In exchange for LHP Zach Duke, the White Sox received fourth-outfield prospect Charlie Tilson from St. Louis. Tilson is a plus-plus runner with good bat-to-ball skills but doesn’t project as a regular because of his complete lack of power.

A Chicago-area high schooler, Tilson blew up a bit at the Area Code Games as a rising senior when he stole seven bases in three days of play. The Cardinals selected him in the second round of the 2011 draft and gave him $1.275 million to turn pro instead of heading to Illinois. He missed all of 2012 while recovering from surgery to repair a separated (non-throwing) shoulder, began 2013 in full-season ball and has made a ton of contact ever since. He was hitting .282/.345/.407 with Triple-A Memphis before the trade.

Tilson has just average bat speed, no leverage in his swing and very rarely extends enough to really punish the baseball, resulting in 30-grade game power. He can play all three outfield positions, though his arm is fringe average and fits best in center and left. His ability to play center field while making a lot of contact is probably enough to win him a major-league roster spot, but unless his defense in center greatly outpaces present projections, he only profiles as a bench outfielder or below-average regular.

Despite a relatively humble collection of tools, Tilson ranked 81st on Chris Mitchell’s updated KATOH rankings.

A bevy of trades went down over the weekend, as this year’s trade deadline-season entered into full swing. Here are the prospects who changed teams the last couple of days, as evaluated by my newly updated KATOH system. KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

The Andrew Miller Trade

Clint Frazier, OF, New York (AL)

KATOH: 2.7 WAR
KATOH+: 4.7 WAR

Frazier had been promoted to Triple-A a week ago after slashing a strong .276/.356/.469 with 13 steals at Double-A this year. He pairs a high walk rate with decent power and speed, making him one of the most promising offensive prospects in baseball. Despite possessing average speed, Frazier plays mostly the corner-outfield spots these days, and hasn’t graded out particularly well there defensively. This suggests most of his big-league value will come from his hitting. Still, considering he’s a 21-year-old who’s already mastered Double-A, his future looks bright.

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As the going rate for elite relievers continues to make grown men and women blush, it’s increasingly evident that there’s value in not needing to get into the market for the crème de la crème of relievers. Through the hefty prices paid in the acquisitions of Craig Kimbrel, Ken Giles, Aroldis Chapman and, now, Andrew Miller, contending teams are making it clear that they value having that lights out guy at the back of the bullpen perhaps even more than we may have once thought. Fortunately for the St. Louis Cardinals, when they lost their closer, Trevor Rosenthal, first to under-performance and then (perhaps not coincidentally) to a rotator cuff injury, they had an internal alternative which kept them from needing to wade into the deep end of the relief pitching market.

Seung Hwan Oh has been absolutely dominant for the Cardinals this season first as a set-up man and, for the last month, as a closer. The 34-year-old right-hander who had been tremendously successful in both South Korea and Japan has posted a 1.69 ERA and a 26.4 K-BB% since being signed by St. Louis this past winter. His 1.94 FIP ranks tenth among relievers in baseball this season. With the loss of Rosenthal, the Cardinals could have pursued the top names on the relief market this month, but Oh gave them the freedom not to. Instead, they made a relatively quiet transaction this morning picking up left-handed reliever Zach Duke from the Chicago White Sox in exchange for 23-year-old outfield prospect Charlie Tilson — a deal which was announced in true old-school fashion by the teams themselves.

In 2014, Zach Duke posted a surprisingly strong season out of the bullpen for the Brewers. He was 31 at the time and it was his first full season in a major league bullpen after scuffling along as an under-performing starter for most of his 20s. That one great season led to the White Sox giving him a 3-yr/$15M which was heavily mocked at the time due to his age and lack of a successful track record. It would appear, however, that the White Sox were either on to something or extraordinarily lucky as Duke has continued to be a solid reliever since signing the contract.

Since the start of the 2014 season, he has thrown 157 innings to very impressive results: 2.87 ERA, 27.9 K%, 58.2 GB%. He walks more batters than you might like — 10.0% walk-rate — but it’s hard to complain when the overall results are as strong as his. The key to his success has been a curveball which misses bats — the whiff-rate on his curve this season is 43.9% which ranks 12th of 41 MLB relievers (min. 100 curves) — and a sinker which induces grounders on 67% of balls in play. This has resulted in him posting an impressive combination of strikeouts and grounders over the past three seasons.

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Back in the middle of May, Dave wrote about how the Cardinals were off to something of an unlucky start. Their record hadn’t tanked or anything, but they weren’t winning as often as it looked like they should’ve been. Based on, you know, the various other indicators. The post went how those posts usually go — Dave observed that the Cardinals were missing wins, and then he talked about how that kind of bad luck has proven itself to be unsustainable. In other words, the Cardinals had been unlucky, but the Cardinals shouldn’t have remained unlucky.

Two months have passed, and the Cardinals have remained unlucky. Don’t like the word “luck”? That’s fine. You know what I mean. The Cardinals’ most important number isn’t matching up with all the other numbers. In May, it was something to notice early on. Now the Cardinals are in historic territory. It’s the wrong sort of history, but at least they’re making a statement, I guess.

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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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Beginning last season, there’s been a raging debate concerning the identity of baseball’s best shortstop. In fairness, I guess, people have probably been arguing about this forever, but now there’s this outstanding, new, young crop, and it’s hard to believe they all exist. There are veterans in there like Troy Tulowitzki and Brandon Crawford, but you’ve also got Carlos Correa. There’s Francisco Lindor, and there’s Xander Bogaerts. Corey Seager! And maybe we’re supposed to include Manny Machado. There are so many good shortstops. There are so many good shortstops that I’ve left several out.

