Heading into last week’s July 31st trade deadline — not to be confused with an actual deadline after which you can no longer make trades, because MLB doesn’t really have one of those — the Phillies were expected to be one of the primary sellers. They had expensive veterans who had openly talked about playing elsewhere in Jonathan Papelbon and A.J. Burnett. They had a right-handed hitter with some power in Marlon Byrd, and there were a bunch of teams looking for right-handed power. They had Jimmy Rollins, an above average big league shortstop, who turns 36 in a few months and could have helped a number of contenders.

And they had Cole Hamels, one of the game’s best left-handed starting pitchers, signed through the 2018 season at salaries that look downright reasonable in baseball’s current economy. Well, it’s now August, and not only do they still have Papelbon, Burnett, Byrd, and Rollins, but they still have Hamels too. The team with the seventh-worst record in baseball did not make a single trade in the month of July, and soldiers on with Hamels surrounded by a group of mostly over-paid under-performers.

Because of their contracts, it remains quite likely that the Phillies can still trade Papelbon, Burnett, Byrd, or Rollins over the next few weeks — or, if someone puts in a waiver claim on any of them, just let them go and be free of the remaining contractual commitment — but Hamels is unlikely to pass through waivers, and the team’s decision to not trade him last week is tantamount to a decision to not trade him during the season.

As Rob Neyer argued last week, there’s merit in keeping Hamels.

If you’re the Phillies, you trade high-priced (or for that matter, low-priced) players who won’€™t be around when you’€™re ready to win again. That’s why you trade Cliff Lee and, of course, you trade Ryan Howard just because. You trade Cliff Lee because he’s locked up through just 2015 (with a team option for 2016), and you trade Ryan Howard because he’s probably never going to do much in terms of actually winning baseball games.

Cole Hamels, though? Cole Hamels is locked up through 2019. That’s one-two-three-four-five seasons after this one. And considering the Phillies current financial edge over much of their competition — thank you massive television moneys! — if they’re not competitive again at some point in the next two or three years, then someone in the front office is probably doing a lousy job…

… Could a trade make sense? Sure. If you’re the Phillies, you ask for the earth and the moon and the sun and the stars. And maybe you can do without the moon.

Otherwise, though, Cole Hamels is the one guy you keep if you’re serious about winning again in this decade.

Now, I like Rob, and we agree on a lot of things — which is probably why I like him so much — but I don’t really agree with the words above, or the Phillies decision to keep Hamels in general. So let me try and lay out the opposing case.

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Several weeks ago, Drew Fairservice talked to Marcus Stroman about a pretty lousy start. There’s a lot in there that’s stuck with me, but in particular it was interesting to see what Stroman said about facing Brett Gardner. An excerpt:

A guy like Gardner, he battles. He’ll battle whatever pitch you’re throwing in there, he’ll foul off. He’s almost the guy you want to force him to put the ball in the play and whatever happens, happens.
[…]
You don’t want to be too “nitpicky” with him. He’s a great hitter but he’s not a guy you want to pitch around. If he gets a hit, he gets a hit. You don’t want to waste pitches.

The numbers have always suggested as much, but Stroman confirmed it from a pitcher’s perspective: the idea with Gardner is to make him put the ball in play early, because he’s only so much of a threat. He’s not a guy you want to be too careful with. He was just ranked the second-best bunter in the American League, and he didn’t get that good by chance. Gardner’s perceived as a pesky, disciplined slap hitter, and pitchers always try to be aggressive around the zone so as to not get unnecessarily fatigued.

As I write this, Gardner’s tied in home runs with Carlos Gomez and Adrian Beltre. He’s ahead of Yasiel Puig and Buster Posey. Gardner’s hit as many home runs as he hit in the majors between 2008 – 2012 combined. For years, Gardner was pitched to like he was one thing. That much remains true, but he’s not that one thing any longer.

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In 2013, Andrew McCutchen was the best player in the National League, and he was rewarded with the NL Most Valuable Player award. In 2014, he and a few others are essentially even for the title of “best NL player,” non-pitcher division, at least among those who were healthy and not on awful teams. (Caveats included because Troy Tulowitzki has been outstanding, but doesn’t have much impact on the pennant race, is on the disabled list and has almost no chance of winning the MVP.) Combine the two years, and he’s easily been the best that the National League has to offer, and although the defensive metrics don’t seem to like him as much this year, he’s out-performing his 2013 on offense, thanks to some additional power.

