We all knew Dan Vogelbach’s days in the Cubs’ organization were numbered. His lackluster range limit to first base, and if we’re being serious, even that’s a stretch. He didn’t have a future with the Cubs. Not only do they lack a DH, but they also have more quality hitters than they have lineup spots. A trade was imminent, and the Cubs finally pulled the trigger on Wednesday night, dealing the 23-year-old slugger for unheralded — yet effective — reliever Mike Montgomery and Double-A hurler Paul Blackburn. Triple-A pitcher Jordan Pries also heads to Chicago in the deal.

Dan Vogelbach, 1B, Seattle (Profile)

KATOH Forecast for first six seasons: 2.8 WAR

Vogelbach offers zero defensive value, which means he’ll need to hit a lot to get by in the big leagues. To his credit, however, his exploits in the minors this year suggest he might hit enough to make for a productive DH. He’s slashed a gaudy .318/.425/.548 in Triple-A, and has little left to prove in the minor leagues. KATOH isn’t crazy about Vogelbach on account of his defensive limitations, lack of speed and iffy contact numbers. Vogelbach’s power is excellent, but the other facets of his game threaten to chip away at his value.

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Ten days from the trade deadline, we usually spend most of our time talking about whatever star player is eligible for free agency at years end, and is on a non-contending team looking to upgrade for the future. David Price, Johnny Cueto, and Yoenis Cespedes last year, for instance. This year, though, that guy doesn’t exist; the big pending free agents on rebuilding teams are guys like Rich Hill and Jay Bruce. And because of the dearth of quality players likely to change teams over the next week and a half, the guy who is generating the most conversation leading up to the deadline is… Kyle Schwarber?

Yes, at this point, the hot name that everyone wants to talk about is an injured 23-year-old catcher/outfielder who won’t be healthy enough to play again until next year. Despite the Cubs best efforts to tamp down rumors, leaks out of New York keep suggesting that Schwarber is the guy the Yankees covet, and given the Cubs well-known interest in Andrew Miller, there appears to be mutual interest in players from both sides, with a stand-off emerging over whether the Cubs should surrender Schwarber in a deal for the game’s best left-handed reliever.

The Cubs continue to insist they aren’t going to do it, seeing the move as shortsighted, giving up too much long-term value for a short-term boost. Their Wednesday night acquisition of Mike Montgomery gives them a quality lefty to stick in their bullpen, and relieves some of the pressure to pay the going price for Miller, though, of course, I’m sure they’d still love to have him. But it seems they’d like to acquire him while retaining Schwarber, preferring to have both on next year’s roster as they make perhaps their final run with Jake Arrieta at the front of their rotation.

But if the Yankees hold fast, and say it’s Schwarber-or-nothing, are the Cubs wisely protecting their future, or passing up an opportunity to increase the odds of bringing Cubs fans their first World Series title since 1908? Well, it all depends on what you think Kyle Schwarber is going to turn into.

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The Cubs had no room for Dan Vogelbach. Hit though he may, the absence of the designated hitter in the National League was always an inhibitor for his future there, to say nothing of the wealth of young bats the Cubs have amassed at or near the major-league level. For several months, Vogelbach was an obvious potential trade candidate simply because the Cubs had nowhere to put him. Yesterday, that trade occurred: Chicago sent Vogelbach and Paul Blackburn to Seattle in exchange for Mike Montgomery and Jordan Pries.

Then a third baseman, Vogelbach won a 3-A state baseball championship in high school at Bishop Verot High School in Fort Myers. He tipped the scales at close to 280 pounds at the time and was asked to shed weight early in his pro career with the Cubs. He’s now listed at 6-foot, 250 pounds. There are certainly baseball players built like Vogelbach who are still able to effectively execute all aspects of their given position. Stories about Bartolo Colon‘s athleticism or Livan Hernandez’s flexibility are common in scouting circles and it’s not impossible that someone built like Pablo Sandoval or John Kruk can maintain enough lateral agility to effectively play a corner infield spot. Vogelbach doesn’t appear to be one of those players. He’s not a good athlete and has issues with range, footwork, flexibility and throwing accuracy. He’ll make the occasional, spectacular-looking, effort-based play but hasn’t shown enough technical refinement in his five pro seasons to convince scouts he can play a position.

