Trade-deadline hysteria can lead to a dehumanization of players. In our effort to feverishly re-imagine our favorite team’s roster, all of us can be guilty of rooting to exchange this piece for that piece without considering all of the havoc that a trade can create for the people concerned.

I don’t mean to be a wet blanket. It’s fun to dream on that big acquisition that will put our teams over the top, and let’s please continue to do so.

But! We can also appreciate how difficult it must be to weather the constant speculation about your status, and then, if the trade is consummated, to then figure out how to move your life to another city — quickly.

So David Laurila and I set out to ask players about the experience. How did they find out? What were the conversations with the family like? What was the emotional roller coaster like? Thanks to the players that opened up, we can get a better sense of the human side of the trade deadline.

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Jeff Samardzija, Giants starting pitcher: “The first time, I watched all the rumors, and it ended up being Oakland, which wasn’t even on the radar, anywhere. The second time around I just ignored it all, and then I almost went to the White Sox and it fell through, and then a few days later it actually happened. Following for entertainment purposes is kinda fun.

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Jonathan Papelbon walked off the mound in Cleveland on Tuesday night with the bases loaded in the ninth inning and no outs. That’s not what you want from your closer. Papelbon put the game in jeopardy by walking Jose Ramirez and giving up a double to Tyler Naquin to begin the inning, which led to a comedy of errors that tied the score and forced a pitching change. Papelbon then watched from the bench as Francisco Lindor beat a ground ball through the right side of the infield against Oliver Perez, completing the second ninth-inning meltdown by the Nationals bullpen in as many games, each initiated by Papelbon.

On the heels of a fruitless pursuit of Aroldis Chapman and amidst continued trade rumors targeting a high-profile relief pitcher, Jon Heyman tweeted the following after Tuesday night’s blowup:

it’s ok not to beat that cubs offer for chapman, but the nats still need a closer. badly.

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) July 27, 2016

And, yeah. Papelbon probably isn’t the greatest high-leverage relief option for a contending team. Among the 32 relievers who’ve recorded at least 10 save opportunities this season, Papelbon’s ERA- ranks 28th, and while that figure did look fine just a few days ago, we can’t pretend that these last two games didn’t happen, and we can’t pretend like the red flags don’t exist either. Papelbon’s lost another half-tick off his velocity from last year, and is now down to averaging under 91 mph on his fastball. The walk rate is higher than it’s been in five years. He’s posting the worst K-BB% of his career and his lowest ground-ball rate since his early days in Boston. More and more of Papelbon’s age is showing, and he now projects as something like the fifth-best reliever on his own team moving forward.

Papelbon projects as something like Washington’s fifth-best reliever, and he’s pitched as something like Washington’s fifth-best reliever, and yet he’s also pitched Washington’s most important innings. Hence, the Nationals looking for outside help regarding their closer role. But, do they really need to go outside the organization? Don’t they already have an elite closer, worthy of trusting in high-leverage innings down the stretch and into the postseason? Don’t they already have Shawn Kelley?

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I was at Progressive Field when Michael Fulmer made the second start of his big-league career on May 5. He wasn’t very good. The Detroit Tigers right-hander gave up a four spot in the first inning and ultimately left having allowed 10 hits and five runs in five innings.

The game in Cleveland exemplified his early outings. In his first four starts, the 23-year-old rookie surrendered 14 earned runs over 19.1 innings. Then he discovered a changeup. Or, perhaps it could be said, the changeup found him.

To say Fulmer has since found success would be an understatement. Over his last 11 starts, the former Mets prospect — Detroit acquired him at last year’s trade-deadline for Yoenis Cespedes — has allowed a grand total of 11 runs over 70 innings. On the season, he has a record of 9-2 to go with a 2.41 ERA.

Fulmer talked about his ascent — including the changeup that seemingly fell from the sky — prior to last night’s game. The pitch will be on display this afternoon when he takes the mound at Fenway Park.

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Fulmer on his development: “There’s hesitation when you first start out. When you’re 18 years old and going into pro ball, you don’t know what to expect. You see big-league guys playing on TV and you’re like, ‘Oh man, that’s going to be so cool. Then you get to the Gulf Coast League and you’re playing at noon. It’s hot and it rains every day. That’s not what I was expecting. I’ve had to learn how it all worked, step by step, at every level along the way.

