Things are going well for Arizona starter Zack Godley. He’s among the top 25 of all pitchers this year no matter how you measure value, his team comfortably occupies the first Wild Card spot, and he’s outperforming expectations. Some of those expectations might have been muted because, at first glance, he looks like a run-of-the-mill sinker/breaking-ball pitcher without a sufficiently good changeup to battle lefties. But then you look at the results on his change and you’re tempted to tinker, to suggest he should throw it more. Dig a little deeper, though, and things aren’t as clear.

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Victor Robles, CF, Washington (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 1  Top 100: 8
Line: 3-for-5, 2B, HR, SB

Notes
Robles is slashing .320/.375/.505 since his promotion to Double-A and has tallied a career-high 51 extra-base hits already this year. Many of those are doubles hooked down the left-field line that Robles turns into extra bases because of his plus-plus speed. Though he still has occasional lapses out there right now, that speed is likely to make Robles a very good defensive center fielder at maturity as he runs down balls in the gaps that many center fielders cannot. Scouts anticipate Robles will hit around .300 with some pop — though probably not quite as much as he’s shown this year — while playing good defense in center field. As a point of reference, Lorenzo Cain, a good defensive center fielder, has slashed .295/.360/.440 this season with strikeout and walk rates within 1% of Robles’ career marks. Cain has generated 3.3 WAR in 119 games this year. That appears to be a very reasonable outcome for Robles, who is one of baseball’s best prospects.

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Below are the updated summer top-10 prospect lists for the orgs in the National League West. I have notes beneath the top 10s explaining why some of these prospects have moved up or down. For detailed scouting information on individual players, check out the player’s profile page which may include tool grades and/or links to Daily Prospect Notes posts in which they’ve appeared this season. For detailed info on players drafted or signed this year, check out our sortable boards.

Arizona Diamondbacks (Preseason List)

1. Anthony Banda, LHP
2. Jazz Chisholm, SS
3. Jon Duplantier, RHP
4. Pavin Smith, 1B
5. Marcus Wilson, OF
6. Taylor Clarke, RHP
7. Socrates Brito, OF
8. Domingo Leyba. INF
9. Kristian Robinson, OF
10. Drew Ellis, 1B/3B

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Michel Baez, RHP, San Diego (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: NR (signed before SD rankings)  Top 100: NR
Line: 7 IP, 4 H, 1 BB, 0 R, 9 K

Notes
I could probably reserve a place for Baez in this space every fifth day and not be let down. His fastball velocity has backed up a bit since extended (when he was routinely in the upper-90s) but is still sitting mid-90s with huge extension. Baez’s secondaries are also progressing, especially his running changeup, and he’ll flash a plus breaking ball and change a few times during the course of a start now. He’s come a long way since spring training when he was just a tall guy who threw hard.

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Evaluating relievers is difficult given their small sample of work in any given year and their volatility from year to year. But, given the fact that the most active sector of the trade deadline ended up being relievers, it makes sense to put them all in one place and wonder who got the best one. Might there be a surprising answer since the Padres ended up holding Brad Hand’s production on their roster?

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Last night, the Diamondbacks acquired J.D. Martinez, one of the very best hitters in baseball. In order to land the best power hitter available, they surrendered… well, three people who play baseball for a living. As Carson likes to remind me regularly, everyone we talk about here is an elite baseball player, relative to the human population. Compared to you and me, these guys are awesome. The Tigers have two more world-class baseball players today than they did yesterday.

But, relative to other professional baseball players, well, these guys aren’t exactly the ’27 Yankees. Dawel Lugo, the main piece in the deal by the Tigers’ own admission, was graded as a 40 Future Value guy and ranked as the Diamondbacks’ 10th-best prospect over the winter. Sergio Alcantara is a glove-first shortstop whose upside is probably Nick Ahmed, or something along those lines. Jose King is an 18-year-old in Rookie ball and signed for $75,000 not that long ago.

Based on what other players have gotten traded for, this return feels very light. And that’s not exactly a controversial opinion.

There are always going to be disagreements in the valuation of players, and projecting young players is really hard. The last time the Tigers got universally crushed for trading a good big leaguer for some questionably valuable prospects, they received Robbie Ray in return. And then they gave him away a year later. But maybe Lugo turns out to be the hitting version of Ray, developing into a far better big leaguer than expected as a minor leaguer. It happens. It happened to the very guy these guys all got traded for!

But when we see trades like this, where pretty much everyone in the public sphere agrees that one team got the better end of the deal, we can either choose to believe that a major-league organization made a very public mistake in valuing the players involved in the deal, or we can try to figure out why an apparently lopsided deal happened in the first place.

