A day after Boston added starting-pitch depth from the Rays in the form Nate Eovaldi, the Yankees have followed suit this afternoon with another AL East team, acquiring left-hander J.A. Happ from Toronto in exchange for infielder Brandon Drury and outfielder Billy McKinney.

While this trade doesn’t preclude the Yankees from making a splashier acquisition for a starting pitcher, it wouldn’t surprise me if Happ is the only significant addition to the New York rotation. The team’s been linked to Cole Hamels in recent weeks, but that seems a curiously unsatisfying acquisition from New York’s perspective. At this point, Hamels’ reputation is still mostly derived from what he did in Philadelphia and, after a so-so 2017, he’s been hit hard and often in 2018. It’s tempting to disregard the inflated HR/FB rate as a fluke, but his 44.9% hard-hit rate this year is the second-highest among qualifiers — this after he set a career high in 2017. Now, that’s not enough to doom a pitcher by itself — Zack Greinke and Patrick Corbin are up there too and having fine seasons — but it does lend support to the notion that his homers allowed aren’t flukes.

Getting hit hard is a risk in Yankee Stadium, and the point of these types of deadline trades isn’t to maximize upside but rather to find some certainty. No, Happ wasn’t really the sixth-best starter in his 20-4, 3.18 ERA Cy Young-contending year in 2015, but he’s also a fairly safe pitcher at this point, one who has already been playing in the AL East and experienced plenty of success. The Yankees aren’t trying to make a David Price or a Johnny Cueto trade here; rather, they’re looking for someone more dependable than Sonny Gray to slot after Luis Severino, Masahiro Tanaka, and CC Sabathia down the stretch. Fourth starters do tend to make an appearance in the playoffs and, should the Yankees reach the ALDS — which our odds says isn’t about 70% likely to occure — it’s difficult to imagine they’d be comfortable turning to Gray, who has failed to complete the fifth inning in seven of his 19 starters in 2018. And with it looking more and more likely the Yankees are the first Wild Card rather than the AL East winner, that extra Wild Card game means they’re even more likely to require the services of that fourth starter.

In the ZiPS playoff odds, the addition of Happ to the rotation boosts the team by about a win over the course the rest of the season, moving their divisional odds from 23% to 28% in the projections. ZiPS believe the Yankees are a slightly better team than the Red Sox, but the 5.5 games baked into the cake, so to speak, are telling here. This is more a depth move for the Yankees than something intended to upend any playoff scenarios.

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During the All-Star break, Manny Machado was traded to the Dodgers for a solid package of prospects led by Yusniel Diaz. Last night, longtime closer Zach Britton was shipped off to the Yankees for Dillon Tate and some other interesting names. Both moves were obviously made with a view to the Orioles’ future.

Both moves were also inevitable, though — and, in a way, easy. It doesn’t take a fancypants scientist to figure out that trading terrific players who’re headed to free agency is a smart thing to do; us regular-pantsed folks can see that for ourselves. Now, though, there are harder decisions to make, other players to give away, if the Orioles are going to embrace a full rebuild. Complicating this is an organization that has shown a tendency to balk at hard decisions and put off future plans, preferring instead to tread water with the least aggressive quarter-measures available. In this case, however, action is required.

Unfortunately, we can’t just waltz into the B&O Warehouse and start trading away Orioles. Seriously, I double-checked what my credentials will permit. No, we may have to seize the team by force. Let’s presume that our dark FanGraphs forces can seize the corporate offices successfully — we do have a particular expertise involving WAR — and gain control of the franchise. It wouldn’t be the first war lost by the Angelos family, and Sheryl Ring can draft some paperwork to make this nice and legal. We have to be quick, though, before we all end up in jail. So let’s start the sale.

Kevin Gausman to the Pittsburgh Pirates

It seems a little too easy to sell Kevin Gausman to the Chicago Cubs and, really, at this point, I’m tired of Orioles pitchers going to Chicago and experiencing a renaissance. Jake Arrieta is the most noted example, but the Cubs squeezed significant value out of Jason Hammel, Pedro Strop, and even Tsuyoshi Wada. The Pirates aren’t rightly interested in rentals: they’ll require somebody who’s useful beyond the 2018 season because, even with their 11-game winning streak, they’re still more likely than not to miss the postseason.

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As was the case for the fans an hour north in Baltimore — where franchise cornerstone Manny Machado entered the last year of his own contract — the 2018 campaign has, for Washington supporters, loomed in the distance like a poorly understood Mayan prophecy. It was, of course, Bryce Harper’s final season before entering free agency.

