In case you hadn’t heard, a lot went down yesterday. Here are the prospects who changed teams on deadline day, as evaluated by my newly updated KATOH system. KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

*****

The Jonathan Lucroy Trade

Lewis Brinson, OF, Milwaukee

KATOH: 7.7 WAR
KATOH+: 9.9 WAR

Brinson posted some terrible numbers in the low minors, but he’s gotten progressively better the past few years, especially in the strikeout department. His 20% strikeout rate from last year was still a bit high, but not alarmingly so. With 31 extra-base hits and 10 steals to his name this year, Brinson has shown a tantalizing power/speed combination.

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The trade of reliever Mark Melancon by the Pittsburgh Pirates to the Washington Nationals sent a clear message: the Pirates are in retool mode. Not rebuild mode — they’re too good for that. And certainly not go-for-it mode — the Pirates barely had a 1-in-10 shot of making the playoffs, and you don’t go for it by trading away one of the best relievers in the game. No, the Pirates were retooling, selling from the immediate future to improve in the very short-term future, and, to a lesser extent, the long-term future. The crux of the return, left-handed reliever Felipe Rivero, will contribute for the Pirates both immediately and moving forward. That’s the difference between he and Melancon — he’ll be sticking around for more than one season. Prospect Taylor Hearn is the longer-term play; small-market teams like the Pirates live for long-term plays.

Which is what makes Monday’s last-minute deal for broken pitching prospect Drew Hutchison — one which allowed them to dump Francisco Liriano’s salary on the Toronto Blue Jays but also cost them prospects Reese McGuire and Harold Ramirez — so puzzling on the surface. While neither prospect cracked Baseball America’s recent top-100 update, McGuire and Ramirez are both legitimate prospects, the type of pieces that can be essential to a franchise like the Pirates by providing cheap value, allowing them to continue chugging along at an affordable operating cost while retaining the pieces that really matter. McGuire is regarded as one of the best defensive catching prospects in the minors, one whose receiving ability alone gives him a near-certain path to the majors. Ramirez is an athletic bat-to-ball outfielder with a plus hit tool who’s playing center in the minors even if he’s likely to move to a corner.

In Hutchison, the Pirates get back a Ray Searage reclamation project, and little more. Hutchison’s still just 25 with some former prospect shine, but the career ERA in more than 400 innings is nearly 5.00, and he’s got a serious home-run problem. Maybe Searage can coax some ground balls out of him.

But Hutchison’s not so much what this deal was about. The motivation behind this deal was clear. It was a straight salary dump. The Blue Jays are taking on the entirety of Liriano’s salary, which amounts to roughly $17 million through the end of next season. They had the space available to take on the money — though it is interesting to wonder how this could impact their ability to re-sign Jose Bautista or Edwin Encarnacion in the offseason — and they were willing to do so for the price of the prospects.

To rationalize this deal from the Pirates’ perspective, you’ve got to believe the organization thinks it can do more with the $17 million and Hutchison to help it win next year and moving forward than it could with Liriano and the prospects. It may be a tough sell, but it is what it is. And to believe that, you’ve got to believe the organization views Liriano as broken.

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Newly acquired Brewers CF Lewis Brinson has superstar level tools that have been undermined throughout his career by excessive strikeouts. A mechanical tweak in 2015 looked like it had unlocked his prodigious potential and he hit .332/.403/.601 across three levels of the minors before a brief but impressive stint in the Arizona Fall League. Brinson’s 2016 season has not gone as well. Mired by a shoulder injury that forced him out of action for about a month, Brinson has hit just .233 this year and his walk rate has completely evaporated.

I think Brinson has 30 homer potential if he can stay healthy, but that’s a real if. He hasn’t played in more than 100 games since 2013, suffering from the shoulder injury this year, a hamstring issue last year, and a quad issue prior to that.

The mechanical changes Brinson has made over the past 18 months or so are substantive. He began loading his hands lower which enabled him to cut down on the distance his bat needs to travel to re-enter the hitting zone. He’s so physically gifted that he can still generate terrific bat speed in that shorter distance and this change also enabled Brinson’s natural bat control to play with more regularity. I’ve seen him hit homers despite failing to fully extend and I think Brinson has plus game power projection. Reports of late are that Brinson’s hands are loading higher again and that he’s become a little long back to the ball.

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As it has been the past few years, the 2016 non-waiver trade deadline brought about a flurry of activity that was hard to keep up with even if it was the only thing you were doing. Since most of us have other things that we have to or would like to occupy our time with, we figured we would save you some hassle and create an omnibus post with all of our trade deadline content so that you have it all in one place. For clarity’s sake, I’m going to limit this to articles about trades that actually took place.

