It’s long been a foregone conclusion that Miguel Cabrera is going to win the 2013 American League Most Valuable Player Award. It’s long felt like a foregone conclusion that this will happen despite Cabrera again finishing well behind Mike Trout in league WAR. The question hasn’t been whether Trout will finish first or second; it’s been whether Trout will finish second or third or fourth or worse. We’ve already been through this, and if Cabrera has a serious challenger, it’s in the person of one Chris Davis. It’s Davis who has the lead on Cabrera in dingers. It’s Davis who’s playing for another AL contender. It’s Davis who stands the only real chance of knocking Cabrera down, in the event of a white-hot few weeks. But it still presumably won’t happen. Cabrera has packed a lot into his time.

This has been a foregone conclusion because we’ve tried to predict the tendencies and beliefs of the voters. Precedent: most previous votes. Specifically, last year’s votes. Cabrera will win because he’s a beast on a playoff team. Trout will not win because he’s a beast on a non-playoff team that hasn’t been close to the race. The overwhelming majority of voters place extra weight on productivity in meaningful games. Because we debate the awards every year, it’s pretty hard to find a fresh argument. It’s hard to feel like it’s worth writing something, when you feel like you’ve written it a thousand times before. But every so often, there’s an unexplored nugget of interest, and if you follow the thought processes of the voting writers, I think you can make an argument that this year’s AL MVP should or could be Josh Donaldson.

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Remember when a seven-year, $126 million deal seemed pretty crazy? Sure, Jayson Werth’s similar contract (signed prior to the 2011 season) does not exactly seem great (although he is having a nice year) these days, either, but back during the 2006-2007 off-season, when Barry Zito signed with the Giants, it seemed utterly insane. It was not simply that it was, at the time, the biggest contract ever signed by a pitcher. Prices go up — hot dogs cost more now than ever before, and I do not see any moral panic about that phenomenon. It was that Zito seemed like a poor choice for such a deal. Sure, he was a three-time All-Star and the 2004 American League Cy Young winner. He was durable, as he had pitched more than 210 innings six seasons in a row for the As. However, Zito was going to be 29 in 2007, and his strikeout and walk rates, which had never been all that impressive, seemed to be getting worse. It looked like it was going to be an albatross.

It was. Although he has had his moments over the last seven seasons, as a final cherry on top (insert a joke about the 2014 option here), Zito’s 2013 season has been one more blow to the contract year theory of player performance. In the last season of his notorious contract, Zito has had the worst year of his career. He lost his rotation spot in August (although he received another shot in the rotation for a few starts later). Zito’s time with the Giants is drawing to a close, and he is not going to get a ceremonial final start at home, if that was something someone wanted. This is not meant as a career retrospective. Instead, I want to look at something that Zito seemed to have in Oakland, something that probably played a big part in the Giants’ willingness to give him the contract, something which seemed to depart after he made the move: his ability to outperform DIPS metrics.

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We’ve heard different approaches from different players, and different levels of familiarity with the statistics so far this year, but it looks like Oakland’s Josh Reddick might be in a niche of his own. He knows about these things, and yet he shrugs — he is who he is, and he can’t change himself on a fundamental level. Doesn’t mean he can’t try to get most out of his skill set.

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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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After a rumor filled day with no real action, it looks like the last night before the trade deadline is going to bring some actual deals, and the A’s have gotten the ball rolling by picking up infielder Alberto Callaspo from the Angels in exchange for minor league infielder Grant Green.

This is an interesting trade for a number of reasons.

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The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

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Bartolo Colon was strong again Monday night, as the A’s knocked off the host Pirates 2-1. Of his 108 pitches, 78 were strikes. He walked one batter out of the 30 he faced. As a consequence, Colon’s season walk rate went up.

