Growing up, the closest minor-league club to me was the Richmond Braves. This was the late 90s and many top prospects who would go on to major-league careers came through town for a season. My scorebook from those years is filled with games that included former major leaguers Andruw Jones and Bruce Chen, along with lesser luminaries such as Wes Helms and Odalis Perez. The Braves moved to Gwinnett after the 2008 season, and the Flying Squirrels — the Giants’ Double-A affiliate — would move to Richmond in 2010.

The parade of prospects slowed a bit after the Flying Squirrels arrived. Buster Posey skipped Double-A, Brandon Belt’s 2010 breakout helped propel him to a top-100 prospect. However, without question, the biggest prospect who stayed in Richmond for any length of time was Kyle Crick. He arrived in 2014 as the 32nd-best prospect in baseball according to MLB.com. He proceeded, however, to stay in town for three seasons without being promoted or demoted. Needless to say, his prospect light dimmed during that period.

When Crick was promoted to Fresno in 2017, it was more out of a need to see if he had any chance of reaching the majors that season, as he was eligible to become a minor-league free agent at the end of the year. He would eventually make it to the Giants’ bullpen and then, later, to Pittsburgh as part of the Andrew McCutchen deal.

In Pittsburgh, Crick has become a serviceable bullpen option, combining with Richard Rodriguez and Felipe Vazquez to helm a bullpen unit that ranks among the league’s top 10 in K/9, FIP, and xFIP. The success of all three has been unexpected — Crick included, despite his prospect pedigree. By leaning on his long-held strengths and gaining a modicum of control over his weaknesses, Crick has been able to end his long minor-league odyssey and has found success in the majors, albeit in a role which he had hoped to avoid.

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The Angels traded 31-year-old glove-first catcher Martin Maldonado to Houston yesterday in exchange for Astros 21-year-old LHP Patrick Sandoval. The Astros signed Sandoval away from a USC commitment with a $900,000 signing bonus in 2015. He was their 11th-round pick. He has tracked through the minors at an even pace, amassing 97 strikeouts in 88 innings split between Low- and High-A this season while also reducing his walk rate to half (4.3%) of what it was last year (8.5%).

Sandoval’s fastball sits 88-92 and will top out around 94. He can really spin a 12-6 curveball, one that’s above average when Sandoval is getting on top of it. Effectively, Sandoval has an almost perfectly vertical arm slot, but the way he gets there is somewhat odd and there’s some skepticism among scouts as to the sustainability of this year’s uptick in strike-throwing. There’s enough of a changeup here for continued development in a rotation and, if everything clicks, Sandoval will be a No. 4 or 5 starter. If not, he’s a lefty with a good breaking ball and a fine bullpen candidate. It’s a fair return for a backup catching rental.

Had Sandoval gone to USC, he’d have been draft eligible this year. Comparable college lefties in this year’s draft would have been Nationals second-rounder Tim Cate from UConn, and White Sox third-rounder, Mississippi State lefty Konnor Pilkington. Cate is a better athlete than Sandoval and the breaking ball is a little better. He signed for slot a 65th overall, $986,200. Pilkington’s stuff is closer to average across the board. I’d have him behind Sandoval just on stuff. He signed for $650,000, slightly below slot at pick No. 81. I think Sandoval would have fit somewhere in that range on draft day, which means the Astros properly valued him three years ago and used an 11th-round pick to acquire a future second- or third-round talent for second- or third-round money. It also means Sandoval probably got an equal or better bonus than he would have this year, and he’s further along the developmental path than most his age-appropriate peers from the 2018 collegiate draft class.

An impromptu conversation will sometimes glean quality interview material, and that was the case earlier this season when I chewed the fat with Scott Emerson in the visiting dugout at Fenway Park. The Oakland pitching coach loves discussing his craft, and that fact came to the fore when an answer to a question about an individual member of the A’s staff segued into what you’re about read here. From the importance of staying closed in a delivery to the value of disrupting timing and attacking weaknesses — with boxing, bullets, and airplane analogies thrown in for good measure — Emerson had a lot to offer.

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Scott Emerson on pitching: “Some guys can create the analytic everybody is looking for with a bad delivery. What I mean by that is they bail out in their delivery and the hitters see the ball better. We can’t quantify the hitters seeing the ball, but the longer they see it — no matter what the spin rates are — the more it takes away from the effectiveness of the pitch. It gives the hitter the advantage.

