Hey there everybody, and welcome to the first part of the year’s fourth edition of The Worst Of The Best. Here is a link to all of the previous editions, if you like the feeling of completeness. Now, let’s all agree on something: there are few things in the world more important than your own happiness. Your own happiness is a function not of your possessions, but of your psychological and possibly spiritual health. Many people consider themselves perfectionists, and might end up upset because they can’t meet their own impossible standards. All right, so, you’re going to see some pitchers. These pitchers are amazing! They have to be to be where they are. You’re going to see these pitchers make huge, obvious, embarrassing mistakes, and yet it doesn’t change anyone’s opinion of them. In the grand scheme of things, these mistakes are irrelevant, and evaluations are based on the entire body of work. Here are some of the best professionals in the world, messing up and having it not really matter. If you’re a perfectionist, then, give yourself a break. You’re allowed to screw up. More: people probably won’t even notice if you do somehow screw up. Or they’ll just forget right away, because everyone else is wrapped up in their own business. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Chris Tillman isn’t. (Spoiler alert)

Here will be the wildest pitches thrown in July, following the usual methodology of PITCHf/x and math and sorting. It’s all determined by distance from the center of the strike zone, and you’re going to see a top-five list, and a next-five list, and there’s also a bonus entry in there based on a tip I got from a few people on Twitter. Thank you, Internet friends! You’re all welcome to come over to my Internet house. But please not my actual house, I don’t have enough chairs. Also the actual reason. Something that will matter to you more in a few minutes: Chris Tillman also just missed the next-five list, by two spots. Here we go, together.

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Marcus Stroman has all the looks of an ace in the making. The 23-year-old Toronto Blue Jays righthander has won seven of his first nine big-league decisions and has a 3.03 ERA and a 2.97 FIP. Remove six-and-a-third relief innings from the equation and his ERA is 2.12.

Drafted 22nd overall in 2012 out of Duke Universiry, Stroman thrives on power and diversity. His radar readings regularly reach 95 and his repertoire includes two- and four-seam fastballs, a cutter, a slider, a curveball and a changeup. The rookie has allowed just one run over his last 21 innings. His ability to keep hitters off balance is a big reason why.

“I have a really good mix right now,” acknowledged Stroman earlier this week. “They can’t sit on any one pitch and over the course of a game I’m using all of them.”

The Red Sox found that out recently, as the righty dominated them in back-to-back outings. Among those impressed with his repertoire was Brock Holt, who was 16 for his last 34 coming into his first meeting with Stroman.

“When I faced him in Toronto, he struck me out three times,” said Holt. “He’s got good stuff. He’s fearless and can throw everything for strikes. He’s got a good sharp slider-curveball, whatever it is. He can back-foot it to lefties, go underneath your hands. He throws a little cutter and a good two-seam he can run back. He’s got a changeup. I mean, he’s got pretty much everything.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays traded David Price and people don’t like it. Everyone, for the most part, accepts the position the Rays were put in. But consensus seems to be the return is underwhelming. There is no Addison Russell. Perhaps there could’ve been an Addison Russell. An ace was turned into non-ace-level talents, but when you’re able to step back and separate yourself from the initial shock, you can see sense in the move that was made. You can see how it addresses the Rays’ goal to keep winning on a budget.

When you talk about moving a player like Price, you’re always looking for that key to the return. You figure he ought to be worth a top-level prospect and change, and there was talk the A’s made Russell available to the Rays shortly before they shipped him to the Cubs. Russell’s quite probably a top 10 prospect in the league, and you can’t say that for Drew Smyly, or Nick Franklin, or Willy Adames. The Rays didn’t end up trading for a potential young superstar. What they traded for instead was greater certainty, greater odds of lower ceilings. The value they got is the value of being young and major-league ready.

The most valuable asset in baseball is the young and cheap star. That’s the guy who delivers a great performance for something close to the league minimum. Then you’ve got the high-level prospects who are knocking right on the door. This is a player like Oscar Taveras, but based on reports, the Cardinals didn’t make Taveras available, and in fact they cleared the path for him to play more often by subtracting Allen Craig. After that you’ve got a choice to make. You can look for greater talent at a lower level, or you can take lesser and more polished talent high in the system. With the former, you’ve got higher ceilings and higher bust rates. With the latter, you’ve got safety and projectability.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

It’s not so bad in the bigger picture. Since the start of last season, Chris Davis has been worth more than seven wins, equal on our pages to the contribution from Jayson Werth. That’s not quite superstar-level, but that’s pretty damned good, and you’d think just based on that that the Orioles are pleased with their slugging first baseman. But since the start of this season, of course, Davis has looked like a different player. Or, Davis has looked like an identical player, but he’s performed like a different player. He’s basically tied in WAR with Garrett Jones, and Mike Petriello tells me he recently heard an Orioles fan complaining about Davis pinch-hitting for Delmon Young. Things are weird.

