It could be argued that, when Atlanta sent Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton Jr. to San Diego last April, it was neither Matt Wisler nor Jordan Paroubeck nor the draft choice they received from the Padres which represented the greatest benefit of the deal for the Braves, but rather the relief from Upton Jr.’s salary. At the time, Atlanta owed more than $45 million to Upton Jr. through the 2017 season. Getting out from under the contract made sense for a club that appeared unlikely to contend anytime soon. Upton Jr., who possessed negative trade value, was nevertheless traded.

Quite a bit has changed in the meantime, it seems. Since arriving in San Diego, Upton Jr.’s on-field performance has improved as the total remaining cost of his contract has decreased. Once a liability, Upton Jr. became a hypothetically tradeable asset — one who was actually traded today, to the Blue Jays, for right-handed prospect Hansel Rodriguez.

There is, of course, some cost to the Padres, who will pay $17 million of the $22 million still owed to Upton Jr. through next season, per Jon Heyman. But that’s not entirely surprising: the trade market currently features a great number of outfielders, something that was true last summer and carried over into the free-agent market last winter. The cost to acquire outfielders simply isn’t very high, and Toronto is benefiting from that glut.

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Not too long ago, I wrote about how the Blue Jays have gotten back to hitting the snot out of the ball. That shouldn’t be too surprising — a year ago, the Blue Jays hit the snot out of the ball. There was something in there, though, I’ve had trouble shaking. I included it as just a throwaway remark, but with Jose Bautista sidelined for the past few weeks, Ezequiel Carrera has gotten regular playing time. And even Ezequiel Carrera has hit.

Odds are, you don’t care. At least, you don’t care much. Several of you might not have ever heard of Carrera before. He’s 29 and he’s made the rounds, and, well, low-profile players can get on good runs. Numbers like Carrera’s could be easy to ignore, but I’ve known of Carrera for years, and I dug in. Carrera has started to show something. Somethings, more like. He’s got a good batting line for the first time in his career. The Blue Jays, as an organization, seem to know something about hitting, and I’m wondering now if even Carrera is reaping the benefits.

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Most All-Stars weren’t born into baseball this way. Most of them had to alter their approach, or their mechanics, in order to find that a-ha moment. They threw a pitch differently, or decided to pull the ball more, or changed their swing, and then found a run of sustained success that put them in the All-Star game that’s being played tonight.

So, given fairly fettered access to the All-Stars from both leagues, that was the question I posed: what was the big adjustment, mechanical or approach-wise, that brought you to this podium today?

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You’ll hear some hitters say that you can’t cover both the inside and the outside parts of the plate at the same time. We heard Marcus Semien talk about the difficulty both of being able to pull for power and also take the outside pitches to the opposite field just last week. And, to some extent, the high and low fastballs require different swings that suit different players. Brandon Moss told us about his problems with high fastballs, and Brian Dozier admitted that his swing was better against the high cheese.

It stands to reason — at least for the benefit of our exploration today — that a balanced hitter would be one who could handle pitches in all four quadrants. They would produce good results against high fastballs, low fastballs, inside fastballs, and outside fastballs. Conveniently, that sounds like something we can measure.

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The Josh Donaldson story is pretty amazing. The 48th pick in the 2007 draft, he was then traded a year later as one of four players going to Oakland for Rich Harden, as the Cubs were partially convinced to let him go due to his poor .217/.276/.349 line in A-ball that year. You generally don’t like it when college draftees put up a 78 wRC+ at any level, much less one they should be dominating. The A’s took a bet on a guy with contact skills and some power, though, and saw him hit much better upon promotion to the Cal League, but the league environment is pretty friendly there, and his slow start in Chicago raised questions about how good his bat would eventually become.

As a bat-first catcher, that’s a problem, so Baseball America ranked him as the A’s 13th best prospect following the 2008 season. That general ranking stuck for the next few years — he ranked as the A’s #14 prospect after 2009, #12 prospect after 2010, and #20 prospect after 2011 — as he kept performing like a good-not-great hitter, and one who mostly caught but also got some time at the corner infield positions, signaling that his future probably wasn’t behind the plate.

The A’s officially converted him to third base full time in 2012, as projected starter Scott Sizemore tore his ACL in spring training, and the A’s needed a replacement. But he flopped in that audition, hitting .153/.160/.235 in 100 plate appearances before getting shipped back to the minor leagues, losing his job to Brandon Inge, who signed with the team as a free agent in April after being released by the Tigers. At that point, Donaldson was a 26 year old with a big league wRC+ of 8. Yes, 8. Given his pedestrian minor league numbers, it was easy to look at Donaldson just like every other guy tweener, with a bat good enough to hang around the highest level of the minor leagues, but without enough value to stick as a big leaguer.

A couple of months later, though, Inge headed to the disabled list, and Donaldson was summoned back to replace him. And since August 14th of 2012, Donaldson has hit .287/.372/.519, good for a 146 wRC+, while turning himself into one of the very best players in baseball. And he just keeps getting better.