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It doesn’t really matter how you think the Rangers got here. Whether you think it’s been team skill or team luck, whether you believe more in the third-best record or 14th-best run differential, today is the first day of August, and only the Cubs have a bigger division lead around the rest of baseball. The way things are set up, the Rangers are almost certainly going to the playoffs. They need to hang tight, sure, but they’ve been free to build for a playoff series. They sit in an enviable position.

The front office has been busy. A few days ago, they brought in Lucas Harrell and Dario Alvarez. Monday, they paid for Carlos Beltran. And most significantly, they’ve now also paid for Jonathan Lucroy and Jeremy Jeffress. This post is about that last move, and obviously, the key is Lucroy, who’s looked like an excellent fit for the Rangers for months. Lucroy will provide something the Rangers didn’t have, and they’ll get to keep him for another year in 2017. Yet don’t sleep on the Jeffress addition. He’s far from being a throw-in, and he’s going to help this team in October.

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Some trade-deadline decisions are painstakingly difficult. The line between buyer and seller can be microscopically thin and the undeniable appeal of winning win can easily tempt teams to hold onto talented players when logic dictates that selling is the right call. For the Yankees, the decision was harder than it should have been this season. For the Rangers, it was as clear as day.

The Yankees are a .500 team sitting just five-and-a-half games out of a wild-card position, and yet the decision to sell couldn’t have been more obvious to those of us on the outside without emotional or financial stakes on the line. Selling is not part of the Yankees’ M.O. They expect to win and, more often than not, they deliver on that expectation. But with a roster laden with aging veterans and little-to-no evidence of an emergent winning core, the obvious choice was for the Yankees to improve their future outlook by trading players who had minimal chances of being key contributors to the next winning Yankees team. To general manager Brian Cashman’s credit, they made the right call and returned impressive prospect value for relievers Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller. Today, they cashed in another obvious trade candidate and sent Carlos Beltran to the Texas Rangers.

For the Rangers, six games up in the division despite a roster with blatant holes and an unimpressive run differential of +3, the decision to buy was an easy one. They’re a team that’s benefited from luck, but one that also possesses enough core talent that it’s more than conceivable a few roster upgrades could put this team in position to win in October. As has been discussed ad nauseam this season, the American League is lacking for obvious powerhouse postseason favorites, unlike the Senior Circuit which is starkly stratified by roster talent. Add to the mix the fact that the Rangers have a farm system dripping with top-tier talent and now was as good a time as any for the Rangers to push their chips all in.

A Beltran/Rangers pairing was such a strong and evident match on paper that Dave Cameron correctly predicted the trade last week (in addition to the Jeremy Jeffress acquisition!). When looking to upgrade a roster, the first place to check is a team’s weaknesses and the Rangers this season have far and away received the worst production out of the designated-hitter position in the American League thanks primarily to Prince Fielder’s ineffectiveness. With Fielder out for the season and a hitter of Beltran’s quality available on the trade market, this match was kismet.

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While deals for Zach Duke and Mark Melancon might have made it appear as though the price for relief pitching was coming down, the San Francisco Giants, in need of some help at the back end of the bullpen, have just paid a pretty high price to get the left-handed Brewers’ reliever Will Smith.

Here are the full terms.

Giants get:

• Will Smith (RHP)

Brewers get:

• Phil Bickford (RHP)
• Andrew Susac (C)

For the Giants, pursuing a reliever made a lot of sense. They have some useful pieces there, surely: Santiago Casilla has been generally reliable at the the end of the bullpen, Derek Law has pitched well with more exposure, and Hunter Strickland has been solid at time. As a whole, however, the group hasn’t done a lot to add to the Giants’ chances of reaching the postseason this year.

The Giants’ 19.8% strikeout rate is barely ahead of the Colorado Rockies’ (19.7%). By ERA (3.76) and FIP (3.92), the Giants pen sits in the middle of the National League pack. By WAR, however, the team places ahead only of the Arizona Diamondbacks and the abomination the Cincinnati Reds have put together. By Win Probability Added (WPA) among NL relievers, Casilla (0.63, 37th), Strickland (0.53, 39th) and Law (0.52, 40) — who, again, represent the back-end of San Francisco’s bullpen — are well behind the game’s better pitchers. The rest of the relief corps is hovering around zero or worse. They’ve landed someone who should be able to bolster the bullpen significantly this year, and perhaps into future seasons.