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Everybody wants Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman. If the Yankees elect to sell off, everybody will want Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman. I don’t need to explain to you why — they are two very obviously dominant left-handed, late-inning relievers. If the Yankees sell, they’ll ask for a high price. Teams, in turn, will pay high prices. You know how the trade deadline works.

People have linked the Cubs and the Yankees. The Cubs don’t need to improve much, but they’d like a steadier bullpen, and they could use a steady lefty. The Yankees present options. On a different tier, I figured the Cubs might have interest in Will Smith. I never once thought about Mike Montgomery. The Cubs just traded for Mike Montgomery. It might not be all they do, but it’s what they did today.

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In his latest trade rumblings column, Ken Rosenthal has a pretty fun story.

Here is an example of a trade that recently was discussed but never got close, and would have amounted to a bombshell if it had come to fruition.

The scenario, according to major-league sources, unfolded like this:

The Cubs tried to acquire left-hander Drew Pomeranz before the Padres sent him to the Red Sox for Class-A right-hander Anderson Espinoza. Simple enough.

The Cubs’ plan, though, wasn’t to keep Pomeranz, who is under club control through 2018. No, the Cubs wanted to spin Pomeranz for a starter who is under even longer team control.

I could not determine the identity of that starter — it was a pitcher whose “name is not out there (publicly), and probably is not going anywhere now,” one source said.

In any case, the Cubs balked at the Padres’ request of infielder Javier Baez for Pomeranz, believing it too high a price. The second part of the deal — the spinning of Pomeranz for the unidentified starter — would not necessarily have worked, either.

This is an intriguing idea for all kinds of reasons. For one, what do the Cubs need with another starting pitcher? Their rotation is already pretty excellent, so making a complicated three-way trade to either acquire a #6 starter or bump Jason Hammel from the rotation while he’s running a 3.34 ERA would be a bit weird. They could use some rotation depth in case of injury, but if you’re acquiring Pomeranz — potentially the most valuable starting pitcher to be moved this month — because you want to flip him for someone even more valuable, that guy has to be pretty good, right? You’re probably not going to pay the price for Pomeranz, only to ship him off for some guy you’d stash in Triple-A, if you’re a win-now contender like the Cubs. At least, I wouldn’t think so.

Of course, it’s not entirely unheard of. The win-now Dodgers inserted themselves into the Todd Frazier trade, getting a package of prospects they liked from Chicago more than the ones they sent to Cincinnati, rather than just keeping Frazier for themselves. Maybe the Cubs knew that some other team hunting for Pomeranz was willing to part with a guy they liked for the future, and they thought this was their best chance to get a young controllable starter from a team that they don’t match up well with in trade. And perhaps they’d think about using that starter as a reliever down the stretch, strengthening a bullpen that could use an upgrade, with the idea of moving him back to the rotation next year.

So, just for the fun of it, let’s try to figure out who this mystery pitcher might be.

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It’s still rather difficult to craft an argument against the Chicago Cubs as the best team in baseball, at least in my opinion. I mean, shoot, they’ve outscored their opponents by 139 runs for the season, and that’s 34 more than the next-best team, and 50 more than the next-next best team. They’ve got an MVP candidate (favorite?) in Kris Bryant, and they’ve got perhaps the second-best pitcher in the world in Jake Arrieta. The lineup’s still deep, the rotation’s still deep. They still play defense, and they still run the bases. It’s the same roster that was undoubtedly the best roster just a month ago, and the same roster that the projections, whether it be ZiPS, Steamer, or PECOTA, think is clearly the best in the sport.