“Sometimes it’s, ‘Oh, this guy can spin it,’ and people are wondering ‘Why does he have a 6.00 ERA?’ Well, he has a 6.00 ERA because he doesn’t hang onto his mechanics well enough. He exposes the ball to the hitter sooner. It’s like a boxer bailing out on a punch. If we’re boxing and I open up too much, I’m exposed and you can hit me with a left hook. But if I’m driving through you, I’m not exposing myself. I’m not giving you the opportunity to beat me up.

“For instance, when Daniel Mengden is really good, he stays closed longer. He’s down the lane, down the slope, closed, and then he explodes out of it. When he gets himself in trouble is when he wants to overthrow. His front shoulder bails out and he exposes the baseball to the hitter. That gets him in trouble.

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In late July, basically every contender is in pursuit of starting pitching in some form or another, whether it’s an ace who can make an impact in the playoffs or a rotation piece who can help the club survive the duration of the season.

That’s certainly the case for the Chicago Cubs. While the club actually does currently have five experienced and healthy starters — plus Yu Darvish — what they need most is quality starting pitching. The team’s starters have put up a 4.76 FIP and accumulated just 3.0 WAR, ranking 25th in baseball and outpacing only the Reds by that measure in the National League. It has quite possibly been one of the franchise’s worst rotations ever so far. And even after accounting for Cubs’ above-average defense, the team still only places in the middle of the pack in terms of run-prevention. In order to give themselves the best possible chance of qualifying for the postseason, Chicago needed better starting pitching.

Last night, they attempted to meet that need, reaching an agreement with the Texas Rangers to acquire left-hander Cole Hamels.

In Hamels, the Cubs receive a pitcher who’s recorded a good road ERA while having performed less well in a very tough pitcher’s park. It stands to reason, as Buster Olney himself reasoned yesterday afternoon, that a change in scenery alone — to a better park, to a league without the designated hitter — might lead to much better performances for Hamels. While there might be something to that, it’s important to remember that similar sentiments accompanied Tyler Chatwood’s arrival in Chicago. Now Hamels is probably taking Chatwood’s job.

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Just last week, Kiley McDaniel finished up this year’s Trade Value series. The Trade Value series represents an attempt to rank all the best assets in baseball while accounting for player skill, age, and contract status all simultaneously. One player who didn’t appear in the series was Cardinals infielder Matt Carpenter, not even in the Honorable Mention section.

At that time, Carpenter was having a fine season, having recorded a 142 wRC+ and 3.2 WAR in 378 plate appearances. However, at 32 years old and with two-and-a-half seasons of control remaining on salaries of $14.5 million in 2019 and $18.5 million ($2 million buyout) in 2020, McDaniel reasonably left Carpenter off the list.

In his first eight games after the All-Star Break, however, Carpenter added 1.1 WAR to his season total, hitting .400/.500/1.100 with a 307 wRC+ during that stretch. His WAR was 21st in baseball at the end of the first half, but now it ranks seventh in the sport and first in the National League. His .275/.384/.579 batting line is good for a 155 wRC+, which is second in the NL and eighth in baseball, just ahead of Jesus Aguilar and Manny Machado. His season totals are even more amazing when you consider that on May 15, Carpenter was hitting .140/.286/.272 with a 59 wRC+. Jay Jaffe already detailed Carpenter’s turnaround at the end of June when he was just doing really well.

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A day after Boston added starting-pitch depth from the Rays in the form Nate Eovaldi, the Yankees have followed suit this afternoon with another AL East team, acquiring left-hander J.A. Happ from Toronto in exchange for infielder Brandon Drury and outfielder Billy McKinney.

While this trade doesn’t preclude the Yankees from making a splashier acquisition for a starting pitcher, it wouldn’t surprise me if Happ is the only significant addition to the New York rotation. The team’s been linked to Cole Hamels in recent weeks, but that seems a curiously unsatisfying acquisition from New York’s perspective. At this point, Hamels’ reputation is still mostly derived from what he did in Philadelphia and, after a so-so 2017, he’s been hit hard and often in 2018. It’s tempting to disregard the inflated HR/FB rate as a fluke, but his 44.9% hard-hit rate this year is the second-highest among qualifiers — this after he set a career high in 2017. Now, that’s not enough to doom a pitcher by itself — Zack Greinke and Patrick Corbin are up there too and having fine seasons — but it does lend support to the notion that his homers allowed aren’t flukes.