On Sunday, he injured his left side, with scary statements like “he needed help from someone else to just zip up the travel bag at his feet” tossed around; he’s likely to be placed on the 15-day disabled list, and could miss several weeks in total. At the time this was all coming out before Tuesday’s loss to Miami (note: this was mostly written before the loss and not updated since the idea is to include McCutchen’s full absence, not one game into it), the Pirates were 1.5 games out of first place in the NL Central, but still only in third, since the Cardinals are in second ahead of them. They were a half-game behind the Giants for the second wild card spot, and just 1.5 games ahead of Atlanta in that chase.

Wins could not be more valuable to the Pirates than they are right now, and they just lost one of the five best players in the game. This is really, really bad. Read the rest of this entry »

What follows represents an attempt by the author to utilize the projections available at the site to identify the five starting pitchers whose per-inning WAR projections have most improved since the beginning of the season.

For every pitcher, what I’ve done is first to calculate his preseason (PRE) WAR projection prorated to 150 innings, averaging together Steamer and ZiPS forecasts where both are available. What I’ve done next is to calculate the prorated WAR for every pitcher’s rest-of-season (ROS) WAR projection (again, using both Steamer and ZiPS when available). I’ve then found the difference in prorated WAR between the preseason and rest-of-season projection.

Only those pitchers have been considered who (a) are currently on a major-league roster and (b) have recorded at least 50 innings at the major-league level and 20 innings this season and (c) are expected to work predominantly as a starter for the duration of the season. Note that PRE denotes a player’s combined Steamer and ZiPS preseason projection; ROS, the rest-of-season projection. Diff is difference between the prorated ROS projections and the PRE one. Data is current as of Tuesday.

5. Chase Anderson, RHP, Arizona (Profile)

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You might not have heard, but Jose Abreu is a pretty good hitter.

Who am I kidding, you’ve heard about that by now. You also probably heard he just wrapped up a 21-game hitting streak. That’s the second-longest streak in the majors this season. You might have heard it was the second time this year he’s had a hitting streak of at least 18 games. He’s a rookie. Rookies don’t really do that. Then you might have heard that those two hitting streaks were separated by just one game. That means you probably heard, or at this point just deduced yourself, that Jose Abreu recorded a hit in 39 of 40 consecutive games. During that second hitting streak, you might have heard he had a stretch of 10 consecutive plate appearances in which a pitcher failed to get him out. These are all really good things to say about a hitter.

Prior to Abreu reaching base in 39 of 40 games, he had reached base in 7 of his last 10. Prior to that, he was on the disabled list with a foot injury. That stint on the DL serves as a pretty convenient place to split Abreu’s season into two halves. What you see looks like two different hitters:
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The July 31 trading deadline came and went last week, with quite a bang. Numerous deadline deals were consummated, with players of varying pedigree changing uniforms. David Price and Jon Lester were the big names, but perhaps the most notable aspect of the proceedings was the movement of incumbent major league regulars by contending clubs, such as Yoenis Cespedes and Austin Jackson, in lieu of or in addition to minor league prospects in pursuit of the biggest fish available.

“Deadline” is a somewhat misleading term, however, as trades will continue to be made throughout the month of August. A whole new bunch of arcane industry rules apply, however, in the August waiver trading period, creating a cat-and-mouse game where teams must not only know which players they covet and are willing to give up, but also which players their competition wants, prompting aggressive moves to block their rivals. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Boston Red Sox cut ties with A.J. Pierzynski, there were two benefits. One was the team no longer had to put up with Pierzynski. The other was that Boston got to take a look at Christian Vazquez. The prospect is 15 games into his major-league career, and while he’s not the only young and talented catcher in the system, for the time being he’s on top of the mountain. Vazquez is getting to show off his skills, and one of them — you already know which one, I bet — has been spectacular.

I know how early it still is. I don’t care. Vazquez has long had the reputation of being an outstanding defensive catcher with a little bit of offensive upside. He’s always been praised for his skills in the field, so that’s our background: We already had reason to believe in Vazquez’s defense. He’s had only a few blocking opportunities. He’s had only a few throwing opportunities. He’s had more than 1,000 framing opportunities. Though it’s been only a few weeks, all the evidence suggests Vazquez is one of the best receivers in baseball.

