The A’s figured 2015 would be a competitive year, and though there have been plenty of encouraging signs, at some point there’s just not enough time left to expect bad luck to reverse itself. The Astros, meanwhile, figured 2015 would be a competitive year, but maybe not this much of a competitive year, so they found themselves considering the market of short-term upgrades. So it is that a surprising A’s team and a surprising Astros team have come together on a move: Scott Kazmir is going to Houston, and now the league-wide trade market is open.

He’s not the first big-leaguer to be moved. Juan Uribe got swapped. Mark Trumbo got swapped. Welington Castillo got swapped a couple of times. But this is the first real deadline move, with the A’s conceding that it’s time for them to sell. Kazmir’s a free agent in a few months, but the Astros weren’t turned off by that. If anything, they were seeking that out. Rentals tend to cost less, and Kazmir provides important rotation insurance. The guys the A’s are getting are named Jacob Nottingham and Daniel Mengden. You’re probably not familiar with either, but that doesn’t mean the A’s just got robbed.

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With significant deadline trades, we’re going to attempt to provide an evaluation of the prospects changing teams from both Kiley McDaniel’s scouting perspective and Chris Mitchell’s statistical breakdowns. The numerical breakdown of both players appears below Kiley’s write-ups.

Today, the Houston Astros officially decided to go for it, acquiring Scott Kazmir from the A’s in exchange for for A-Ball prospects RHP Daniel Mengden and C Jacob Nottingham. Both were late cuts from my preseason prospect list list, which by Opening Day, with the Evan Gattis trade and losing Delino DeShields in the Rule 5 draft, included 22 players.

Both players were among the group of six given 35+ FV grades, so they were both in the 23-28 range in Houston’s system entering the year. I don’t have inside info on how the negotiations went down, but I’m guessing Kazmir was long a target for Houston (as they took a run at him this offseason) and Oakland was holding out for a top 10 prospect in the Astros organization. Based on the preseason rankings, this will look like a light return, but given Nottingham’s breakout season, they did indeed land a guy who would have ranked in the Astros top 10 if the list was re-done today.

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Lance McCullers is starting for the Astros on Thursday, and while he’s going to have his innings closely monitored down the stretch, potentially reducing his availability, there’s no doubt he’s played a big role in getting the Astros to where they are at present. McCullers has followed an up-and-down 2014 with an incredibly successful 2015, and in just 11 big-league starts, he’s been worth about 2 WAR no matter which formula you prefer. The Astros are said to be in the market for a starting pitcher, but if it weren’t for McCullers’ presence, the situation would be a lot more desperate.

McCullers throws three pitches, though the changeup is simply coming along. He has a good fastball that sits in the mid-90s, but the best pitch here is the curve, thrown a third of the time and responsible for the majority of McCullers’ strikeouts. It’s never been a secret that McCullers throws a good breaking ball, but in talking with David Laurila, Brent Strom tossed out a heavy comp:

“I’d say McCullers’ breaking ball is Kimbrel-like at times,” said Strom. “That’s as good as you can get. I haven’t seen everybody’s curveball, but I would say the young kid McCullers has a curveball as good as anybody in this game.”

That’s a direct comparison between Lance McCullers’ breaking ball and Craig Kimbrel’s breaking ball. That’s coming from a big-league pitching coach, so it carries some weight. But why not put numbers to this, to try to find the best comp, really?

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The adage that power is the last tool to develop floats around every year when trying to explain why a certain prospect has or has not realized his raw power in game situations. When I first heard the idea, it made sense. A hitter’s power develops as he gets stronger getting into his early-to-mid-20s, and… that was enough for me. The problem with this concept is that many of these hitters whose power we expect to develop sometime in the future already have the ability, just not the means to use it regularly. It’s not, in other words, merely a matter of getting it done in the weight room. And oftentimes, the smooth-stroking high-average doubles hitter never gets any attention for his power, then becomes a home-run monster as he matures. As an evaluator you need to understand how that happens and when it applies to individual hitters.

For this noninclusive inquiry, I wanted to look at two hitters lumped into the first group, those believed to have the raw power to be legitimate home-run hitters and how that power has or hasn’t manifested itself in the professional game. In looking at how hitters are able or unable to tap into their raw power skills, we can have a better idea of how to evaluate whether other players will be able to develop those skills into tangible results. Xander Bogaerts and Carlos Correa provide two excellent examples of this paradigm. Bogaerts has shown he can hit for moderate power in the minors against age-advanced competition, but has not yet brought it to Boston in his young career. Correa has started to showcase his power in the early going this year, though prior to this season it was more projection than demonstration. He was touted as a five-tool prospect going into the draft, and our own Kiley McDaniel graded him out in October as having a present 60 raw power tool (65 potential) with a 55 potential game power ability, or approximately 19-22 homers per season.

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Whoa, that was a rough two days without baseball. But the wait is almost over. (And, in fact, the Royals and White Sox are in the first inning as of press time.) As we grind our nails into a fine paste waiting for the second half to start, here are 10 questions that I’ll be hoping the second half answers. Perhaps you have others. If so, let me know in the comments, but these are mine. Let’s get to it.