The Orioles, as a whole, are weird. They’re right where they want to be, in first place, but they’re in first having gotten very little out of Davis. They’re in first having gotten very little out of the injured Matt Wieters. They’re in first having only recently started to get production out of Manny Machado. They’re in first having gotten very little out of Ubaldo Jimenez. In order to hang on, the Orioles are probably going to need their most talented players to step up down the stretch. You can count Davis among them, but he’ll have to shake off a season-long slump, a slump we can isolate to one particular part of his game.

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Bud Selig has been giddy watching baseball teams attract bigger and bigger local television deals. More local TV revenue to a team means more money for the league to spread via revenue sharing and greater competitive balance. And Bug Selig sure loves competitive balance. On a recent visit to PNC Park, Major League Baseball’s commissioner told Pittsburgh Pirates broadcasters that he got “goosebumps” watching the Reds and Pirates square off in last year’s postseason.

But big local TV contracts aren’t all Skittles and puppies. Certainly not for fans who are forced to pay higher and higher cable and satellite TV bills to watch their home team. Nor for cable and satellite TV customers who don’t care about baseball but have to pay the higher prices as part of their bundled programming.

It turns out that big local TV contracts aren’t always good news for teams either. That has turned Selig’s mood quite sour.

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Note: This morning, I noticed that Baseball Prospectus did a piece with the same basic premise. We aren’t trying to copy their content; both of us just had the same idea. Go read their piece too.

Yesterday, a bunch of teams made trades, and a bunch of conclusions were drawn about what these trades mean. The Angels did nothing and are now screwed! The Cardinals will now run away with the NL Central! Good luck competing with the Orioles now, Blue Jays!

As we’ve written countless times over the years, though, one individual baseball player doesn’t matter very much in the grand scheme of things, and two months of one individual baseball player really doesn’t matter all that much. As you might expect, the postseason odds from today look an awful lot like the postseason odds from yesterday, even after all the trades were processed and the depth charts updated. Good teams got a little more good and bad teams occasionally got a little worse, but there were no seismic shifts in our future expectations.

However, there were some changes, and it’s worth looking at what changed the most. To note; we ware not isolating the effects of solely the trade a team made, but the entire effects of all of the moves on the league yesterday, as well as the games played last night. So, it’s not quite correct to say that the complete difference in odds from yesterday to today was due to Player X’s acquisition, since we’re also incorporating some changes in the standings from yesterday morning as well.

Caveats aside, let’s get to some data.

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Well, that’s about the most active trade deadline I can remember, though it might not feel that way if you live in Philadelphia, Colorado, or Toronto. Still, some big deals happened, some small deals happened, and a bunch of players are changing uniforms. We’ve written about most of the deals, with multiple angles on all the big ones. To make them easy to find, here’s one big post to find all our reactions in one spot. As we add more write-ups, we’ll add them here as well.

Thanks for hanging out and breaking all kinds of FanGraphs traffic records, everyone.

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Today was quite the deadline spectacle, with two of the best pitchers in baseball, Jon Lester and David Price, changing uniforms. The Lester deal hit early, and it was an eye-opener, with the “buyer” A’s “selling” their #4 hitter, Yoenis Cespedes in the process. The movement of established players, such as Cespedes, Allen Craig and Joe Kelly, by buyers in pursuit of their needs came to be one of the themes of the day.

As they often do, however, the Tampa Bay Rays zigged while everyone else zagged, and “sold” ace lefty David Price to the Tigers in a three-team deal that sent Austin Jackson to the Mariners, and lefty starter Drew Smyly and infielders Nick Franklin and Willy Adames to the Rays. The reaction of many media outlets to the Rays’ take had a quizzical or even disappointed tone. It takes a little more analysis – and an understanding of the way the underfunded Rays need to do business – to see what they’re up to here. To put it simply, the Rays are trusting their solid organizational evaluation skills as they have many times in the past, and see an abundance of talent and team control in this three-player package. Read the rest of this entry »

In one of the smaller moves of the day, the Mariners dealt Abraham Almonte and another minor leaguer to the Padres for Chris Denorfia. It wasn’t a trade that caught much attention, because neither of the younger guys is of any real consequence, and Denorfia is a rental having a down season. It was just something that flew by, completely under the radar, and now something you should consider is that Almonte began the season as the Mariners’ starter in center field.

So it could be said that, later on Thursday, the Mariners addressed a need that was ever so desperate. They didn’t end up with David Price, but they did get themselves involved in the deal, adding Austin Jackson and subtracting Nick Franklin. Jackson has only another eight months of team control, and it would appear he might’ve peaked in 2012. But while Jackson hasn’t been playing like a star-level player, for the Mariners he ought to be an upgrade of some very real significance.

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The last two years, the Tigers have beaten the A’s in the American League Division Series. In both years, it went the full five games, with the A’s falling just short. The A’s have spent the last month trying to make sure that doesn’t happen again, loading up their rotation with Jeff Samardzija, Jason Hammel, and now Jon Lester.

Maybe the Tigers would have done this anyway. We’ll never know, of course, but what we do know is that the Tigers acquired David Price this afternoon, bolstering their own rotation to make a pitching staff that is unlike anything we’ve seen in a while.

This is what their current starting five has done over the last calendar year.

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