But, here’s the thing. The Cubs no longer have the best record — they’ve barely got the second-best record — and that’s kinda crazy, considering it was barely a month ago that they had the best record in the sport by 6.5 games, with an even better BaseRuns record at the time.

Except, lately — and pretty much since that moment — things haven’t been going so hot. I created a little infographic to help put things into perspective. Hope this does the trick:

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Ah, this part. I always enjoy this part. Not because I enjoy when superstars struggle, but because I enjoy seeing the standards to which we hold those same superstars. The standards are revealed when people start to worry. Over his last…I don’t know, eight starts, Jake Arrieta has a 3.77 ERA. He’s allowed a slugging percentage of .331. This is Jake Arrieta in a rut. I mean, this really is Jake Arrieta in a rut — people aren’t making up the rut — but you can see how silly reality is. That all-time amazing version of Arrieta became the version we allowed ourselves to take for granted.

But, heck, where’d he go? Arrieta himself would admit he hasn’t been firing on all cylinders. He’d like to pitch better than he has. The Cubs would like him to pitch better than he has. While Arrieta hasn’t been bad, lately he’s fallen short of expectations. And if you examine the record now, you see signs that Arrieta has been off to some degree for several weeks. This isn’t all that recent of a thing.

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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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Who is the best hitter in the National League? The easy and “right” answer, insomuch as one exists, is Bryce Harper, as we’re mere months removed from watching him put up the best season at the plate by a 22-year-old since Ted Williams. But with Harper currently producing at the plate at a rate more comparable to guys like Odubel Herrera and Stephen Piscotty, it’s natural to ponder the question: “If not Harper, then whom?”

There are a few viable candidates but two who stick out are the only two National League players other than Harper to post a wRC+ above 150 since 2014: Paul Goldschmidt, who has been consistently elite with the bat for four seasons now and, the subject at hand, 26-year-old superstar, Anthony Rizzo.

In the previous sentence, you could argue I threw around the word “superstar” a bit cavalierly. It’s a word from which I tend to shy away because it’s so incredibly subjective as to be functionally meaningless. I don’t know that there are more than two players in the game right now – Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw – who are labeled “superstars” with anything resembling universal agreement. Anthony Rizzo certainly wouldn’t receive universal billing as a “superstar.” I don’t know if he’s a superstar by your definition – shoot, I just paired him with that term and I’m not completely convinced he’s a superstar by my own subjective definition – but I do know this: Anthony Rizzo is an extraordinarily talented baseball player and, so far this year, he’s putting up what looks like the best season of his major-league career.

He has set or matched his career high in most key offensive rate stats from on-base percentage to wOBA to strikeout and walk rates. But not only is he putting together a strong season by his own standards, his stats stand out in comparison to his competition in the National League:

There are a variety of different ways to go about building a prototype for an ideal hitter, but a great starting point would be a guy doing exactly what Rizzo is doing right now: exhibiting plate discipline, getting on base, and hitting for power. That’s an impressive trifecta — and, at the core of that offensive profile, lies the key improvements Rizzo has made.

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A few days ago, I shared KATOH’s thoughts on the college players who were drafted (and not drafted) in this year’s amateur draft. There were hundreds of them. Many of the players with very good projections went in the first round, including Nick Senzel, A.J. Puk and Cody Sedlock. But the player with the very best KATOH projection fell all the way to the 10th round. The end of the 10th round. That player is Dakota Mekkes, whom the Cubs drafted with the 314th-overall pick out of Michigan State.

Mekkes was straight up filthy this past season. Pitching in the Big 10, Mekkes struck out a remarkable 96 batters in just 57 innings without surrendering a single home run. The catch is that he pitched exclusively in relief — though he wasn’t used like a typical reliever, and actually pitched more like a starter in some cases. Mekkes averaged over two innings per appearance in relief, and frequently threw many more than that. Most notably, he tossed six shutout innings in an extra-inning game against Maryland. Unlike most college relievers, he wasn’t a one-inning guy, which helps explain why KATOH likes him more than most relievers.

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