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I’m going to let you in on a little writer secret. We don’t just write exclusively for traffic, but without traffic, there’s no FanGraphs. So we do want more clicks instead of fewer clicks, and when you’re composing a post about Chris Iannetta, it can be beneficial to disguise the subject. You might not be interested in reading about Iannetta, if you knew that’s what you’d be doing. But now you’re in, see. And you’re probably going to see this whole thing through, because the brain doesn’t want to acknowledge being teased. Now that I think about it, this isn’t a writer secret at all. This is just the Internet. Well anyway, there is something crazy here, so let’s get to that.

Jerry Dipoto didn’t set expectations too high for the Mariners, saying the goal was to build a team that could win 85 games or so. As part of that construction, Dipoto targeted bounceback candidates, and one of them was Chris Iannetta, who was coming off a down year at the plate. At the very least, Iannetta would improve upon the Mariners’ miserable catching baseline from 2015. But there was something even more promising in there: In 2015, Iannetta learned how to frame. He became one of the better catchers with regard to stealing or keeping strikes, and the story all made sense. It was easy to buy into Iannetta as a solid receiver. That, in turn, made it easy to buy into him as a solid regular catcher.

You know what they say about buying into things. Don’t ever bother buying anything. Iannetta’s bat hasn’t bounced back. But, far weirder, the receiving has completely deteriorated.

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It could be argued that, when Atlanta sent Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton Jr. to San Diego last April, it was neither Matt Wisler nor Jordan Paroubeck nor the draft choice they received from the Padres which represented the greatest benefit of the deal for the Braves, but rather the relief from Upton Jr.’s salary. At the time, Atlanta owed more than $45 million to Upton Jr. through the 2017 season. Getting out from under the contract made sense for a club that appeared unlikely to contend anytime soon. Upton Jr., who possessed negative trade value, was nevertheless traded.

Quite a bit has changed in the meantime, it seems. Since arriving in San Diego, Upton Jr.’s on-field performance has improved as the total remaining cost of his contract has decreased. Once a liability, Upton Jr. became a hypothetically tradeable asset — one who was actually traded today, to the Blue Jays, for right-handed prospect Hansel Rodriguez.

There is, of course, some cost to the Padres, who will pay $17 million of the $22 million still owed to Upton Jr. through next season, per Jon Heyman. But that’s not entirely surprising: the trade market currently features a great number of outfielders, something that was true last summer and carried over into the free-agent market last winter. The cost to acquire outfielders simply isn’t very high, and Toronto is benefiting from that glut.

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On Sunday, news broke that the Rockies were ready to call up top prospect David Dahl following his 2016 minor-league stints at both Double-A and Triple-A, both of which were incredibly successful. For a prospect who looked to be thrown off his fast track last year thanks to a spleen injury, the news is joyous for Rockies fans. The high-school standout reaches the majors in his fifth professional season, which in the grand scheme of things, isn’t really that far off course.

While plenty of players from his draft class have already found success in the majors — Carlos Correa, Addison Russell, Corey Seager and Marcus Stroman, and Michael Wacha are other 2012 first rounders who have done well — some still haven’t debuted at all. That list includes three players taken ahead of him — Kyle Zimmer, Max Fried and Mark Appel — and Albert Almora, taken four picks ahead of Dahl, was only just recently promoted.

I think Dahl will be a monster, but don’t take my word for it: read what Eric and Chris have to say about him. As cool as Dahl’s promotion is for the Rockies, it wasn’t his actual promotion that was the most interesting tidbit to come out of his news report. The Rockies, 7-3 since the All-Star break at the time of his call-up (and now 7-4 following a loss last night), suddenly are not yet ready to give up on 2016. Per Thomas Harding of MLB.com:

The callup comes with the Rockies challenging themselves to become a contender. They are 47-51, six games back in the National League Wild Card race.

The Rockies wake up this morning in sixth place for a National League wild-card berth, behind the Dodgers, Mets, Marlins, Cardinals and Pirates, whom they trail by 4.5 games. The Rockies are sort of floating in their own tier, as they have a bit of separation between themselves and the next team in the queue (the Phillies at 8.0 games back).

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Yesterday, the Cubs acquired the final couple of months of Aroldis Chapman’s contract, adding the flamethrowing lefty to their bullpen for the stretch drive, but paying a high cost to win the bidding; shortstop Gleyber Torres is considered a top #25-#50 prospect in baseball, the kind of asset that is worth something like $40 million right now, and they had to throw in some sweeteners on top of that, including a big league pitcher was was worth +2 WAR just last year. Overall, the package of talent the Yankees received was probably worth around $50 million; that’s a staggering price for a rental.