Unlike the Orioles, though, the Nationals were at least likely to provide some solace by remaining the class of the NL East until Harper left to grab his $300 million contract. Unfortunately for residents of the area, that merry scenario has not unfolded as expected. While the the Braves and Phillies seemed unlikely to have completed their rebuilds by the start of the 2018 season, both teams appear to have done exactly that, leaving the Nationals in third place a week from the deadline, six games back and a game below .500.

More surprising than the accelerated schedule of Atlanta and Philadelphia is Harper’s role in the poor season. Even hitting .216, Harper has been far from worthless, recording a .365 on-base and .470 slugging percentage for a 119 wRC+. With some poor defensive numbers added in, the result is a 1.4 WAR in nearly two-thirds of a season. A league-average player is a real contributor, of course, but a league-average Bryce Harper feels a little like Beethoven composing the radio jingle for a local pizza place.

(Historical note: Beethoven’s Der glorreiche Augenblick, Op. 136 isn’t really that far off from being this, but that’s a story for another day on another site — or, more likely, just a Google search.)

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Whereas the first notable reliever acquisition of the trade deadline saw Cleveland receive, in Brad Hand and Adam Cimber, two pitchers who will remain with the club for future seasons, the Athletics this afternoon have performed a swap with a more traditional rent-a-player flavor, getting Jeurys Familia from the New York Mets in exchange for right-handed reliever Bobby Wahl, third baseman William Toffey, and an unspecified pile of international slot money, the 2018 version of a player-to-be-named-later.

There’s an argument to be made that, at this point, Familia may be slightly underrated among relievers. The extra couple of walks per nine that Familia picked up in a 2017 season mostly ruined by surgery to remove a blood clots from his shoulder have disappeared in 2018. Familia’s not relying on his hard, heavy sinker as much as he has in the past — especially against lefties — but given that the A’s have an infield whose four primary players, Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, Matt Olson, and Jed Lowrie have all been above average by UZR (Lowrie a couple of runs in the negative in DRS), I’d be happy to see him go to that well a bit more often again. Even without relying on the sinker, Familia’s pitching as well as he was in 2016, which was enough to earn him an All-Star appearance and a rather odd MVP vote. Familia is in the top 20 of relievers in WAR and among the top 30 in FIP, so it’s a real upgrade to the A’s bullpen. Blake Treinen will remain the closer, which I believe is absolutely the right tack to take.

Despite Sandy Alderson’s insistence earlier this season that the Mets have no plans to go full-scale rebuild, the team’s at least been listening to offers on pretty much the entire roster. Familia doesn’t necessarily indicate a stronger organizational willingness to go that route, of course, as he was likely to be traded anyway given his contract and the team’s position in the standings.

Bobby Wahl is an interesting flier for the Mets to take. It’s hard to characterize a 26-year-old reliever as some kind of top prospect — and I won’t — but Wahl throws in the upper 90s, has an effective slider (that really feels more like a slurve to me), and can change speeds at least tolerably well. His control’s been an issue at times, though not on the Bobby Witt scale, and one of the reasons he’s not been a bit higher in the pecking order is that he has a long history of injury, losing parts of most years with varying ailments, most recently surgery for a thoracic outlet issue last season. He was fine by spring training and, as far as I know, hasn’t had any significant issues along those lines since.

Prospect-watchers tend to like Will Toffey more than Wahl, and ZiPS agrees that he’s a bit above-average defensively, placing him at about two runs per 150 games better than average based on the rough estimates ZiPS makes from play-by-play data. I’m really not sold on his bat: 23 is just too old for a player not in the middle infield or catching to not be killing the ball in the California League. While there’s obviously more time for Toffey to develop into something more than Wahl, I think the latter is more likely to actually contribute to a major-league team. The Mets’ squadron isn’t that deep in relief pitching and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see him in the back end of the team’s bullpen in April (or even this year!) depending on what other moves the Mets make.

