The Cardinals are reportedly kicking the tires on David Price and Jon Lester, and presumably, they’ve probably at least inquired about Cole Hamels. It’s no secret that they’re looking for pitching, and they both the means and the motive to make a big move. And not surprisingly, trade rumors with the Cardinals inevitably invoke Oscar Taveras‘ name.

According to all the prospect guys, Taveras is the Cardinals best prospect, and one of the best prospects in the game. But while I’m not a prospect expert by any means, I will say that I hold some reservations about Taveras’ long-term value, as I think he fits the mold of the hitter that prospect analysts miss on the most often.

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Oh, hanging curve
Shapely and round, you are
With the touch of a finger and the flick of a wrist,
You’re sent spinning, darting downward,
Destined for Your Leather Sanctuary
Perhaps, first, met with a kiss from the Earth!
But nay
Neither governed by gravity nor man,
You stand tall
Proud – and erect – for the world to see
Fearlessly perpetuating your fleeting, floating existence
For just a moment too long, before:
*thwack!*
A new trajectory is born
At the hands of your nemesis:
That unforgiving maple lumber
Helplessly hurtling,
You shoot scowls toward your maker between rapid rotations
“What have I done to deserve this?”
Before long, you reach Your Leather Sanctuary
But it is not the one you’ve grown to love
No, like a hard bed at the Motel 6: you rest, uneasy
Disappointment looms on the face of many
Josh Beckett seems not to care.
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The Pittsburgh Pirates don’t have much of a recent history of buying. This is because the Pirates don’t have much of a recent history of winning. But the team was somewhat active during each of the past two seasons. In the middle of 2012, the Pirates added guys like Wandy Rodriguez, Gaby Sanchez and Travis Snider. In the middle of 2013, they added guys like Marlon Byrd, Justin Morneau, John Buck and… Robert Andino? The Pirates were happy to make some tweaks, but they didn’t want to do anything too big, because they’ve been thinking longer-term. They haven’t been positioned to give up prospect talent.

Well, it’s 2014. And the Pirates are good again. They’ve been rumored to be in the mix for some smaller bits, but Tuesday brought word of a potential blockbuster:

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a fast-emerging dark horse in the Jon Lester sweepstakes, joining the Los Angeles Dodgers in pursuit of the Boston ace as the Red Sox decide whether to trade him before Thursday’s deadline, major league sources told Yahoo Sports.

Lester’s a big fish. Arguably the biggest fish out there. He’s also a rental fish, in whatever kind of market it is where you rent fish. The Pirates haven’t previously targeted moves like this, but this season not only are they in the mix — they seem like a perfect match. The Pirates check off all the boxes on the Jon Lester trade-partner checklist.

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While this is definitely a gross simplification, there are essentially two competing schools of thought on how to construct a roster: emphasize talent at the top of the roster — the Stars and Scrubs approach, as it is often called — or spread the wealth around to limit glaring weaknesses. To be sure, either approach can work, as the reality is that the total production level is more important than the distribution of that production within the roster, but there are certainly differing camps who prefer one strategy or the other.

The argument in favor of the Stars and Scrubs approach has a lot of overlap with the argument for the non-linear valuation of WAR. As the argument goes, one +6 WAR player is worth more than two +3 WAR players, because it is easier to upgrade on a +0 WAR player than a +3 WAR player, so if you start out with +6 and +0, you can upgrade the +0 guy to a +1 or +2 WAR player and come out with a higher overall level of production.

I think the theory has a few problems, however.

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When the Royals and Rays matched up on the big James Shields/Wil Myers (and others) trade in the winter of 2012-13, the judgement from the baseball community was swift and decisive. It wasn’t necessarily that you couldn’t trade a budding star like Myers away under any circumstances; after all, plenty of people liked the Jeff Samardzija / Jason Hammel trade for Oakland even though it cost them Addison Russell. It was that the 2013 Royals, unlike the 2014 A’s, didn’t appear to be close enough to success to make a “win-now” move at that price. It was that the Royals already had a Jeff Francoeur-sized hole in right field and could have made a similar overall improvement by just putting Myers out there instead.

It seemed that Dayton Moore was trading the future for the present, even though the present wasn’t likely to work out, and so far, that’s been the case. The 2013 Royals won 86 games, a huge 14-game improvement over the 72-win 2012 team, but didn’t come close to the playoffs. The 2014 Royals are two games over .500, and our latest playoff odds give them just a 14.7 percent chance of making it to October. Recent reports that they’re looking for a right-handed right fielder have led to some pretty easy snark considering who they gave away. Dave wrote last week that they should trade Shields now, since he’s an impending free agent; I argued that they were the team most likely to mistakenly “go for it” before the deadline.

