Wednesday was a busy day for the Rays front office. First, they traded starter Nathan Eovaldi to the rival Red Sox. Then, they traded versatile righty Matt Andriese to the Diamondbacks. As I write this, Wednesday still has another few hours to go, so it’s possible they have even more in store, something you’ll have heard about by the time this post is published. Though the Rays are still incredibly north of .500, they’re not really in the hunt, so they’re shifting their priorities to the future. The nearer-term future, but the future nevertheless.

In the middle of the Rays’ busy Wednesday, there was a baseball game. It was a baseball game Eovaldi was scheduled to start. Based on that fact alone, the game was out of the ordinary, but it got stranger still. The Rays, of course, are the team that brought you the opener. They’re the team that used a catcher to protect a late lead. They’re the team that played a pitcher at first base. And now they’re also the team that played a pitcher at third base. These weren’t emergency circumstances the Rays were playing under. It was the same strategy as it was before, with Jose Alvarado. This time, it was Sergio Romo’s turn to head to a corner.

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The Astros have it relatively easy: They’re a super-team lacking meaningful divisional competition. The Indians have it even easier: They should resemble a super-team as well, playing in one of the very worst divisions in modern baseball history. This isn’t what it’s like for the Yankees or the Red Sox. While both teams are almost certainly going to the playoffs, one of them will have to survive the wild-card game, which brings an abrupt end to one competitive team’s season. Even though either team would be favored in this year’s matchup, neither is excited by the prospect, so they’re working to try to finish in first. Late Tuesday, the Yankees got better by fetching help in the bullpen. Early Wednesday, the Red Sox responded by fetching help in the rotation.

Red Sox get:

• Nathan Eovaldi

Rays get:

• Jalen Beeks

It’s a clean trade — a one-for-one between a team in the hunt and a team watching it from the outside. In general, it looks how these trades usually look. The good team is getting a veteran rental, and the worse team is getting a longer-term prospect. Indeed, you could say this is a normal trade for the teams to make. But even normal trades are interesting! And for both sides, this is a bet on the numbers. It’s a bet on the new Eovaldi, and on the new Beeks. Both have been pitchers in transition.

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Who trades players at 10 AM? The Red Sox, apparently, is who. That’s what they’ve done today, at least, picking up right-hander Nathan Eovaldi from the Tampa Bay Rays in exchange for minor-league pitcher Jalen Beeks.

Trading Eovaldi represents the successful culmination of a two-year strategy for the Rays, who signed him to a one-year, $2 million contract for a 2017 he was going to miss due to Tommy John surgery. A one-year option for $2 million gave the Rays a chance to get some serious upside in value for their patience, $4 million representing basically ashtray money when it comes to signing major-league-competent starting pitchers.

Eovaldi’s always been a bit of a puzzle, a pitcher who possessed a fastball that touched 100 mph but lacked the key to closing the deal and punching out batters, his breaking pitches never effectively complementing his velocity. Relying heavily on a cutter this year, however, Eovaldi has produced the highest strikeout rate of his career to date (23.7%). Eovaldi had fooled around with the pitch before, but this is the first time he’s had real success with the pitch, FanGraphs’ linear-weighted measure of pitch value gives him the 10th-most valuable cutter in baseball this season, ninth on a rate basic for pitchers with a minimum of 50 innings.

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During the All-Star break, Manny Machado was traded to the Dodgers for a solid package of prospects led by Yusniel Diaz. Last night, longtime closer Zach Britton was shipped off to the Yankees for Dillon Tate and some other interesting names. Both moves were obviously made with a view to the Orioles’ future.

Both moves were also inevitable, though — and, in a way, easy. It doesn’t take a fancypants scientist to figure out that trading terrific players who’re headed to free agency is a smart thing to do; us regular-pantsed folks can see that for ourselves. Now, though, there are harder decisions to make, other players to give away, if the Orioles are going to embrace a full rebuild. Complicating this is an organization that has shown a tendency to balk at hard decisions and put off future plans, preferring instead to tread water with the least aggressive quarter-measures available. In this case, however, action is required.

