The MLB season is drawing to a close, which means it’s about time for rampant speculation about next year’s free agents. One of my favorite off-season storylines is that of the east Asian baseball markets both giving and absorbing talent.

This past off season, we witnessed the likes of Chad Tracy, Wladimir Balentien, and Micah Hoffpauer head west to the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league while Japan sent Tsuyoshi Nishioka and Ryan Vogelsong Minnesota and California’s way.

Let’s look at the present NPB league statistics, so we can start writing our wishlists and dreaming about next year’s rosters.

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Most contenders didn’t get a shot at some of the biggest bats to hit the waiver wire. Earlier this week the Twins placed two desirable hitters, Jim Thome and Jason Kubel, on trade waivers, and both were claimed by teams on the fringe of contention. Kubel will stay put, while Thome heads to Cleveland. Left in the dust were teams such as the Angels, Rangers, Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, and the entire National League. Yet if any of these teams want to add a left-handed bench hitter there is one readily available.

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Rich Harden is effective when healthy, but that caveat is more relevant for him than it is for most others. Over nine major-league seasons, he has never thrown 200 innings in a single year. Since logging 189.2 frames in 2004, he hasn’t even thrown for more than 148 innings in a season — and he’s working on his second consecutive year with fewer than 100 innings to his stats line.  He can’t seem to stay healthy long enough to have an impact commensurate with his talent.

Regardless, Harden’s possibilities are tough to ignore. He misses bats at an elite rate for a starter and induces feeble contact when batters connect. He has a career .274 batting average on balls in play, significantly lower than the league average. He also ranks third among starters with at least 200 total innings since 2008 with a 10.1 K/9: only Brandon Morrow and Tim Lincecum have a higher rate. Over the same span, batters have whiffed at 13 percent of Harden’s offerings, by far the highest rate for a starting pitcher. Cole Hamels ranks second at 11.7 percent. He’s a starter with elite reliever numbers.

It’s easy to see why teams are always interested in him despite the checkered injury history, and why that interest persists even with a small sample of starts this year.

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The Athletics traded a reliever and got back a young player that, despite his struggles to date, already has shown more power than anyone on the Oakland roster not named Josh Willingham. Yes, they used Brad Ziegler to (hopefully) free Brandon Allen.

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In a post earlier this week, I mentioned a Bill James quote: “If you could split [Henderson] in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” James was totally serious. Since James wrote those words, Wins Above Replacement (WAR) has become the Nerdosphere’s favorite total value stat. Does it support James’ contention? Let’s “split Rickey in two” and found out.

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The Chicago Cubs general manager, Jim Hendry, has been described by many as a lame duck, but team owner Tom Ricketts may want to get out the hunting rifle now before the situation deteriorates any further.

Hendry took over the Cubs GM position midway through the 2002 season and has never quite assembled the impressive major league team comparable to the impressive farm system he built in the late 1990s. Once touted for assembling a farm system that included future stars like Corey Patterson, Mark Prior, Eric Patterson, Felix Pie, Rich Hill, and (hey, mildly positive ones!) Kerry Wood and Carlos Zambrano, Hendry is now widely considered a neither great nor terrible GM.

His on-the-field product reflects that dichotomy:

His great times (2008, 2004) have been great; his good times (2003, 2007, 2009) have been okay; and his bad times (2005, 2006, 2010, 2011) have been numerous.

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It’s trade rumor season. It’s time for fans of contenders to lust after the best players on lesser teams. The airways of AM radio are already full of trade ideas, many of them ridiculous. Their most valuable player for your least valuable prospects is no way to build a trade, and those rumors are easy to dismiss.

The problem is, even if we set the filter higher, and listen only to rumors that come from reputable sources and concern acquirable names, we are still going to hear a decent amount of hogwash. Let’s just take a couple tasty morsels and examine why the rumored swap makes little sense for one team in the dance. Even a real rumor from a real source can be a real silly idea.

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Whence we last examined yonder batting orders, we came away with several expected observations (Jose Bautista plays baseball like a video game, the Oakland Athletics do not care much for scoring runs, Rick Ankiel and Ian Desmond are not feared hitters, and so forth) as well as a number of curious findings (the Cubs lead-off combo was tops in the majors, the 7th hitters on AL teams were worse than the 9th hitters, NL managers effectively managed the bottoms of their lineups, and such).

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Jemile Weeks has been as advertised for Oakland. Through his first 20 games, the younger Weeks has compiled a .303/.346/.461 line to go with six stolen bases in eight attempts, adding up to a .359 wOBA and a 131 wRC+. The second baseman of the future for the Athletics has quickly become the second baseman of the present.

Just as quickly, Mark Ellis became the second baseman of the past for the Athletics. His ineffectiveness had those around the A’s discussing Weeks’s impending arrival; his early-June hamstring injury began the Weeks era. At his return, the A’s had a decision to make. The A’s decided quickly, moving the venerable second baseman to Colorado for pitcher Bruce Billings and a player to be named later. The trade sees the exit of a player who defines the Moneyball Athletics, as Ellis compiled $83.5 million worth of value for only $27.3 million in salary as an Athletic.

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Like most hitters in Oakland this year, David DeJesus is not doing so well. The A’s acquired him from the Royals to give their offense a spark, but thus far he has racked up just a .229/.313/.358 line and has begun to find himself on the bench with some regularity. During interleague play, Bob Melvin has chosen to use Hideki Matsui in the outfield in lieu of playing DeJesus, a sign of just how uninterested Melvin is in using DeJesus.

That said, DeJesus is actually having a pretty standard season in many areas. In fact, take a look at his 2011 marks compared to the last two seasons:

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