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Hey there everybody, and welcome to the second part of the year’s fourth edition of The Worst Of The Best. Here is a link to the complete series archive, for you to bookmark and never revisit, like most of the rest of your bookmarks. And here’s a link to Monday’s first part, covering July’s wildest pitches. I’m sitting on a patio right now, and as I’ve been writing this, a large number of crows has been pecking around in a nearby field. Then the crows lifted off, save for one, who remains on the field with what appears to be an injured wing. So, apparently I’m going to be writing this while sad. And a little confused. How did the crow join up with the group in the first place? How recently did it injure its wing? Has it been in the field the whole time, and the other crows just came down to hang out and keep it company? Were the other crows actually being compassionate? Nevermind, apparently I’m going to be writing this while hopeful?

You’re going to see the wildest swings attempted in the month of July, as determined by distance from the center of the strike zone. As a consequence of the method, all the swings are pretty much similar, because nobody swings at a pitch that misses three feet high or outside. So the fun’s in the little distinguishing details, provided any can be identified. There’s a top-five list and a next-five list, and this list of lists also includes a couple bonus entries that I couldn’t in good conscience leave unincluded. I always make sure to leave out checked swings and swing attempts during hit-and-runs, but by the latter I mean I’m willing to show those as bonuses, like I am right here. Those swings shouldn’t count toward the official countdown, but they should also absolutely be displayed so we can all have a good laugh. Laughter is the best medicine, if you aren’t actually sick with a disease.

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Let’s talk for a second about Scott Carroll, a generally unknown right-handed 29-year-old rookie pitcher for the White Sox, although this isn’t really going to be about Scott Carroll. He doesn’t throw all that hard, topping out at around 91 mph. He doesn’t get a lot of strikeouts, but he also doesn’t limit walks particularly well, leading to the second-worst K%-BB% in baseball, minimum 80 innings. When he survives, it’s because of a somewhat-decent ability to get grounders. If and when the White Sox are good again, he’s probably not going to be a big part of it, but for a back-end starter on a bad team, you get by with what you can. Needless to say, Carroll exists in the big leagues on a razor-thin margin of error, though he’s occasionally capable of bursts of brilliance, like taking a one-hit shutout into the seventh inning against the Red Sox last month.

With all that working against him, for Carroll to succeed, a lot of things have to go very right. You’ll be forgiven if you didn’t pay much attention to Saturday’s huge Carroll/Yohan Pino matchup between the fourth-place White Sox and last-place Twins, but now matter how unimportant a game may seem, there’s always something of interest to be found. Unfortunately for Carroll, what he found was umpire Gary Cederstrom having what looked like a very bad day.

A really bad day, actually. Thanks to the wonderful Baseball Savant, we can look at umpires and see who called the most supposed strikes (per the PitchF/X zone) as balls. Since the start of 2013, this game ranked pretty highly… Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a regular FanGraphs reader, you probably know that I’m somewhat fascinated by market valuations, and have spent a decent amount of time talking about the price of a win in the baseball economy. Most of that effort is concentrated around the off-season, when teams are signing free agent contracts, since that is the most obvious place where a team is buying expected future wins with cash. However, free agency isn’t the only market, and the prices paid in free agency don’t necessarily apply to the other markets where teams can acquire talent.

We can say with some confidence that the average price per win in free agency last winter was around $6 to $7 million. What do they pay to add wins mid-season, though? We’re pretty sure the price is higher based on observation, and realistically, it should be higher; buyers have more information and more certainty about their playoff chances, and can assume that they are at a different point of return on investment than they can over the winter, when their playoff odds are lower. The value of a win doesn’t inherently change, but contenders now know which wins they’re likely to be buying, and the premium value of the marginal wins that get you into the playoffs push prices up.

But how much higher is the cost of a win in July versus in the off-season? This isn’t an an easy question to answer, because teams are generally not just exchanging expected future wins for cash, but are exchanging one player for several other players. Instead of having the known cost in dollars, we’re now mostly dealing with unknown values on both sides of the ledger, so this exercise will necessarily be less precise. But it still might be worth doing, even if we have to put a lot of caveats on the data in the process.

So, while admitting that this is about as inexact as science can get, let’s try and figure out what the market price of a win was in July.

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