1. How many more younglings?

The first half saw the introduction of some really top-shelf talent, with some of those young players immediately vaulting to the top of Dave’s trade-value rankings, including Carlos Correa at #5 after just 32 major-league games. That probably won’t be topped, but the second half hasn’t even started yet, and we already know of one more prospect who is set for his big league debut in Frankie Montas. Montas was ranked 113th by Kiley before the season, and his 3.03 FIP ranks 10th across all of Double-A; his 2.47 ERA, 13th.

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Don’t allow the recent slump to throw you off. If the Astros were to keep winning games at their season pace, then by next Wednesday they’d have more wins than they did in all of 2013. By Thursday, a week later, they’d have more wins than they did in 2012, and by that Saturday, they’d have more wins than they did in 2011. By the penultimate day of August, they’d have more wins than they did a season ago. And then there would be 31 games left. The speed with which we adjust our expectations means there are people who are disappointed by how the Astros closed out the first half, but this has been a great season, a blessing of a season, a season of competitive baseball that even recently would’ve been almost impossible to imagine. For the Houston Astros, 2015 has been wonderful.

Which comes with the upside: unexpected success. Everybody loves unexpected success. It’s good for the players, it’s good for the coaches, it’s good for the fans, and it’s good for the organization. But this also comes with a challenge: figure out how to navigate the rest of the month. The Astros might’ve expected 2015 to be another year of building. Now they’re in position to trade from the long-term to try to improve the short-term. The Astros will be perhaps the most interesting team to watch in the days and weeks ahead, because if they wanted, they could be awful aggressive.

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If you’re a Yankees fan, you probably know that Chris Young (the hitter) has been on a bit of a tear lately, forcing himself into the starting lineup on a daily basis. If you’re a general baseball fan, you also might know that Young is from Houston, Texas. How would you know a sort of random bit of information like that? Most likely because there are two known Chris Youngs, the hitter: Mr. Young the usually fringy outfielder, and Mr. Young when he’s playing in Houston.

The former Mr. Young we’ve known for some time. He had a ton of expectations put on him early in his career, a few momentary flashes of what could have been, then he’s bounced around in a fourth-ish outfielder role for a number of clubs in the past few years. He owns a career line that supports such a role:

A little power, a little speed, but not really enough there to merit full-time work. Young is almost 32 years old, so the ship sailed long ago on him becoming the guy people expected when he was called up. However, the main point: there’s a place on some major-league team for a guy like Chris Young, even if there barely is, and even if that role is limited in nature.

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It was almost cute when it started — there were the Astros, playing really competitive baseball, a year or two ahead of schedule. They stormed out of the gate and people everywhere wrote about the possibility of the Astros making the playoffs without really believing it would happen. And to this point the Astros still haven’t clinched a berth in the playoffs, but with every passing day, they’ve been taken a little more seriously. They’ll be in first place at the halfway mark, leaving only another half left to go, and the prospect promotion is well underway. It’s not so cute these days. It’s like the Astros have skipped a step.

Look over what they’ve accomplished and you can understand why the Astros are a legitimate threat to make a playoff run. Hitting-wise, they’ve collectively been above-average. The rotation might not have a classic ace, but it’s been above-average as a group. The bullpen, too, has been above-average, and the team’s been good about running the bases, and on top of all that, the Astros have avoided ugly black holes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a problem spot, which is a feature of a winning club. But what might you call the Astros’ strength? Some might suggest hitting for power, which, yeah, they’re good at that. But they’re even better at dealing with groundballs.

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At a time not very long ago — actually, just a single month and a few days ago — viscount of the internet Rob Neyer wrote at Just A Bit Outside about how the Houston Astros, then as now a first-place team, had been winning games with negligible contribution from any players drafted by General Manager Jeff Luhnow. Quoth Neyer:

The 2012 draft has, so far, produced two major leaguers: pitcher Lance McCullers and hitter Preston Tucker. McCullers and Tucker have combined for zero wins and one home run (granted, the homer was a big one Thursday). The 2013 and 2014 drafts haven’t produced any major leaguers.

The final sentence of Neyer’s paragraph remains, as of this writing, true. But, in a testament to how rapidly things are changing down in Houston, the first two sentences of Neyer’s paragraph have already become dramatically obsolete. Please recall that Neyer’s post is barely one month old.

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I’ve written about the Houston Astros an awful lot recently. Between Lance McCullers, Vincent Velasquez, and of course, Carlos Correa, they’ve had more than their share of impact prospects arrive in the majors this year. Today, I’m back to analyze yet another Astro who was recently called up the big club: Domingo Santana.

You might have missed Santana’s call up among the flurry of blue-chip prospects who got the call this week. I almost missed it, and I monitor these things about as closely as anyone. But while Santana’s upside is nowhere close to that of a Byron Buxton or Francisco Lindor, he’s someone worthy of our attention.

Before the Astros called him up to replace Colby Rasmus, who’s currently on the bereavement list, Santana was absolutely mashing in Triple-A. His 176 wRC+ was the highest of all qualified hitters at the level. He also lead Triple-A in walks and slugging percentage. Sounds great, right? What’s not to like about a 22-year-old who’s hitting .320/.444/.584 in Triple-A?

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