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One season ago, the Blue Jays had one of the stronger team offenses in baseball’s recent history. Going into this season, not too much stood to change. So throughout the winter, the talk was about what the Jays could do to strengthen the starting rotation. It would be fair to say that, when the Jays signed J.A. Happ, the community was underwhelmed. It looked like the plan was simply to brutalize, and then April rolled around, and the Jays had a good rotation and a mediocre lineup. Baseball was one step ahead of us. Baseball is forever one step ahead of us.

Concerns shifted, as they do. While Aaron Sanchez emerged as a quality starting pitcher, people began to wonder about some of the hitters. To be sure, there were some ugly trends taking place. Let me tell you, though: Those days are gone. There was a time, this year, when the Blue Jays had trouble scratching out runs. They’re back. The Blue Jays, I mean, and I guess the runs. They’re destroying the competition, and I’m not sure how much they can be expected to slow down.

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Ever since Eric Byrnes used a computer to help umpire an independent-league baseball game last year, and then Brian Kenny took up the mantle of #RobotUmpsNow on the MLB Network, I’ve been fascinated with the idea that robot umpires will soon call strike zones in baseball. The more I talk to players about it, though, the more I doubt that it’s an eventuality. Because the players, well, the players are going to hate it.

I can’t speak for all players, obviously. I haven’t talked to all of them. But I’ve talked to plenty on both sides, even ones I can’t quote here, and the biggest endorsement I could get was a tepid version of “It’s going to happen.”

So instead of asking each player what they thought about robot umpires, I changed the question a bit. Instead, I asked pitchers, catchers, and hitters, “Who will hate robot umps the most?”

The short answer? Everyone. The long answer? Much more interesting.

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Josh Donaldson is a superstar. There’s not really any agreed-upon definition of what a superstar is or isn’t, but there are certain obvious candidates, and Donaldson is among them. He hasn’t been the Blue Jays’ best hitter. Jose Bautista is probably also a superstar. He’s aging, sure, but he’s terrifying. He hasn’t been the Blue Jays’ best hitter, either. Edwin Encarnacion is a nightmare to face. He hasn’t been the Blue Jays’ best hitter. Troy Tulowitzki has been one of the best all-around shortstops in recent baseball history. He hasn’t been the Blue Jays’ best hitter. Russell Martin has been one of the better all-around catchers in recent baseball history. He hasn’t been the Blue Jays’ best hitter. The Blue Jays actually tried to trade away the guy who’s been their best hitter. Their best hitter has been Michael Saunders.

And to be clear about this, it’s not like all those Blue Jays have struggled. Donaldson has continued to be one of the very best players in the game. He’s amazing! Slugging .563. Super good. Saunders is slugging .596. We usually like to rank hitters by wRC+. Saunders hasn’t been David Ortiz, because no one has been David Ortiz, not this year. He leads baseball at 189. Daniel Murphy’s the current runner-up, at 163. Saunders is one of three players at 162. We’re approaching the halfway point, and Michael Saunders has been a top-five offensive force. Not bad for a Blue Jay who was nearly an Angel.

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A good way to get smart people to mock you on the internet is to make a big deal about small sample defensive metrics. There are actually a lot things for which people on the internet will mock you, but that’s definitely one of them. For instance, imagine someone told you that Kevin Pillar is the best defender in baseball because his 2016 UZR/150 is 41.3! That assertion would earn some ridicule because a center fielder with a true talent 41.3 UZR/150 would essentially be some kind of baseball magnet positioned behind second base, and I’m given to understand those violate rules 3.09 and 3.10.

Just pointing to a defender’s metrics, be it UZR or DRS, isn’t enough to win an argument. Pillar has a reputation as a great defender, but no one honestly thinks he’s 40 runs better than the average center fielder. At best, that number suggests that Pillar has made great plays at an unsustainable rate, and at worst, it shows that the metrics are imperfectly designed tools that use imperfect data.

In 2015, Pillar accumulated 14 DRS in center (1,236 innings) and 8 DRS in left (120 innings) to go along with his 14.0 UZR in center and 1.5 UZR in left. Over his most recent full season, he was an elite defender; during the first 66 games of 2016 he’s been even better. Pillar currently owns 11 DRS and a 15.4 UZR (all in center). We all acknowledge those estimates are noisy and the precise run values needn’t be taken at face value, but the underlying message is probably right: Kevin Pillar is playing outstanding defense.

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We often treat knuckleball pitchers as if they were members of some long-forgotten sect, practicing their secret ninjutsu on the rest of the league with a pitch that defies gravity and cannot be classified. That’s fine, the knuckler is the rarest pitch in baseball, and it has its iconic moments. Let’s not begrudge anyone a little fun.

But once you peal back the layers on the pitch, you start to see that each truism about the knuckler isn’t necessarily true. In fact, there are probably more ways in which the art of throwing a knuckleball is similar to the art of throwing other pitches than it is different. At least, that is, in terms of strategy and outcomes. Mechanics are obviously a different story.

Let’s unpack some of the things we might hear about knuckleballs, and then us the data and the words of R.A. Dickey and Steven Wright to guide our analysis.

Velocity doesn’t matter.

Maybe this isn’t a thing that’s said a ton, but nobody breathlessly reports knuckleball velocity readings the way they do fastball readings, so at least implicitly we’ve decided that speed doesn’t matter as much with the floating butterfly.

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