If the Shields trade was made on the premise that they needed to get to the playoffs for it to be a success, then it certainly looks like it’s going to be a failure, just as most predicted the day it was made. Needless to say, nearly two years later, the trade still looks bad for Kansas City… but maybe not exactly in the way that we might have thought. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, Cooperstown looked as it should on induction day. A good crowd, in a beautiful, heavenly part of America, paying tribute to well deserving — and just as importantly, living — awardees. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been this way often enough in recent seasons, as the BBWAA has had a difficult time electing members, for reasons both within and outside of their control. To that end, they have enacted a rule tweak, with the desired impact of clearing up the ballot that has become saturated in recent years. Eligible players may now remain under BBWAA consideration for 10 years, instead of 15. Is this the magic bullet that is going to make the voters’ problems go away, or might this simply be a “rearranging the deck chairs”-type move that takes the onus off of the actual problem? Read the rest of this entry »

There are a few annual series we run here at FanGraphs. One of them is the annual trade-value series, where Dave gets to write glowingly about Mike Trout. Another one of them is the annual positional power rankings series, where some randomly assigned lucky author gets to write glowingly about Mike Trout. The positional power rankings are intended to highlight the strongest positions in baseball, but you can’t identify the strongest without also identifying the weakest. Granted, the rankings are only as strong as the projections, but the projections are solid, and so, here were the five weakest projected positions coming into the 2014 regular season:

• Mets bullpen, -2.3 standard deviations from average
• Astros rotation, -2.1
• Marlins first basemen, -2.1
• Marlins third basemen, -1.9
• Blue Jays second basemen, -1.9

Nothing in there was shocking. And a lot of that stuff wasn’t particularly relevant. Only the Blue Jays, out of that group, were looking to contend. So there was a lot of conversation in spring training about what the Blue Jays were going to do at second base. Their solution back then: nothing! The situation, however, has changed. All of the situations have changed to some degree, because the future always introduces new information. The point of all this: Those were the five worst projected positions coming into the year. How have the players at those positions actually done? How have the teams actually maneuvered?

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Here at FanGraphs, a normal post runs in the range of 1,000 words. We’re wordy folk, basically. But sometimes, we have things that might be interesting at 200 words and would be ridiculously boring at 1,000 words. Maybe it’s a link to something someone else wrote, or simply a fun little tidbit from the leaderboards. Or, hey, the Astros just offended someone else, but what else is new? These things are worth pointing out, but not worth writing eight paragraphs about, so they’ve generally ended up on the cutting room floor. Or Twitter.

Over the last few months, I did a few experiments with shorter posts on the site, and the reaction was mostly positive, so today, we’re launching a dedicated section for these kinds of posts, and we’re calling it InstaGraphs. Essentially, this will be the place for things that are interesting enough to note but aren’t full articles, though maybe eventually they’ll turn into one. Or maybe not. Maybe they’re just interesting standalone items that don’t need extrapolation.

InstaGraphs will be part of the main FanGraphs blog, but we wanted to make it a little more clear when you should expect 200 words and a GIF instead of 1,000 words and a formula, so you’ll note the new InstaGraphs box on the home page; the most recent articles will show up there, and you’ll be able to click through straight from that dedicated box.

Overall, we think InstaGraphs will be a fun place to note things that otherwise probably wouldn’t have turned into content, and hopefully you guys will enjoy the extra pieces each day. Just a heads up, though: it will probably mean more Cistulli GIFs of mediocre curveballs from the California League. You’ve been warned.

The most unfair thing to imagine in baseball is Aroldis Chapman learning a knuckleball. The next-most unfair thing to imagine in baseball is Aroldis Chapman learning a changeup. This year Aroldis Chapman got around to learning a changeup, and things got weird. When we last checked in on June 19, batters had attempted 14 swings against the change, and not a single one of those swings had made any kind of contact. Later that day, Pirates batters attempted two more swings against the change, and both of them whiffed. So, at one point this year, through 16 swings, Chapman’s changeup had a contact rate of 0.0%. That’s a low rate that put Chapman’s change among the league leaders.

I thought it would make sense to check back in, now that more than a month has passed. I’m fascinated to no end by the idea of Chapman throwing an offspeed pitch, but sadly, it would appear that Chapman and the changeup are on a bit of a break. Not that it isn’t understandable. And not that Chapman needs a changeup to be a good reliever. He really, really doesn’t. I can’t emphasize this enough. Chapman in whatever form is amazing. It’s just that the most hilarious pitch in baseball is taking a nap.

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Not too long ago, Dave ran through his annual trade value series. Predictably, he ranked the most valuable player in baseball as being Mike Trout. Less predictably, but still predictably, he ranked the most anti-valuable player in baseball as being Albert Pujols. Mike Trout and Albert Pujols are teammates! A fun question, then, that showed up in a chat: does Pujols cancel Trout out? In other words, would it make sense for the Angels to package Trout and Pujols together for nothing? It’s totally hypothetical and unrealistic, but it’s an awesome thought experiment, and when Dave ran the numbers, he determined that, no, the package still has value because Trout is that amazing.

So, we’ll never see a trade involving Albert Pujols to offset Mike Trout. But perhaps we could see a deal with a similar design. Playing the part of Pujols: Matt Kemp. Playing the part of Trout: not a guy like Trout at all, but an interesting and talented young prospect. See, it would appear the Dodgers are motivated to move Kemp to another team, and given his salary commitment, there are a few ways the Dodgers could make Kemp more appealing.

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