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The Diamondbacks have added a big bat to the middle of their lineup, swinging a trade for slugging outfielder J.D. Martinez. In exchange for Martinez’s services, the Arizona sent Detroit a trio of minor-league infielders: Dawel Lugo, Sergio Alcantara and Jose King. I do not have a KATOH projection for Jose King, as all but 13 of his professional games have taken place in the Dominican. However, he signed for a mere $75,000 and didn’t even make the honorable-mention section of Eric Longenhagen’s Diamondbacks list. That tells you about all you need to know: he’s a low-probability lottery ticket.

Below are the projections for the other two players whom the Tigers receive. WAR figures account for the player’s first six major-league seasons. KATOH denotes the stats-only version of the projection system, while KATOH+ denotes the methodology that includes a player’s prospect rankings.

Dawel Lugo, 3B (Profile)

KATOH: 2.4 WAR
KATOH+: 1.3 WAR

Of the prospects headed to the Tigers, Lugo is the closest to the big leagues and is also the most promising. He’s spent all of 2017 at the Double-A level, where he’s hit a respectable .282/.325/.426. He hit a more impressive .311/.339/.492 last year between High-A and Double-A. Lugo makes a lot of contact while also hitting for a fair amount of power. Players who can do both of those things from a semi-premium position aren’t all that common.

That’s about where Lugo’s appeal ends, however. He rarely walks and is a non-factor on the basepaths. Despite having played shortstop, Lugo’s defense per Clay Davenport’s numbers place him a tick below-average at third, which jibes with Eric’s 40/45 fielding grade. Lugo is still just 22, but as someone who signed out of the Dominican several years ago, he’s unlikely to make any wholesale improvements at this point. Still, someone with his offensive skill set who can play a passable third base could be of some use in the near future.

To put some faces to Lugo’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps. I calculated a Mahalanobis distance between Lugo’s Double-A performance and every season since 1991. 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.

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When it comes to making moves for pending free agents at the trade deadline, it’s hard to say that any pure rental is going to be a bargain. In recent seasons, the most successful trade for a soon-to-be free agent is probably the New York Mets’ acquisition of Yoenis Cespedes from the Detroit Tigers two years ago. Cespedes caught fire over the last two months of the season, putting up a 156 wRC+ and helping the Mets to the World Series. The cost was steep, however: part of Detroit’s return, Michael Fulmer, came in at 22 on Dave Cameron’s Trade Value Series this year.

If there’s a Yoenis Cespedes-type player available this year, it’s the guy whom the Arizona Diamondbacks just acquired. And they don’t appear to have conceded any top prospects for him, either, with Detroit opting for some players further away from the majors, potentially indicating where their future is headed.

Here’s the deal in full:

Arizona gets

• J.D. Martinez

Detroit gets

• Dawel Lugo
• Sergio Alcantara
• Jose King

Arizona is win-now mode. Also, they don’t have a great farm system, and Daniel Descalso has been their regular left fielder of late. Even if the injured Yasmany Tomas returns, he’s still just a replacement-level player. J.D. Martinez, meanwhile, provides at least a one-win upgrade over the course of the rest of the season.

Nor does the price appear to have been particularly high. The Diamondbacks retain top prospect Anthony Banda. As for the players they dealt, Lugo was the Diamondbacks’ 10th-best prospect coming into the season. The 22-year-old second baseman has some power and is holding his own in Double-A. Alcantara is a strong-armed shortstop putting up an average line in High-A, while King is an 18-year-old infielder getting his first exposure in the US in Rookie-level ball in Arizona. Detroit seems to have opted for some lottery tickets in exchange for potentially the best hitter on the market.

You might be forgiven for not totally believing in J.D. Martinez. His career got off to a poor start, and of late, he can’t seem to stay healthy. You might even be forgiven for thinking that Martinez is an aging slugger in decline. He’s not that, though. Teammate Victor Martinez fits that bill, and J.D. certainly has the old-man skillset of power and walks while offering little on defense. J.D. Martinez is just 29 years old, though, and since he joined the Tigers in 2014, he has been one of the very best hitters in baseball.

A champion of the fly-ball revolution, Martinez has put up a 146 wRC+ since joining Detroit, which is ninth in baseball over that span, just behind Nelson Cruz, tied with Anthony Rizzo, and ahead of Josh Donaldson, Giancarlo Stanton, and Justin Turner.