It’s interesting to see Oakland positioning themselves as buyers, at least in the bargain section. To find the last time Oakland was the team trading prospects for a veteran rather than vice-versa, you actually have to go back to the 2014 Jeff Samardzija trade, which saw the team give up Addison Russell, Dan Straily, and Billy McKinney to the Cubs for Samardzija and Jason Hammel. (They picked up Jon Lester later in that month, but you’d be hard-pressed to describe Yoenis Cespedes as a prospect.) While one doesn’t really think of the A’s as front-line, top-tier contenders, the fact is they’re essentially in a two-team race for the second Wild Card with the Mariners, a team that only has a Pythagorean record of right around .500 and likely isn’t as good as their seasonal record when you talk the rest-of-season projections. Even four games back, that it’s a two-team race is quite important: I’d rather be four games behind one team than two games back and fighting with seven other teams. But the 2018 National League is highly competitive one and the American league, the bifurcated stars-and-scrubs league, a flip of the situation a few years ago.

I’m not a believer in going all-in for a Wild Card unless it comes with a significant chance of also capturing the division title, but with what Oakland is giving up, they’re not going all-in, but simply making an incremental addition to enhance their Wild Card odds. Being less risk-averse with Familia is better in this situation than rolling the dice with Wahl would be. In all, the A’s add a significant part of their present without giving up a significant part of their future.

Wins on both sides here, with both teams getting what they need from this trade. I daresay that I’d be happier with Familia at this price than Zach Britton at the price he eventually fetches.

Well before the rumors of a deal between the Dodgers and Orioles surfaced this week, Manny Machado was — as a legitimate star with an expiring contract on a team unlikely to contend — considered the prize of this year’s trade deadline. The 2018 season has done nothing so far to invalidate that notion, Machado bouncing back considerably from a surprisingly unimpressive 2017 season to hit .315/.387/.575, all three parts of that slash line representing career bests. The move back to shortstop hasn’t been quite as successful, but even a narcoleptic Jeff Blauser would have significant value with this kind of offensive contribution.

It took about 92 games longer than expected, but the Dodgers entered the All-Star break in first place, caressing a half-game lead over the Arizona Diamondbacks in the NL West. Nor is it a two-team race: the Colorado Rockies sit just two games back and the team’s traditional rivals, the San Francisco Giants, are still hanging on four games behind despite a bevy of nasty surprises in the rotation this season. There are reasons to believe that the Dodgers are in better position than their slim divisional lead might suggest, their somewhat modest record due more to underperformance than any fatal flaw in how the roster is designed. Even before the Machado trade, the updated ZiPS projections saw the Dodgers as the strongest National League team in terms of the strength of roster and the likely depth-chart configuration.

There are areas where ZiPS produces different results than the official postseason odds calculated from the combined Steamer/ZiPS projections. ZiPS, for example, has long preferred the Braves, Brewers, and Phillies while being a bit Nationals-skeptical, but both the ZiPS and FanGraphs methodologies agree that the Dodgers had the best roster in the National League before the trade. The problem the Dodgers faced is that, while the mean projections obviously look quite favorably on their prospects, mean projections also don’t account for the uncertainty around the numbers, which can be quite significant. Even firmly believing that the Dodgers had the strongest roster in the NL West, ZiPS still called for them — after a million years of game-by-game matchups — to lose out on the division about once every three times.

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Of all those 1970s disaster movies, the worst one for me has always been The Swarm. Featuring an impressive cast, with names such as Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Chamberlain, José Ferrer, and Olivia de Havilland (along with many others), the film’s stars muddle their way through roughly three uninteresting hours, all the time looking like they had accidentally wandered in from other, more interesting movies. Every star gets his or her own cameo, and typically a random death, like when the bees destroy a helicopter or when the bees derail a train or when Henry Fonda decides to test a vaccine by giving himself a large dose of it and crossing his fingers. I’ll leave any connection between that last misfortune and the Orioles’ most recent offseason to the reader.

Despite the ambition of the film, what it lacked was any sense of fun, any sense of purpose for having assembled such talent. And that’s why it works as an able metaphor for the All-Star Game. There are a lot of great things about All-Star Week. The Futures Game gives the wider public what is, for many, their first look at players like Hunter Greene or Peter Alonso. As used to be the case for the All-Star Game, many of the players involved in the Futures Game are facing off each other for the first time — in this case, thanks to rosters constructed of players from across the minor leagues. That kind of unfamiliarity is rare to see at the major-league level, both because of free agency and also interleague play, the latter of which is now a daily occurrence. But my colleague Travis Sawchik has more on that!