Unfortunately, we can’t just waltz into the B&O Warehouse and start trading away Orioles. Seriously, I double-checked what my credentials will permit. No, we may have to seize the team by force. Let’s presume that our dark FanGraphs forces can seize the corporate offices successfully — we do have a particular expertise involving WAR — and gain control of the franchise. It wouldn’t be the first war lost by the Angelos family, and Sheryl Ring can draft some paperwork to make this nice and legal. We have to be quick, though, before we all end up in jail. So let’s start the sale.

Kevin Gausman to the Pittsburgh Pirates

It seems a little too easy to sell Kevin Gausman to the Chicago Cubs and, really, at this point, I’m tired of Orioles pitchers going to Chicago and experiencing a renaissance. Jake Arrieta is the most noted example, but the Cubs squeezed significant value out of Jason Hammel, Pedro Strop, and even Tsuyoshi Wada. The Pirates aren’t rightly interested in rentals: they’ll require somebody who’s useful beyond the 2018 season because, even with their 11-game winning streak, they’re still more likely than not to miss the postseason.

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The New York Yankees have the best bullpen in the game. Aroldis Chapman is great. David Robertson is having a typical year for David Robertson. Dellin Betances seems to have recovered his form and is, once again, pitching like a relief ace. Chad Green and Jonathan Holder — even A.J. Cole and Adam Warren — have pitched well.

The Yankees don’t need bullpen help. Yet, if rumors are true, they are about to get it anyway. Jon Heyman reports tonight that New York and Baltimore are close to finalizing a trade that would send Zach Britton to the Bronx.

As for whom the Orioles will receive, Ken Rosenthal reports that right-handed pitching prospect Dillon Tate is expected to headline the deal. Sources tell both Joel Sherman and Heyman that the deal will look like this:

Yankees receive:

• Zach Britton

Orioles receive:

• Dillon Tate
• Josh Rogers
• Cody Carroll

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Second base is a position where defensive concerns generally outweigh offensive ones, as suggested by the modest 94 wRC+ recorded collectively by second basemen this year (although that figure was as high as 106 as recently as two years ago). This year has been a rough one for aging second-sackers, with Daniel Murphy and Dustin Pedroia barely playing due to knee injuries, Ian Kinsler struggling, Robinson Cano getting suspended, and several other previous stalwarts — Brian Dozier, Jason Kipnis, Joe Panik — seeming to fall apart before our eyes. Some of these, as you will see, have direct bearings on our rankings here, while others limit the pool of available replacements.

Among contenders (which for this series I’ve defined as teams with playoff odds of at least 15.0%, a definition that currently covers 16 teams), six teams have gotten less than 1.0 WAR at second base thus far, but as with catchers and first basemen, a closer look at each situation suggests not all will be in the market for external solutions — an area that colleague Dan Szymborski will examine later. Between early-season injuries and slow-starting veterans, some of these teams aren’t in as dire a shape as the overall numbers suggest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re out of the woods.

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When it comes to replacement level, first base is a very different beast than catcher. In general, teams prioritize catcher defense and staff handling over offense, and even in this age of advanced analytics, there’s room to quibble over whether the available metrics — including the pitch-framing sort — capture enough of their value. As we lack a good staff-handling metric (catcher ERA isn’t it due to sample-size issues), there’s a whole gray area that, among other things, allows teams, particularly contending ones, to convince themselves they’re getting enough value behind the plate.

First base is another story. Offense is comparatively easy to measure, and the expectations for the position are high. A contending team that lacks a heavy hitter at the spot, or at least an adequate one, is bringing a spork to a knife fight. At this end of the defensive spectrum, it shouldn’t be that hard to find alternatives, even if they possess relatively clunky gloves; in this day of shortened benches, you can generally find a utilityman to fill in defensively at first in the late innings. With upgrades available as the July 31 deadline approaches, there’s no excuse for letting a Replacement-Level Killer drag your contending team down.

Among contenders (which, for this series, I’ve defined as teams with playoff odds at least 15.0%, a definition that currently covers 15 teams), five have gotten less than 1.0 WAR at the position thus far. That said, a closer look at each situation suggests not all will be in the market for external solutions (an area that colleague Dan Szymborski will examine). Between early-season injuries and slow-starting veterans, some of these teams aren’t in as dire a shape as their overall numbers suggest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re out of the woods.

