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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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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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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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I’m going to tell you something you’re not going to like. You’re going to think this is stupid, and you’re going to want to dismiss this as rubbish, but, I mean, let’s just get right to the point. If nothing else, this is where we’ll start. Early Thursday, the A’s gave up Yoenis Cespedes and more for Jon Lester and more. A little later Thursday, the A’s gave up Tommy Milone for Sam Fuld. Losing Cespedes opened up a spot in the outfield; adding Fuld plugged it. Here is a fun fact:

Career

Cespedes: 2.9 WAR / 600 plate appearances
Fuld: 2.5 WAR / 600 plate appearances

Obviously, Cespedes has a thousand times more natural talent. Obviously, Cespedes has more potential and a higher ceiling. Obviously, Cespedes is younger. Obviously, that’s a little deceptive because Fuld has spent a lot of time as a defensive replacement. Obviously, we can trust the defensive metrics only so much, and obviously, Cespedes is the more marketable player since he has some of the purest right-handed power in the sport. But here is the general message: Sam Fuld is not far and away an inferior overall player, compared to Yoenis Cespedes. At least, they’re somewhat close. And this year, specifically this year, Fuld’s been worth the same WAR in a fraction of the time. So you can see why the A’s are happy to get Fuld back, a few months after designating him for assignment.

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Well, this was probably not what we thought a Jon Lester trade was going to look like. After speculating about which team would unload their farm system for a rental, the answer is none of them; instead, the A’s used Yoenis Cespedes to land the Red Sox ace, and picked up Jonny Gomes as a replacement for the right-handed slugger they just traded away. This is a fascinating deal from a lot of angles, but let’s focus on the A’s side of things for a second.

Very clearly, the A’s believe that they can win the World Series this year, and are aligning their roster to give themselves the best chance to do that. And this is probably the perfect storm for the a team in the A’s position to go for it; the Red Sox are bad, the Yankees are mediocre, the Phillies are awful, and the Cubs and Mets are still rebuilding. There is no $200 million behemoth standing in the A’s way this year, at least not unless the Dodgers get to the World Series, and it isn’t clear that the Dodgers are better than the A’s anyway. The Angels and Tigers are still around, but the Angels might have to play their way in through the Wild Card game, and the Tigers pitching staff looks a little less fearsome than it has in past years.

The A’s are in go-for-it mode not just because of their own roster this year, but because this is the kind of year in which it makes sense for a small-market team to push their chips and try to take advantage of the league’s parity. It’s why Jeff wrote that Lester to Pittsburgh would make sense. The door is open for a low-revenue team to have a parade this winter, and the A’s are responding to that opportunity by trying to kick the door in.

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As the grains in the hourglass slip away toward the trading deadline, Jon Lester has become the most focused-upon target of buyers. As recently as a month ago, this didn’t seem to be a particularly likely scenario, but the surge of the Tampa Bay Rays and the plunge of the Boston Red Sox has caused the wheel to spin from David Price to Lester. While Lester has been exceptional this season, his 2013 performance would be characterized as no better than solid, and he was one of the game’s biggest disappointments in 2012. What has happened to bring Lester from there to here, and is his current form sustainable going forward? Read the rest of this entry »

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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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.

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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