In fact, I think it’s probably correct to say that the Cubs paid more for two months of Chapman than the Red Sox did for 2.5 years of Drew Pomeranz. And while this deal might prove to be an outlier in terms of deadline prices — the Cubs are somewhat uniquely positioned to overpay for relief help, given the strength of the rest of their roster, and how difficult it would have been for them to upgrade at another position — it also looks like a continuation of rising prices for relief pitchers.

Last winter, the Red Sox gave up a significant prospect package to acquire Craig Kimbrel from the Padres, and the Astros put together a five player combination for Ken Giles that the Phillies simply couldn’t turn down. Even the mid-tier relievers benefited, with seemingly every bullpen pitcher with a pulse landing a multi-year contract, and three year deals becoming standard for arms coming off strong seasons. With the game trending more towards shorter outings from starting pitchers and the Royals showing you can win a World Series with lousy starting pitching, teams have begun to alter their calculations on what relievers were worth.

But is this increasing emphasis on specialists an acknowledgment of the growing importance of bullpens, or simply an overreaction to the Royals winning the 2015 World Series on the backs of Wade Davis, Kelvin Herrera, and Ryan Madson?

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The Chicago Cubs paid one hell of a price to acquire Aroldis Chapman yesterday. Maybe the highest we’ve ever seen for a reliever; certainly the highest for a half-season rental. What this post won’t do is answer whether the Cubs paid too much, not enough, or just a little for Chapman’s services. What it won’t do is give you any kind of added indication of how Chapman might perform down the stretch; Chapman’s not only his own person, but he’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. To be honest, this isn’t going to answer much of anything, really, but I’m interested in checking on how similar reliever acquisitions have gone recently. Or, more importantly, seeing if we can even answer that question at all.

I used MLBTradeRumors’ Transaction Tracker to span the last few years for reliever trades and free-agent signings by contenders. The names I picked were subjective, but I hope you all can trust me enough to correctly identify the big ones. Once I had my names, I decided to look for… something.

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Home runs are up! Okay, you’ve noticed that. But here’s a wrinkle: the Rays’ starters have been hit especially hard. Especially in the starting staff. Only the starters for Cincinnati, Kansas City, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh have suffered a greater increase in home runs per nine innings — and those staffs had more turnover. These Rays starters were supposed to be the club’s strength, but the gopher ball has eaten a hole into their value. Why?

To answer, we’ll have to look at the tendencies of the team and the league and the pitchers themselves. I asked Drew Smyly and Chris Archer for help figuring it out, too.

“We’ve all noticed. We’re all talking about it,” said Smyly. “Max Scherzer is giving up 22 home runs, and he’s filthy! Our whole staff has given up like 20 a piece. It’s weird.” I agreed.

But even just establishing as fact that the Rays have been harder hit than other teams is tricky. If you look at home runs per fly ball for the starters, for example, the Rays’ starters have improved actually, from 19th in the league to 23rd this year, even as their HR/FB has risen. It hasn’t risen as badly as other teams have seen around the league!

If you look at the starters with the biggest difference between their projected home-run total and actual, though, the Rays zoom to the top. Smyly is fifth, Archer ninth, Moore 17th, and Odorizzi 34th. They were projected to give up some home runs, but then they got it much worse than the projections suggested they would.

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You’ve undoubtedly heard about the Chapman blockbuster by now. Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen gave his take on the prospects involved. Below, I outline what my newly revamped KATOH projection system thinks about the youngsters headed to the Yankees. I also go on to compare that group to the group the Yankees sent to Cincinnati last December in exchange for Chapman’s services.

Note that I’ve included two types of KATOH projection. KATOH denotes the newest iteration of my projection system, outlined yesterday. KATOH+ denotes a version of that same thing which also accounts for Baseball America’s prospect rankings.

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Gleyber Torres, SS (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 5.6 WAR
KATOH+ Projection: 7.1 WAR

Although he’s just 19, Torres has been one of the more productive hitters in High-A this year. The Venezuelan shortstop is slashing .275/.359/.433 on the year, with an impressive nine homers and 19 steals. In addition to his offensive exploits, Torres plays an uber-premium position and plays it well.

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