Working from the order of the table above, from the worst to the most borderline…

Rockies

As I noted in the catchers’ installment, eight out of 12 Rockies with at least 100 PA have a wRC+ below 90. While it’s understandable how the team could convince itself that the defensively sound Chris Iannetta and Tony Wolters might be adequate enough, there’s no fig leaf of an excuse to cover the team’s ongoing inability to find competence at first base, where Ian Desmond, Ryan McMahon, and Pat Valaika have combined for an 85 wRC+. Desmond himself hasn’t been quite that bad with the bat (.238/.309/.468, 92 wRC+), but his defensive numbers at the position are lousy (-1.7 UZR, -4 DRS), and at this point it feels like the Rockies are playing him mainly because they still owe him about $50 million, preferring a sinking ship to a sunk cost.

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Last week, I took up the mantle from Dave Cameron and published this site’s 11th annual Trade Value series. If you’re new to the concept, the Trade Value series represents an attempt to rank the most valuable assets in baseball, accounting for each player’s current skill level, age, and health while factoring in controllable years or contract status (with lots of advice from scouts and execs). Few, if any, of the players are likely to be traded in reality; however, the rankings represent an opportunity to see how the industry is and isn’t valuing players.

An unusual thing happened in this year’s series — namely, the top two spots in the rankings went to a pair teammates, Francisco Lindor and Jose Ramirez. By my reckoning, the combined eight years for which their contracts are controlled by Cleveland are worth around $385 million*. They’re incredibly valuable.

*To arrive at this figure, I used ZiPS projected WAR, projected dollar-per-WAR inflation, discounted values for years further into the future, and a linear concept of dollar-per-WAR. This is more of a ballpark number since clubs on either extreme of the payroll spectrum may value each win much more or less than the average team that’s assumed in this sort of calculation.

In the wake of this year’s edition, I began thinking: would any clubs have sufficient ammunition for Cleveland even to consider a possible trade of Lindor and Ramirez? As with the Trade Value series itself, this is mostly a hypothetical question. The Indians, as a contending club, have little incentive to deal two of the majors’ best players. Still, I was curious if any club could put together enough assets even to make it possible.

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In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters, yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of killing a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’s 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical all-star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. It’s a concept I’ve revisited on several occasions over the past decade, both at BP and beyond, albeit not for a while. With the trade deadline looming, this seems an ideal moment to dust it off and identify some of the bigger holes at each position among contenders.

When it comes to defining replacement-level play, we needn’t be slaves to exactitude. Any team that’s gotten less than 1.0 WAR from a position to this point might be considered fair game, even if in some cases that means an above-average starter and ghastly backups. Sometimes, acceptable or even above-average defense (which, of course may depend upon which metric one views) coupled with total ineptitude on offense is enough to flag a team. In theory, a team may be well ahead of replacement level at a given position but has lost a key contributor due to injury. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography, I know replacement level when I see it.

For this series, I’ll start with the catchers and go around the diamond, pointing out the most egregious examples of potential Killers at each position among contenders, which I’ll define as teams with playoff odds of at least 15.0%, a definition that currently covers 15 teams (sorry, Angels, Giants, and Pirates, and fuhgeddabout it, Mets and Blue Jays). I’m less focused on these teams’ solutions; colleague Dan Szymborski will examine the potential trade candidates at each position.

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When I approached Ross Stripling at the All-Star Game media session, I knew that he was in the midst of a breakthrough season. The 28-year-old Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander went into the midsummer classic with a record of 8-2, a 2.08 ERA, and a 10.2 K-rate in 95-and-a-third innings.

I didn’t know that he was a nerd.

“Are you taking about things like spin rate and spin efficiency? I’m a believer in that for sure,” was Stripling’s response when I asked if he ever talks pitching analytics with anyone in the organization. “When I got called up in 2016, I thought that what made me good was my high arm angle leading to good downward angle on my fastball, so I should pitch down in the zone. But I tried that, and I was getting walloped.”

Then came a conversation that jumpstarted his career. Optioned to the minors in midseason to help limit his workload — “I was basically down there sitting on innings” — Stripling picked up a ringing cell phone and was soon standing at rapt attention. The voice on the other end belonged to Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. Read the rest of this entry »