Getting hit hard is a risk in Yankee Stadium, and the point of these types of deadline trades isn’t to maximize upside but rather to find some certainty. No, Happ wasn’t really the sixth-best starter in his 20-4, 3.18 ERA Cy Young-contending year in 2015, but he’s also a fairly safe pitcher at this point, one who has already been playing in the AL East and experienced plenty of success. The Yankees aren’t trying to make a David Price or a Johnny Cueto trade here; rather, they’re looking for someone more dependable than Sonny Gray to slot after Luis Severino, Masahiro Tanaka, and CC Sabathia down the stretch. Fourth starters do tend to make an appearance in the playoffs and, should the Yankees reach the ALDS — which our odds says isn’t about 70% likely to occure — it’s difficult to imagine they’d be comfortable turning to Gray, who has failed to complete the fifth inning in seven of his 19 starters in 2018. And with it looking more and more likely the Yankees are the first Wild Card rather than the AL East winner, that extra Wild Card game means they’re even more likely to require the services of that fourth starter.

In the ZiPS playoff odds, the addition of Happ to the rotation boosts the team by about a win over the course the rest of the season, moving their divisional odds from 23% to 28% in the projections. ZiPS believe the Yankees are a slightly better team than the Red Sox, but the 5.5 games baked into the cake, so to speak, are telling here. This is more a depth move for the Yankees than something intended to upend any playoff scenarios.

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The outfield corners are traditionally home to heavy hitters. Currently, the combined wRC+ of MLB’s right fielders (108) is just a point below those of first basemen and AL designated hitters, with left fielders (105) lagging by a few points. The last of those is a bit strange given the inherently lesser defensive responsibilities — less throwing, mainly — but many teams have taken to stashing their speedy, slappy non-center fielders there, a trend that seems to have begun back when the White Sox won it all in 2005 with Scott Podsednik.

Despite that generally robust production, several contenders — which for this series I’ve defined as teams with playoff odds of at least 15.0% (a definition that currently covers 15 teams) — are barely getting by at one corner or another, by which I mean receiving less than 1.0 WAR at the spot, which makes them eligible for inclusion among the Replacement Level Killers. If you’re a regular reader of my work, it won’t surprise you that one contender is somehow on both lists… as well as a forthcoming one.

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The Pirates have won 13 of their last 15 games, which, as Craig Edwards explained on Wednesday, places them on the periphery of playoff contention. With two months to go in what has been a fast-moving season, the suddenly overachieving Sons of Honus Wagner are seven back in the NL Central, and just four-and-half out in the Wild Card race.

Pittsburgh fans are familiar with the Wild Card. The Buccos’ 2013, 2014, and 2015 seasons — which followed 20 consecutive years of October-less baseball — all included the one-game nail-biter that qualifies a team for Division Series play. And while the latter two qualify as forgettable, the first was a never-forget Pittsburgh sports classic. The game, a 6-2 conquest of the Cincinnati Reds at PNC Park, was played on October 1, 2013 against the backdrop of a black-clad cacophony.

Tim Neverett was there. A member of the Pirates’ broadcast team at the time — he’s now calling games in Boston — Neverett never tires of recounting that epic night. Nor should he. It was an experience like none other, as he explains here.

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Tim Neverett: “Ron Darling had the best line on TBS that night. I went back and watched their broadcast later, and they panned around the stadium. It was a ‘blackout’ — everybody is wearing black — and PNC was going crazy. I think they gave the fire marshall the night off, because the place was overcapacity. Ron said, ‘This is what 20 years of frustration looks like.’ And he was exactly right.

“I got down to the ballpark in the afternoon, and I had never seen the North Shore buzzing with activity the way it was that day. It was incredible. People in costumes. People hanging out on the Clemente Bridge. People actually watched from the Clemente Bridge. That’s the first time I ever saw that. They were hanging on the bridge, just looking for a glimpse of the ballpark, to see the game.

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There’s room for debate over whether the present mix of super teams and tanking teams is good for baseball.

On the one hand, the Astros-Dodgers World Series last fall — as well as many of the matchups that preceded it — made for compelling theatre. The Astros featured one of the best offenses in MLB history. The Indians’ rotation was the definitely the best by some measures. There’s something to be said for appreciating rare performances in real time. And the field of elite clubs likely to participate in this coming October’s postseason — especially in the American League — promises more of the same.

Meanwhile, teams at the other end of the spectrum are operating rationally. Clubs are best positioned to win by acquiring premium long-term, cost-controlled assets. The best way to do that is by loading up on early draft picks and bonus-pool dollars. Even with the addition of the second Wild Card, few clubs seem interested in sustaining mediocrity.

Still, there can be consequences if too many teams are simply not competitive and the best teams are dominant.

Fans might be responding at the gate already. Earlier this year, two million fans were missing. Now, through July 23rd, 2.55 million fans are missing.

While a frigid April had something to do with attendance woes, gate receipts are still down nearly two million fans, or roughly 5%, from last April 15 through July 23 compared to the same period last season.

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