Martinez isn’t relying on 2014 and 2015 to prop up his stats, either. Since the beginning of last season, his 148 wRC+ trails only Mike Trout, Freddie Freeman, Joey Votto, Jose Altuve, and Daniel Murphy. This season, Martinez has been even better, hitting .305/.388/.630 with a 162 wRC+. It’s possible the season has flown a little under the radar, as his name is absent from the leaderboards. That’s only because Martinez missed the first month of the season with a sprained ligament in his right foot, however. As a result, he’s accumulated just 232 plate appearances, not enough to qualify for the batting title. If Martinez had hit 16 homers with a 162 wRC+ in April and May instead of May and June, he probably would have made the All-Star team. He didn’t, and while we are mostly talking about past performance, his projections look great, as well.

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The Diamondbacks are officially going for it. Despite being 10 1/2 games behind the Dodgers in the NL West, they are right in the thick of the Wild Card race, and with just three teams fighting for two spots, have a pretty good at reaching the play-in game. And today, their line-up just got a lot better.

Source confirms: #DBacks acquiring J.D. Martinez from #Tigers. First: @JonMorosi.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 18, 2017

J.D. Martinez was the best hitter available, as he’s now on year four of being an elite hitter. Since the start of the 2014 season, Martinez is ninth in MLB in wRC+, right between Anthony Rizzo and Justin Turner. He’s a beast.

With Yasmany Tomas on the shelf, the Diamondbacks had been using Gregor Blanco, Daniel Descalso, and Chris Herrmann in left field, so swapping those guys for one of the game’s best hitters is going to be a huge upgrade. The projections — which still don’t totally buy Martinez’s bat, thanks to his weak pre-2014 numbers — have him worth a little over a win over the remainder of the season, but you can probably bump that up to +1.5 WAR if you think ZIPS and Steamer are too conservative on his offensive production.

Given how competitive the Wild Card race looks to be, that win or two could be the difference between making it or sitting at home. And now sticking Martinez behind Paul Goldschmidt gives the Diamondbacks a pretty fearsome pair of hitters if they advance deep in October. Given how well the team is pitching, this makes Arizona a potentially tough postseason opponent, should they get there.

To land Martinez, the D’Backs are giving up three prospects. Nick Piecoro had the details.

Dbacks are sending prospects Dawel Lugo, Sergio Alcantara and Jose King to the Tigers in exchange for J.D. Martinez.

— Nick Piecoro (@nickpiecoro) July 18, 2017

Obviously things can change during a season, but these are three kind of shocking names to be traded for an elite hitter, even a rental one. Eric had Lugo as the best prospect of the trio last winter, giving him a 40 FV and ranking him as the team’s 10th best prospect. Alcantara was in the others of note section. King wasn’t mentioned.

Lugo’s been fine in Double-A this year, but hasn’t done anything that would dramatically change his stock that I can see. Alcantara is running a 96 wRC+ in high-A ball, which lines up with Eric’s pre-season report of a future utility infielder or a lower-tier starter. King is an 18 year old in rookie ball.

These guys might turn out well for the Tigers. Perhaps Lugo is closer to being big league ready than we think. Maybe the market for rentals really has crashed.

But hard not to like this for Arizona. They get an elite hitter for the stretch run for three prospects that, to be honest, don’t look all that special. You never like giving up any potential, but for the present upgrade, this looks like Arizona did quite well.

Logically, all of the following is true. We accept that human beings are in charge of calling the strike zone. They try their best to tell the difference between strikes and balls, but you can usually understand if they call a strike on a pitch that missed by an inch. How much is an inch? When’s the last time you tried to do what they do a few hundred times every game? The ball moves incredibly fast, and as an umpire, you never know where it’s going to go, or how it’s going to spin. Anyway, we can be forgiving with an inch. And if we can accept a miss of one inch, it follows that we should accept a miss of two inches. All that is is one more inch, and we already gave them the first inch.

If we can accept a miss of two inches, we can accept a miss of three inches. If three inches, then four inches. If four inches, then five, and if five, then six. On and on it goes, in single-inch increments, and it does all make a certain amount of sense. Humans are great, but humans are flawed, and any human-called strike zone is going to have a gray area.

But, nine inches? Imagine nine inches. You don’t even have to be precisely correct. Your imagination is enough. We know that pitches miss the zone by nine inches. But how does a pitch like that get called a strike? I mean, ever? I don’t want to act like some kind of umpiring authority, because I *haven’t* ever been an ump, and I know sometimes people make mistakes. It’s just — nine inches. Technically, 9.1 inches, in this case. The worst called strike of the 2017 regular season’s first half missed the outer edge of the zone by 9.1 inches. You might’ve seen that Angel Hernandez has been in the news lately.

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