I’m very comfortable asserting this: Whoever might be the best shortstop in baseball, I believe it is not Aledmys Diaz. Diaz isn’t a premium baserunner, nor is he a premium defender. Remember, he wasn’t even supposed to be in the majors. But here’s a fact for you — Machado leads all players listed as shortstops in wRC+. There in second place, trailing by just five points, is Diaz. He leads everybody else. And he’s officially now a National League All-Star.

It comes off like a classic case of the Cardinals. In the middle of last summer, when Diaz was in the minors, he was removed from the 40-man roster. Anyone, at that point, could’ve had him. The Cardinals brought him back. The rest is history, and the present.

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Baseball fans’ brains are littered with obscure names and trivia. We all know names like Wally Pipp, Fred Merkle, and Johnny Vander Meer for their rather absurd places in baseball history. Five of those baseball names that may or may not be stuck in your brain for trivial reasons are: Freddy Garcia, Jamie Moyer, Gil Meche, Joel Pineiro, and Ryan Franklin. If that quintet is meaningful to you, it’s because every single game of the 2003 Mariners season was started by one of those pitchers.

In the modern era of five-man rotations, that team was the only one ever to get through an entire season without once turning to a sixth starter. It’s a trivial feat, but one that I find myself wondering year after year whether it will ever be repeated. Now that we’re halfway through the 2016 season, it’s time to assess the situation and determine whether or not this will be year of the second immaculate five-man rotation.

One-in-five teams have already used 10 or more starters this season and only two teams are left standing in my personal race to a perfect five-starter season: the Cubs and the Cardinals. Can either team match the 2003 Mariners?

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In 1990, Rickey Henderson came to the plate in the leadoff spot 588 times (out of 594 total plate appearances). He hit 28 homers out of that slot, walking 95 times and striking out just 60, en route to a .326/.439/.579 line as Oakland’s No. 1 hitter. He also stole 65 bases and was caught on just 10 attempts. All told, he produced a 10.2-WAR season that has since been eclipsed by only three position players: Barry Bonds, Cal Ripken, and Mike Trout.

Henderson’s 190 wRC+ mark in 1990 has been topped by a small handful of batters in the meantime, too: Bonds a bunch of times, Jeff Bagwell Mark McGwire. Bryce Harper did it last year, and Frank Thomas did, too, in the strike-shortened 1994 season. None of them provided such production out of the leadoff spot, however. By most criteria, it’s the greatest hitting season by a leadoff batter in history.

It will likely remain the greatest season by a leadoff batter after the 2016 campaign, as well. That said, Cardinals infielder Matt Carpenter is making a strong case for second-best.

In terms of pure value at the plate, Matt Carpenter is off to a great start. Carpenter’s .300/.419/.585 line has led to a .419 wOBA and a 167 wRC+ that leads the National League and is behind only David Ortiz in all of major-league baseball*. Over the last 365 days, Carpenter’s 154 wRC+ mark sits behind only Ortiz, Trout, Josh Donaldson, Harper, and Joey Votto, and his .277 ISO is the seventh best in baseball. Continued production at that level would give him one of the greatest-hitting leadoff seasons of all time.

*Numbers current as of Monday afternoon.

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Sunday morning, I was talking with Craig Edwards and some others in the lobby of a New York hotel. Craig, who as you probably know runs the Cardinals’ site Viva El Birdos in addition to his work for FanGraphs, lamented Trevor Rosenthal’s “shaky” performance this season. After checking in on Rosenthal and the Cardinals’ bullpen, it is even more clear than it already was that Craig is a kind man, for I would use other words to describe Rosenthal’s performance. It might be time for manager Mike Matheny to make a change at the top of the Cardinals’ bullpen.

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You don’t need numbers to gain a sense of how Adam Wainwright’s season has started. You just need Adam Wainwright postgame quotes. After his Opening Day start, he wasn’t “anywhere close to being excited,” and called himself “the definition of average.” The next start tied his “career-high-of frustration level” because he was “so upset about the way the ball [was] coming out.” After start number three, he postulated that he’d “made more mistakes these first three games than [he had in] entire seasons.” Start four: “still not great” and “getting tired of losing.” Following his penultimate outing: “The only way I can move on from that is I have to start over. It’s a new season for me from now on.”

That’s a brief rundown of the first eight starts of Adam Wainwright’s 2016 season, in words. I said you didn’t need the numbers, but now you’re going to get them anyway. Through those eight outings, Wainwright ran a 6.80 ERA. The FIP was better, but still a below-average 4.32, and the expected FIP even worse than that. The strikeouts were way down from what we’ve come to expect, the walks were up, and too many balls were being put in the air and leaving the yard. It was the worst stretch of eight games that Wainwright had had in nearly a decade.

Wainwright being 34, and his arm having had the number of surgeries it’s had, a start to a season like that raises some questions. It raises some questions that would be tough to ask to Wainwright’s face. He probably didn’t care about the questions, but he still wanted to give some answers to make the questions stop. Consider his most recent start like the beginning of an answer.

As far as professional athletes go, Wainwright is notably candid. If his stuff isn’t good, even in a win, he’s going to say his stuff wasn’t good. A couple of those negative quotes from the first paragraph came after victories. He doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to his opinion of how he pitched. The key quote following his most recent outing: “I’m dangerous. You can say I’m dangerous again.”

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