The non-waiver trade deadline was last week, but when it comes to high-priced assets, August is just as good a time to complete a trade as any. The Rangers were willing to pay the price tag on Alex Rios, and nobody with a worse record in the American League felt the same. The reports are that the player to be named later (a quirk of waiver trading) is Leury Garcia, and that’s a price that these Rangers can afford to pay in order to improve their odds of postseason play.

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Maybe you’ve heard. Jonathan Lucroy is good at framing pitches. According to Jeff Sullivan’s most recent post on the subject, third-best in the league and the current first-best starting catcher. So he’s good at framing. But he doesn’t call it framing. And when he describes how and why he got good at it, it doesn’t sound like much of a mystery. It’s just the natural result of years of hard work.

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Trying to point out where the steroid era begins and ends, using data, is not as easy as you might think. While there are substances you can take to increase muscle mass, and that has direct consequences on athleticism, there just isn’t a clear moment where one the numbers pinpoint the beginnings of steroid usage in Major League Baseball. That might be because the pitchers were on them too, or that the steroid era reaches further back than we suppose, or continues more into today’s game than we prefer to think.

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When Dan Straily graduated high school, he was a big-bodied pitcher with one pitch coming out of a town of 18,000 with no fanfare. After hitting the mid nineties on a few guns at the local Western Oregon University, he suddenly was on his way to Marshall University. Then came the Oakland farm system as a 24th-round pick. Now that he’s overcome some long odds to appear in the big leagues, he took a minute to reflect on the process that got him to where he is today. Oh, and while we were talking, he showed me all those changeup grips he tried along the way.

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Bud Norris is heading to Baltimore, it looks like. Ken Rosenthal is reporting that the Orioles will send the Astros the much-traveled LJ Hoes along with a second prospect and a draft selection to Houston in exchange for Norris, who is under team control through 2015. At first, it may seem like a flawed prospect isn’t much to pay for a proven, cost-controlled starter who has struck out over 21% of the batters he’s faced so far in his career, but on the other hand, Norris has deep flaws that make his acquisition less of a steal and more of a gamble.

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Rick Porcello has changed his pitching mix this year. Most noticeably, he’s ditched his cutter for a curveball. The move was done for a variety of reasons, but the work continues to this day. Because even once you make a change, you have to work hard to maintain it.

The Tiger starter told me that he “really dedicated” himself to working on his curve this offseason, mostly because the cutter/slider “wasn’t really working.” Since it moves left to right, it cuts right into the meat of the plate for lefties. “The curveball is a more effective pitch to left-handers, which is something I struggle with,” Porcello admitted to me before his team played the White Sox in Chicago this week. Over his career, the pitcher has allowed lefties lower strikeout and grounder rates and higher walk rates than he has allowed to righties.

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Torii Hunter is a changed man. Remember when he was a power-hitting centerfielder in the middle of the lineup? Torii Hunter is the same man. See that smile? And that stolen home run? Hunter might actually owe his ability to change his approach late in his career to his personality, so I asked him about both things before the Tigers played the White Sox early this week.

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