On Monday, the Oakland Athletics promoted a couple of hitting prospects from Triple-A: Renato Nunez and Matt Olson. Both Nunez and Olson came off the bench on Monday to make their big-league debuts. With Billy Butler out of the picture, and Danny Valencia likely soon to follow, Nunez and Olson might see a decent chunk of playing time these next two weeks.

Olson’s numbers have trended in the wrong direction since his 37-homer season in the Cal League in 2014. He slashed .249/.388/.438 in Double-A last year and only managed to hit .235/.335/.422 in the PCL this year. Throughout his minor-league career, Olson has demonstrated good power and a willingness to draw walks. He’s also a 22-year-old with a 6-foot-5 frame, which suggests he may still have some untapped upside. But his underwhelming performance, defensive limitations and 24% strikeout rate don’t bode particularly well for his future in the show.

KATOH pegs Olson for 3.7 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method and 2.8 WAR by KATOH+, which integrates Baseball America’s rankings. To help you visualize what his KATOH projection entails, here is a probability density function showing KATOH+’s projected distribution of outcomes for Olson’s first six seasons in the major leagues.

To put some faces to Olson’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps for the newest Brewers prospect. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis distance between Olson’s performance this year and every Double-A season since 1991 in which a first baseman or corner outfielder recorded at least 400 plate appearances. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp.

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When Kiley McDaniel wrote about the Athletics prospects before the 2015 season, Ryon Healy was just a “name to note” with “55 raw power that plays down in games.” After Healy produced a nice year at Double-A — albeit one without much power — Dan Farnsworth didn’t add much love, saying that he didn’t think Healy had the “swing path to keep driving balls.”

They weren’t alone. Baseball America made him Oakland’s 22nd- and 23rd-best prospect those two years, respectively. He didn’t make it into either of the team write-ups on Baseball Prospectus. Keith Law didn’t include him in his Oakland write-up going into this season.

Healy is 24, yes. He’s only had 184 plate appearances, sure. But he’s already shown more power than projections and prognosticators had in mind for him, and it’s probably not a fluke. He’s made a change we’ve heard about from many other major leaguers. He’s not using the same swing path that kept him off the top-prospect lists.

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Oakland right-hander Jharel Cotton made his major-league debut on Wednesday. The results were positive: over 6.1 innings, Cotton conceded just a lone run on two hits — the product, that run, of a homer by the Angels’ C.J. Cron. The process, while entirely adequate, was also slightly less positive: over those 6.1 innings and against those same 22 batters, Cotton recorded just three strikeouts.

In a sense, this start was the opposite of the sort which have defined much of Cotton’s season in the Pacific Coast League this year. Despite producing the best strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) among all 57 Triple-A qualifiers in 2016, Cotton also recorded a 4.31 ERA — which, it turns out, is only the 35th-best ERA at Triple-A and even pretty middling among just PCL starters, too. The home runs were a problem for Cotton. Sequencing was a problem for Cotton. Controlling the strike zone wasn’t.

Apart from the runs he allowed and the runs he might have been expected to allow — whatever the discrepancy there — Cotton exhibited one quality yesterday that he’s exhibited all of this season and all of last season and maybe always since he was just a small child. An excellent changeup, is what. Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen, among others, has described it as a plus-plus pitch — and it’s the presence of that pitch that has largely been credited with allowing Cotton to experience such great success as a professional despite a rather diminutive frame.

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The purpose of this very brief post is merely to document the first changeup — a plus-plus pitch according to lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen — of Oakland right-hander Jharel Cotton’s major-league career. It’s also to note that all representations and depictions of Cotton’s blessèd changeup must employ the grave accent over the -e-, in the same manner that has been both represented and depicted here.

Khris Davis has maintained excellent exit velocity all year, and has 33 home runs to his name, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t pressed at times with his new team. His walk rate is less than half what it used to be, and his swinging-strike rate is up nearly 20%.

The Oakland outfielder admitted that his decision on when to swing hasn’t been at its finest this year. “I was putting pressure on myself in a new environment,” he told me recently before a game against the Indians. “It was mental. Just kinda settled down.”

It’s something we can easily see in his swing percentages — but, perhaps more importantly, it’s totally normal and has happened very often to other big bats changing teams.

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In January of this year, the author of this post, following some statistical perambulations, arrived at the conclusion that Max Schrock, a 13th-round selection out of the University of South Carolina during the most recent (2015) draft, would someday win an MVP award. The basis for that conclusion: no SEC batter in 2015 had produced numbers more similar to Josh Donaldson’s — during Donaldson’s own final year as a collegiate player (also in the SEC) — than Schrock. And Donaldson himself had just collected an MVP award in the American League. So, by a very liberal application of the transitive property, I concluded that Schrock would as well.

There were, of course, a number of reasons to suppose that Max Schrock would not win an MVP award in the major leagues. There remain a number of reasons. Chief among them is probably this: the best player of the current era — and possibly any one’s era ever — has received only one MVP award during his first four seasons in the majors and faces a non-negligible chance of extending that record to one in five years. If Mike Trout is capable of just a 20% conversion rate on MVP awards, everyone else’s chances are dramatically lower.

