Matt Carpenter just hit another home run. Here, look at it:

That home run was hit on August 13, and for Carpenter, it was his career-high 33rd. He had set a new career high with his 29th, and so this is all just uncharted territory. Right now, Carpenter leads the National League in wRC+. He also leads the National League in Statcast’s expected wOBA, so it’s not like this is all luck. Carpenter has been absolutely outstanding, and he’s likely to generate support for the league MVP. He’s helped to fuel the Cardinals’ recent run toward a wild-card spot, and heaven only knows where the club would be without him.

I should also point out that, according to Statcast again, Carpenter’s top exit velocity this season ranks in the 35th percentile. We’re mostly accustomed to sluggers who slug the ball. Carpenter would never be confused for another Giancarlo Stanton. So let’s quickly walk through how Carpenter makes this all work. To a certain extent this is all pretty basic, but Carpenter happens to be one of the world leaders in bat control.

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At 53-53, the Rays aren’t bad, but they’re also not anywhere close to the race. At 54-52, the Cardinals aren’t much better, but a wild-card slot remains within reach. Given that, you’d think, if anything, the Cardinals would be improving, while the Rays would be selling. Instead, we have a trade that goes in the other direction. It’s a little bit of a surprising deadline maneuver, yet the Rays are gearing up for a run next season. And the Cardinals are just making more room for Harrison Bader and Tyler O’Neill. I’ll give you the specifics:

Rays get:

• Tommy Pham
• $500,000 international bonus-pool money

Cardinals get:

• Justin Williams
• Genesis Cabrera
• Roel Ramirez

On the surface, you can understand the Cardinals’ perspective here. Pham is 30 years old, and his numbers don’t look like they did last season. Pham and the organization haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, and besides, Bader looks like one of the better defensive outfielders in either league, so it makes sense to play him more often. I can see why they might’ve wanted to make a trade. Still, it feels like they’ve sold Pham low. The Rays are getting a possible difference-maker here, and you don’t have to dig too far into the numbers to see it.

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In somewhat of a surprise move, the Cardinals have traded outfielder Tommy Pham this morning. In somewhat of another surprise, the team acquiring Pham hasn’t added him for the purposes of contending this season. While the Tampa Bay Rays haven’t been mathematically eliminated from a place in the playoffs, their chances of earning even a Wild Card berth are effectively zero at this point. Pham has value to the organization beyond 2018, though.

Even as rumors continue to circle around Chris Archer, the Rays have added a much needed outfielder not only for the remainder of the season, but also for the future. In trading away Pham, the Cardinals appear to be receiving multiple minor-league depth pieces.

Rays receive:

• Tommy Pham
• $500K international bonus-pool money

Cardinals receive:

• OF Justin Williams
• LHP Genesis Cabrera
• RHP Roel Ramirez

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The Mariners and Cardinals swapped relievers today, the latter sending RHP Sam Tuivailala to Seattle for prospect Seth Elledge. The deal gives Seattle a marginal bullpen upgrade in Tuivailala (probably over Casey Lawrence) for a stretch run that’s going to require them to continue winning close games. Every slightly better bullpen option is more meaningful in this situation than it is when looking at reliever value from a broader point of view. The deal is also a good fit for St. Louis, who acquires a comparable talent whose service-time calendar better aligns with their competitive schedule. Tuivailala is arbitration-eligible starting in 2020, when Elledge will probably be in his first or second year of big-league service.

Tuivailala is a fine middle reliever. He sits 93-96, will occasionally touch 99, and has two very average secondary offerings in an upper-80s cutter/slider and an upper-70s curveball. The Mariners have had success drafting low-ceiling, high-probability college relievers in the middle rounds of the last several drafts and quickly flipping them for mature big-league pieces on the margins. Elledge was the second pitcher Seattle traded from their 2017 draft class (JP Sears was sent to the Yankees for Nick Rumbelow last fall), which means Seattle’s 2017 draft has technically yielded the most subustantial big-league return in all of baseball right now.

Seth Elledge is a big-bodied, crossfire reliever with a mid-90s fastball and plus breaking ball. He was a 2017 fourth-round pick out of Dallas Baptist, a college that parades hard-throwing relievers into pro ball annually. He has a 54:14 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 38.1 innings. He might eventually be better than Tuivailala because the breaking ball is better. It’s reasonable to project a 2020 debut for Elledge, though has a non-zero chance to debut next year.

Just last week, Kiley McDaniel finished up this year’s Trade Value series. The Trade Value series represents an attempt to rank all the best assets in baseball while accounting for player skill, age, and contract status all simultaneously. One player who didn’t appear in the series was Cardinals infielder Matt Carpenter, not even in the Honorable Mention section.

At that time, Carpenter was having a fine season, having recorded a 142 wRC+ and 3.2 WAR in 378 plate appearances. However, at 32 years old and with two-and-a-half seasons of control remaining on salaries of $14.5 million in 2019 and $18.5 million ($2 million buyout) in 2020, McDaniel reasonably left Carpenter off the list.