The Home Run Derby is nonsense in a lot of ways, but it’s fun, glorious nonsense, which takes one important aspect of baseball (hitting for power), fills it with helium and cotton candy, and then sends it on its merry way. While cotton candy oughtn’t be the foundation of a every meal, it’s fine for an occasional celebration. As Jay Jaffe noted this morning, last night’s Home Run Derby captured this atmosphere perfectly. The participants were all clearly having a blast and that kind of feeling is infectious. Watching Bryce Harper come from behind in the finals, smacking nine consecutive homers to pass Kyle Schwarber is one of those Big Moments© you remember 10 years later, the kind of thing that makes watching baseball a joyful experience.

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2:00	The Decadent Moose: Since last June…

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While the result isn’t always a poor one, the decision to wait for an exact perfect trade is a dangerous game for a rebuilding/retooling team. Greed can sometimes be good, yes, but a player’s trade value can also dissipate with a simple twinge in the forearm.

For every Rich Hill who lands at a new home in exchange for an impressive haul, there’s a Zach Britton or Zack Cozart or Todd Frazier or Tyson Ross whose value declines dramatically — sometimes so dramatically that they become effectively untradable. Even when waiting doesn’t lead to disaster, such as with Sonny Gray and Jose Quintana, teams frequently don’t do that much better by waiting for the most beautiful opportunity for baseball-related extortion. Regression to the mean is real. For a player at the top of his game, there’s a lot more room for bad news than good; chaos may be a ladder, but it’s not a bell curve.

With that in mind, I’ve identified five players who might be most valuable to their clubs right now as a trade piece. None of them are likely to be dealt before the deadline. Nevertheless, their respective clubs might also never have a better opportunity to secure a return on these particular assets.

Kevin Gausman, RHP, Baltimore Orioles (Profile)

There seems to be a sense almost that, if the Orioles are able to trade Manny Machado for a great package, get an interesting deal for Zach Britton, and procure some token return for Adam Jones, then it’ll be time to fly the ol’ Mission Accomplished banner. In reality, though, that would simply mark the beginning of the Orioles’ chance to build a consistent winner. After D-Day, the allies didn’t call it wrap, shake some hands, and head home to work on the hot rod. (Confession: I don’t actually know what 18-year-olds did for fun in 1944.)

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“And just like that, as mysteriously as he arrived, he was gone.”

– Oscar Martinez, The Office

It wasn’t quite Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, but after the Cardinals lost to the Cardinals 8-2 Saturday night, dropping to just a skosh above .500 at 47-46, manager Mike Matheny was dismissed from his managerial duties. The Cardinals remain in the playoff race, but it’s been a tumultuous month behind the scenes in St. Louis, from normal run-of-the-mill struggles to public friction with right fielder Dexter Fowler to the latest report — written by the tireless Mark Saxon of The Athletic — of Bud Norris’s old-school clubhouse antics with rookie reliever Jordan Hicks.

While Matheny’s role in the Norris-Hicks situation probably wasn’t the main factor behind his dismissal, I have few doubts that it was a contributing factor. Saxon received a lot of pushback publicly about his reporting on the issues, but these types of wagon-circling denials from teams when a story becomes embarrassing isn’t just common, it’s practically de rigueur. That doesn’t necessarily negate the veracity of the original reports.

In the end, though, it usually comes down to winning. Like most managers, Matheny lived by the win before he died by the win, the extremely successful Cardinal seasons at the start of Matheny’s tenure making him as unassailable at the time as he was vulnerable by 2018.

In a piece for ESPN in 2013, Anna McDonald reported on the relationship between the analytics-friendly front office headed by then-general manager John Mozeliak (who’s since been promoted to team president) and the more traditional Matheny.

“I believe how [Matheny] puts a lineup together is that he is utilizing things we give him from upstairs, but we don’t want to bury him with having to overthink things. Most importantly, we hire a manager to make that lineup. I do think one thing that Mike and his staff have done a very good job of is embracing anything we can put together as far as advanced scouting for them. Trying to eliminate small sample sizes and make them accept larger ones for probabilities has been helpful. Mike, he is a young manager that is very interested at looking at the best ways to be successful, so that’s always a good sign when you have that in an employee.”

Few analytics types, myself included, really thought much of Matheny as an in-game tactician. But that’s only part of the job of a manager. I’ve talked a lot about admiring Joe Torre as a manager for the Yankees not because of his in-game acumen but simply because, unlike a lot of managers, he didn’t stand in the way of his team’s success. Sometimes, keeping the team from killing each other is what a manager is there for, which is why I praised Dusty Baker’s hiring by the Washington Nationals as the right move at the right time for that particular club.

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