Moreover, there’s the matter of Schrock himself. Because, here’s a type of prospect who rarely develops into a perennial MVP candidate: a 5-foot-8 hitter. And here’s another kind: an infielder who’s incapable of playing a competent shortstop. And here’s a third sort: a player who’s selected in the 13th round. How many 5-foot-8, 13th-round second basemen have been recognized as their respective league’s best? I lack the requisite ambition to perform the search. But none seems like a reasonable answer. Let’s assume none or somewhere close to none. Indeed, even Josh Donaldson, whose ascent to stardom is regarded as improbable, is a former first-round selection. And features physical attributes that suggest the ability to hit for power. And offered, as a young player, the possibility of defensive value as a catcher. (And continues to offer it as a markedly above-average third baseman.) Schrock possesses none of these redeeming qualities.

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A 13th-round pick last year, infielder Max Schrock — received by Oakland today from Washington in exchange for left-handed reliever Marc Rzepczynski — has made something of a name for himself by putting up strong offensive numbers in the lower levels. He’s hitting .333 between two levels of A-ball this season, largely due to an 8% strikeout rate. That’s encouraging coming from a middle infielder with speed and decent power. As a result, he’s become a regular on Carson Cistulli’s Fringe Five column.

Despite his strong performance, KATOH isn’t a huge fan of Schrock. My system pegs him for 2.9 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method and 2.8 WAR by the method that integrates Baseball America’s rankings. That puts him in the #150-#200 range in terms of prospects. To help you visualize what his KATOH projection entails, here is a probability density function showing KATOH+’s projected distribution of outcomes for Schrock’s first six seasons in the major leagues.

While Schrock’s hitting has been very good, KATOH dings him for being just 5-foot-8, and also for playing second base rather than shortstop. Second baseman with good numbers in the low minors don’t pan out all that often. There are some obvious exceptions to that statement, but it’s worth pointing out that those exceptions all provide defensive value, while Schrock has been eight runs below average at second base, according to Clay Davenport’s numbers.

To put some faces to Schrock’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps for the undersized second baseman. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis distance between Schrock’s performance this year and every A-ball season since 1991 in which a batter recorded at least 400 plate appearances. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp.

Please note that the Mahalanobis analysis is separate from KATOH. KATOH relies on macro-level trends, rather than comps. The fates of a few statistically similar players shouldn’t be used to draw sweeping conclusions about a prospect’s future. For this reason, I recommend using a player’s KATOH forecast to assess his future potential. The comps give us some interesting names that sometimes feel spot-on, but they’re mostly just there for fun.

As Dave Cameron pointed out, Rzepczynski is a mediocre left-handed reliever, and a month of his services probably could have been had for next-to-nothing. Schrock probably won’t win any MVP awards, but there’s a pretty decent chance he’ll be a useful role player in a couple of years. That’s demonstrably more than next-to-nothing.

Here’s a little game for you to play: Try to name, off the top of your head, the current Oakland A’s starting rotation. It’s not so easy. It’s not even easy for me, and I’m the guy on staff in charge of the A’s team depth chart. Sonny Gray is sidelined. Rich Hill is gone. Henderson Alvarez never showed up. On and on it goes. The upside is that, at this point, the rotation doesn’t matter much, since Oakland’s games don’t matter much. The downside is that Oakland’s games don’t matter much, partly because a quality rotation never came together.

Yet in some ways it can be liberating when everything goes wrong. You get to experiment as an organization a little more, because you don’t have to put up with the burden of stakes. You can try things out, just to see, and for no other reason or reasons. Because of the way things have gone, the A’s have had to scramble for pitching help. Monday, they got six shutout innings from an unlikely starter against the Indians. That starter? Andrew Triggs.

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Jharel Cotton was omitted from all the notable top-100 lists entering the 2016 season. He was excluded from all those same lists entering the 2015 season, as well. And the 2014 one. And 2013 one. And 2012. And so on. A review of the literature suggests that, since the dawn of the uncreated light, Jharel Cotton’s name has been omitted from top-100 prospect lists.

One sort of document from which Cotton’s name hasn’t been omitted is the author’s weekly attempt to identify and/or monitor compelling fringe prospects, the Fringe Five. Cotton finished atop the haphazardly calculated Fringe Five Scoreboard last year and is currently fourth on this year’s edition of the scoreboard.

Why Cotton has been excluded from the aforementioned top-100 lists isn’t precisely for me to say. Why he’s been included among the Five, however, is because both (a) he’s produced excellent strikeout and walk numbers and (b) his repertoire suggests that his performances are sustainable.

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As it has been the past few years, the 2016 non-waiver trade deadline brought about a flurry of activity that was hard to keep up with even if it was the only thing you were doing. Since most of us have other things that we have to or would like to occupy our time with, we figured we would save you some hassle and create an omnibus post with all of our trade deadline content so that you have it all in one place. For clarity’s sake, I’m going to limit this to articles about trades that actually took place.

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