In his first eight games after the All-Star Break, however, Carpenter added 1.1 WAR to his season total, hitting .400/.500/1.100 with a 307 wRC+ during that stretch. His WAR was 21st in baseball at the end of the first half, but now it ranks seventh in the sport and first in the National League. His .275/.384/.579 batting line is good for a 155 wRC+, which is second in the NL and eighth in baseball, just ahead of Jesus Aguilar and Manny Machado. His season totals are even more amazing when you consider that on May 15, Carpenter was hitting .140/.286/.272 with a 59 wRC+. Jay Jaffe already detailed Carpenter’s turnaround at the end of June when he was just doing really well.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Starling Joseph, OF, Texas Rangers (Profile)
Level: Short-Season   Age: 19   Org Rank: NR   FV: 35+
Line: 3-for-4, HR

Notes
Joseph is a physical 6-foot-3 outfielder with plus raw power. He’s raw from a bat-to-ball standpoint due to length and a lack of bat control, but the power/frame combination here is interesting for a 19-year-old. Joseph has a 67:10 strikeout-to-walk ratio in domestic pro ball and is as high-risk of a prospect as you’ll find, but he has the power to carry the profile if he ever becomes sentient in the batter’s box.

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On Saturday evening, the Cardinals made the necessary — though arguably tardy — decision to fire manager Mike Matheny. The now-former Cardinals skipper was at the helm of some successful teams, but after two consecutive playoff misses and a mediocre 2018 season, Matheny was shown the door. While managers often receive too much praise for success and too much criticism for a club’s failures — Matheny certainly benefited from inheriting a World Series champion and might ultimately have been fired for piloting this year’s club to just a .500 record — the last few weeks shined an unwelcome light on the Cardinals due to communication issues with Dexter Fowler and the defense of Bud Norris and old-school antics.

While Matheny’s poor bullpen management and recent internal troubles will get a lot of attention, his biggest deficiencies as a manager were (a) an inability (or refusal) to discern his players’ present talent levels and (b) his related preference of managing with his gut. While the latter quality might function as a virtue in some situations, it most famously caused Matheny trouble in the 2014 NLCS when he turned to Michael Wacha after weeks of rest. It has also forced the Cardinals front office to make roster moves around Matheny’s weaknesses instead of playing to his strengths.

When Matheny was provided with depth, he would neglect it, exiling useful players to the bench. When he was provided with clear starters, those starters would receive so much playing time that they were exhausted by late summer. Prospects were sent to Memphis not because they had something to prove in Triple-A but because playing time was at a premium in the majors. Veteran relievers were required because younger options were ignored, and Matheny’s need for fixed roles led directly to the acquisition of Greg Holland, whom Matheny persisted in using even when all indications suggested that such a thing was hurting the club. Mike Mayers drew raves in spring training but, due to Matheny’s insistence than an eighth reliever ought to be reserved for emergencies, was ignored once the season began. The front office is, of course, complicit in accommodating Matheny’s wishes, but they apparently desired to be free from the restrictions the manager put on their decisions. Now they can turn to other, fundamental questions.

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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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When I think about control artists, I think about pitchers who consistently hit their spots, particularly on the edges of the strike zone. These thoughts are further associated in my mind with low walk totals. So when I look at the National League leaderboard in walk percentage and see Miles Mikolas at 3.9%, I assume, he is good at painting corners. Then I look at his heat maps, and I don’t see that at all.

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Yadier Molina was added to the NL All-Star team on Monday, replacing the injured Buster Posey, who’s been slowed by a bout of inflammation in his right hip and recently received a cortisone shot. Molina’s addition is just the first of a wave that will dull some outrage over the most obvious snubs from Sunday’s roster announcement; on the AL side, Jed Lowrie was named as Gleyber Torres‘ replacement on Tuesday. As Molina is a Star Player of a Certain Age, his ninth selection to the Midsummer Classic in a 10-year span (he missed 2016) set off another round of everybody’s favorite parlor game, Is He a Hall of Famer?. You know I can’t resist buzzing in for that one.

But first, the selection. Molina, who turns 36 on July 13, is having a pretty good season, particularly for a guy who missed a month due to [crosses legs uncomfortably] emergency groin surgery necessitated by a foul tip. He’s currently hitting 274/.317/.484 with 13 homers in 240 plate appearances, and while his on-base percentage is nothing to write home about — how is it a guy who spends half the game minding the strike zone for his pitchers can walk just 5.4% of the time? — his slugging percentage is his highest since 2012, his best offensive season. His 115 wRC+ is his highest since 2013, and it’s lifted his career mark to an even 100. Of the 23 catchers with at least 200 PA this year, that 114 wRC+ is tied for sixth overall. Both MLB leader J.T. Realmuto (149) and fourth-ranked Willson Contreras (122) are already on the NL All-Star squad, with the latter elected the starter.

While Molina’s offense is in a good place in 2018, his defense appears to be off, and not only because he’s thrown out just four out of 19 stolen-base attempts (21%, nearly half of his 41% career mark). Via FanGraphs’ version of catcher defense (which isn’t UZR), he’s 2.4 runs below average, including two below average in the stolen-base component of Defensive Runs Saved. Via the non-pitch-framing version of DRS, he’s four runs below average, while via the framing-inclusive version, he’s two below average. Via Baseball Prospectus’ Fielding Runs Above Average, which includes framing, he’s 2.3 runs above average overall and 3.7 above in the framing component. Via our version of WAR — which, again, does not include framing — Molina’s 1.3 WAR is tied for ninth among catchers overall. Some of that is the impact of his injury; prorate all of the catchers with at least 200 PA to 600 PA and he’s a rounding error out of fifth:

Thus it’s fair to say that his selection isn’t just about 2018 performance but about his reputation and bigger-picture productivity, and as I noted in Monday’s reaction piece to the NL starting outfield of Bryce Harper, Nick Markakis, and Matt Kemp, I’m not one to sweat that.

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