In 2015, mostly in the capacity of setting up Francisco Rodriguez, Will Smith was one of the best relievers in baseball, . He made 76 appearances, strinking out 35% of the batters he faced — and no NL reliever without a save had a higher WAR than Smith’s 1.4 mark. He moved into 2016 with the closer role his to lose, but lose it he did when he lost his balance while removing a shoe and twisting his right knee during spring training, an injury which required surgery. Smith hasn’t been as lights out this season, striking out 24% of batters against a 10% walk rate in 22 innings. Although his ERA and FIP have not stabilized due to a couple home runs, his strikeout rate in July has crossed the 30% threshold, providing some encouragement that Smith is on his way back.

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The trade deadline always brings us surprises, but man, this one takes the cake for out-of-nowhere deal that no one could have seen coming.

Source: #Twins acquire Hector Santiago from #Angels.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) August 1, 2016

Nolasco and Meyer from #Twins to #Angels.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) August 1, 2016

Told #Angels–#Twins trade is cash-neutral. Cash going from MIN to LAA presumably.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) August 1, 2016

If you had Hector Santiago for Ricky Nolasco in your trade predictions post, you are either Billy Eppler or Rob Antony, or a crazy person.

So we have two sellers swapping big league starting pitchers at a time when most buyers looking for pitching help can’t find big league starting pitchers to trade for. That’s pretty weird!

On the other hand, I can kind of squint and see this. The Twins get a Twins-like pitcher, a guy who has spent his career beating FIP by inducing a million infield flies, and looks like a perfectly useful mid-rotation starter. The Angels get a guy who controls the strike zone a bit better but has underperformed his FIP forever, making him much worse than his peripherals suggest, and is closer to a replacement level arm. In exchange for downgrading their rotation, the Angels get a lottery ticket pitching prospect in Alex Meyer, who is big and throws hard but can’t command the zone.

The Angels will take on a few million bucks in payroll next year, when Nolasco is due $12 million while Santiago will make less than that in his final arbitration season, but financially, there isn’t a huge difference here. So the Angels just make themselves a bit worse while getting a different innings sponge and admitting that they’re looking long-term.

Why the Twins themselves are the ones acquiring Santiago, I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps they’re going to trade Ervin Santana and wanted to have someone around to eat innings, and thought that Meyer wasn’t too high a price to pay for some credible big league pitching over the next year. If he keeps pitching well, he can probably be flipped for an equally decent prospect this winter or next deadline.

So it’s not like this trade is a disaster or anything. It’s just pretty weird to see a 40-64 team trading for a pitcher with some present value by shipping a prospect to a 47-58 team at the deadline.

Presumably, you’re aware that the Dodgers have been playing well, but, presumably, you’re aware that the Dodgers have been playing well without Clayton Kershaw. In a sense, that’s a good thing — it demonstrates that they’re strong even without their most valuable player. But then, nobody wants to be without Kershaw, and he doesn’t have a timetable to return from his back injury. He might not come back this year at all. The Dodgers have been plowing forward without their ace, and their ace is a big part of the equation.

The rumors were predictable. Big-budget operation, deep farm, rotation hole. The Dodgers got linked to Chris Archer, and the Dodgers got linked to Chris Sale. Observers wanted to see the Dodgers make a splash, because splashes are sexy, and restraint can be boring. In what’s at least their first trade Monday, the Dodgers didn’t make said splash. They didn’t give it up for a No. 1. Except, also, they did, in their own way. The Dodgers have acquired Rich Hill, and Hill has been statistically the best starter in his league.

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The Baltimore Orioles’ vision from 2012 is almost fully formed. In 2011, they selected Dylan Bundy with the fourth-overall pick in the draft, and the following year, they did the same with Kevin Gausman. In 2013, Bundy was the No. 2 overall prospect in the game, according to Baseball America. He was Lucas Giolito. Gausman was No. 26 — he was Jose Berrios. Now, three years later, it’s 2016, and the club is in first place. It’s all going to plan. The Orioles are leading the American League East, and it’s all thanks to their dominant starting rotation, led by workhorse aces Bundy and Gausman — among the most dominant one-two punches in the league.

I’m sorry, what’s that? Everything’s true except for the last part? You’re telling me the Orioles are in first place, but their rotation has a 5.00 ERA? They just traded for Wade Miley? Gausman’s never thrown more than 115 innings in a season and has a career-worst 4.45 FIP and Bundy’s only made three major-league starts? Three?

So, maybe the vision from 2012 isn’t fully realized. But the Orioles are winning, and, despite a bit of a circuitous route in getting there, this is the closest that vision’s ever come to being a reality. Because Dylan Bundy is a starter now. Alongside Gausman in the major leagues, and for the first time in their careers, finally. We’ve been waiting for this for years. And, at the risk of delving too deep into sports talk radio host jargon, Bundy feels like he could be a massively important piece for an Orioles club that badly needs a shot in the arm if it wants to make a deep postseason run. I swear I’m not going to use the phrase “X-Factor.”

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