defense that’s been the bigger surprise. He could always hit, but his defensive numbers at second are much more adequate than they were in his Marlins days. Small sample size, of course.

As for Pittsburgh, I don’t think they have the arms to peek back over the .500 mark for any extended period of time this year. With a healthy Jameson Taillon, and Chris Archer looking more like the Cy Young threat he once was, the division’s middle-heavy enough that the Pirates could be a contender. I don’t think they are, though.

It’s only really a 100.0% chance to win the NL West because of rounding, but it’s hard to envision a scenario in which the Dodgers blow a 13-game lead. Maybe, if there was another top team in the division that was simply underperforming, you could squint your way to seeing some type of apocalyptic scenario in which a second place team goes 55-25 in the second-half while Cody Bellinger and Hyun-Jin Ryu are captured by brigands in a forest. You can’t even “But ’69 Mets!” here — that team maxed out at a ten-game deficit. Okay, the Bucky Dent Yankees, but who in the division has a Goose Gossage or a Reggie Jackson?

Suffice it to say, Goose Gossage might actually upgrade the Colorado Rockies bullpen. I don’t mean 1978 Gossage — I mean Gossage now. In truth, Colorado’s bullpen hasn’t really been that mad, but they tend to fail in the most spectacular ways possible, as seen in their three straight walk-off losses against the Dodgers. In typical Colorado fashion, the team ranks 22nd in position player WAR and 22nd in wRC+ and I’m not sure anyone in the front office realizes this.

The Padres are obviously not as good a team as the Dodgers, but they’re the most fascinating team to watch, simply because of the young talent that will inevitably reach the majors in the next few years. I remain at a loss as to why they’ve been so conservative with Luis Urias, who is likely to be part of the best possible lineup right now (and I say this as someone who is a fan of Ian Kinsler as a player). It’s hard to blame any fiduciary shenanigans given that the team pointedly decided to not play those sorts of games with Paddack or Fernando Tatis Jr. The team is obviously pleased to be wild card-relevant, though I don’t think they’ll do anything to jeopardize the real show, which should start as soon as next year.

The Diamondbacks continues to accidentally contend, but I still think they’re more likely to trade off the reasons for that contention rather than make any additions. I still don’t believe Zack Greinke finishes his contract in Arizona, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Robbie Ray go. I think either Greinke or Ray are potentially more impactful pickups than Madison Bumgarner would be and there’s an actual Bumgarner market. It’s hard to see the Diamondbacks as a good enough team to be able to turn down solid offers should they materialize.

Every year, there’s a team that’s rebuilding that doesn’t quite realize it. Right now, that’s the San Francisco Giants. Other teams have come back from deeper pits than 33-43, but most of those other teams were more talented. The Giants have already played 13 different players in the outfield and just claimed Joey Rickard on waivers. By comparison, the Yankees have had most of their desired starting lineup on the IL but have only used nine.