Colon, maybe, doesn’t have the best command of any starting pitcher — but it’s close, and that much is something of a miracle, considering where Colon went and how he came back. Colon basically throws a ton of fastballs — his rate is the same as Aroldis Chapman’s — and only Cliff Lee has thrown a higher rate of strikes. Few pitchers have thrown a higher rate of first-pitch strikes. Colon’s walk rate is a tick above 3%, and no one’s thrown a higher rate of pitches in the zone. Though Colon’s far from unhittable, he succeeds by pounding the zone relentlessly and he  forces the batter to supply the damage. It might be a simple formula, but Colon makes it work, thanks to his command of his pitches.

So I thought we’d look at his wildest pitches. Sometimes a technique to examine a guy’s success can be by looking at his failures. Which has been Colon’s lowest pitch of the season? What about his highest? What about most inside and most outside? What, if anything, can we learn from these pitches? I’ll admit, I’m kind of going into this blind, but I have confidence we can learn something. So let’s pay tribute to Colon’s ability to throw strikes by looking at him throw some balls.

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With the trade deadline a little more than a month away, we’re going to see a lot of rumors and speculation over the next few weeks, with reporters tying players to certain teams based on what they’ve heard from industry sources. This post is neither rumor nor speculation. No one in the game has suggested to me that this might happen. I have no inside information. I’m just pointing out a trade that, from an outside perspective, looks so glaringly obvious that it has to happen for the world to make sense.

The Oakland A’s need a second baseman. Well, maybe you could argue that they need a shortstop, because Jed Lowrie’s defense is pretty lousy at he’d be less harmful at 2B than SS, but Lowrie is still playing SS on a fairly regular basis, so technically, the A’s still need a second baseman. Preferably a second baseman who can hit. Eric Sogard is not a bad utility player to come off the bench, but he shouldn’t be playing regularly for a team in the midst of a pennant race. They should be able to do better.

So, let’s assume that the A’s are hunting for a second baseman, and not just a fill-in stop-gap type, but a guy who could make a real difference and push them over the hump as a legitimate World Series contender. But, because they’re the A’s and they’re constantly balancing current wins against maintaining enough assets for the future, they also need that impact player to come at something of a discount due to a diminished perception of his abilities. Basically, they need an impact player who people don’t think of as an impact player anymore.

They need Chase Utley.

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After months of threats and saber-rattling, the City of San Jose sued Major League Baseball and its 30 constituent teams on Tuesday over MLB’s refusal to allow the Oakland A’s to move to San Jose.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in San Jose, is a direct challenge to MLB’s federal antitrust exemption. San Jose claims that MLB places unreasonable restrictions on competition by giving each team its own exclusive territory (or in the case of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, shared territory) and veto power to prevent any other team from moving into that territory. As I explained in this FanGraphs post last September, under MLB rules, a team can move into the territory of another team only when the following conditions are met: a vote of three-fourths of the owners approving the move; the two ballparks are located at least five miles apart; the move results in no more than two teams in a single territory; and the team moving compensates the team already in the territory.

In addition to the federal antitrust claims, San Jose also charged MLB with violations of California antitrust law and with state law claims for interference with prospective economic advantage based on San Jose’s agreement to allow the A’s to buy certain parcels of city land, if the A’s plan to move is approved by the league.

You can read the lawsuit in its entirety here.

San Jose is represented by Joe Cotchett and his law firm, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy. Cotchett is a nationally well-known and well-regarded attorney with experience in antitrust cases. In fact, Cotchett represented the National Football League and the (former) Los Angeles Rams when the Oakland Raiders sued the league for antitrust violations in 1982 when the league voted against allowing the Raiders to move to Los Angeles. The Raiders won that lawsuit, and paved the way for other professional sports franchises to move from city to city more easily.

Except, that is, in baseball.

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“Nothing has ever come easy for me, especially the first time around,” — Oakland third baseman Josh Donaldson

Josh Donaldson played baseball for two high schools. Add to that college, two minor league sytems, and the pros, and he’s had to start over in a new place often over the course of his career. And, for the most part, he’s had a hard time at first. But with hard work and a few changes to his approach, he’s come back and been dominant. The process of acclimating, to Donaldson, is equal parts understanding himself and understanding the new situation.

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