Every team that ever trades is rolling the dice. Nothing in baseball has ever been certain, and so to make a trade is to gamble. But the gamble, typically, is that the player being traded for will continue to perform as he has. At least, this is how it is with veterans. The Astros gambled that Justin Verlander would keep on pitching like Justin Verlander. The Angels gambled that Justin Upton would keep on hitting like Justin Upton. The Yankees gambled that Sonny Gray would keep on pitching like Sonny Gray. Over any full season, you never know what a player’s going to do. When you narrow to just a few months, the volatility only increases.

There’s nothing to be done about that kind of gamble. You can’t make sample-based uncertainty certain. You just hope a player’s talent level will shine through. But more rarely, a team will make a different kind of gamble. A gamble on a player the team thinks it can fix. Needless to say, the teams aren’t always right. Every team already tries to get the most out of the players it has. Yet the Dodgers, in July, thought they saw something in Tony Cingrani, and so far, they’re looking brilliant. Nobody’s noticed, but Cingrani’s kicked it up.

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With still roughly two weeks left in the regular season, the divisional races across the major leagues have sputtered and nearly died. Three divisions have already been clinched. The Los Angeles Dodgers have already guaranteed themselves a playoff berth and should secure the National League West in short order. Beyond the Wild Card races, then, the NL Central and AL East remain the only hope for meaningful baseball over the season’s closing weeks. The Cubs have a four-game lead in the former and 96.6% odds of taking the division. The Red Sox, meanwhile, possess a three-game lead in the latter and 89.6% odds.

The Cubs have four games this week with the Brewers in Milwaukee. That series has a chance to facilitate some of the season’s most consequential games, provided Milwaukee can remain within striking distance of Chicago in the meantime. As for the Red Sox, though, don’t play the second-place Yankees again, which will make it tougher for the latter club to make up ground.

The bright side of having these races more or less decided is that we can start to look at the potential rosters for the League Division Series a little sooner. I’ll begin today with the American League. For the purposes of this exercise, I’ll proceed by the odds and regard the Red Sox as the presumptive winners of the East. If that turns out not to be the case, feel free to come back here in October and squawk at me.

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While so much recent focus on the Dodgers has (rightfully) centered on their recent stretch of poor play, how about this ray of sunshine: the club is on the cusp of receiving a nine-win season — the sort of value one can only dependably expect from Mike Trout — from a lone source this year.

Surprisingly, the player responsible for this unusually high level of production isn’t Corey Seager or Justin Turner or even Clayton Kershaw. It’s not even a single player, at all, but a combination of two players at one position: catchers Yasmani Grandal and Austin Barnes. The pair has accounted for 8.1 BWARP, the Baseball Prospectus version of wins above replacement that also accounts for pitch framing.

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The Shohei Ohtani show has unofficially begun. After missing over a month with a thigh issue, Ohtani returned to the mound two weeks ago, with scouts from half of the Major League teams reportedly in attendance. For his start on Tuesday night, both Andrew Friedman and Jerry Dipoto were known to be in the stands to watch in person, a start in which Ohtani was clocked at 101 mph and allowed just one hit over 5.2 innings. And after that start, reports from Japan have begun to suggest that there’s an agreement in place for Nippon to post Ohtani this winter, clearing him to come to the Majors for the 2018 season.

Yahoo’s Jeff Passan has a good breakdown of the situation.

It isn’t about the money. Athletes reflexively say this, and sports fans roll their eyes, because of course it’s about the money. It’s always about the money. Then along comes Shohei Ohtani, 23 years old, the finest baseball player Japan has produced in years, maybe decades, a once-in-a-generation sort who can throw 102 mph and hit tape-measure home runs, a player whose free-market value would start at $200 million if Major League Baseball didn’t restrict the signings of international players under 25 to barely $10 million.

Only Ohtani, it seems, does not mind the prospect of giving up literally hundreds of millions of dollars to play in the greatest league in the world. Multiple reports out of Japan on Wednesday morning there said the same thing: Ohtani, who has been called the Japanese Babe Ruth, will enter the posting system this winter and play for a major league team in 2018. This came as no surprise to the general managers and scouts who have flocked in recent weeks to watch him pitch for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. It also didn’t lessen their excitement any.

“It’s really happening,” one GM said, half-mocking, half-giddy at the prospect of the 23-year-old spicing up the free agent market this winter. And fascinating as his courtship would be in normal circumstances, the prospect of the best player available signing one of the most piddling contracts makes it unlike any free agency sports has seen: One where it literally isn’t about the money.

Because last year’s CBA raised the age of international prospects covered by the bonus-pool system to 25, Ohtani isn’t eligible for true unrestricted free agency for two more years. Rather than wait that long — and as a pitcher, two more years of good health is no guarantee — Ohtani will reportedly be posted this winter and then sign under the same rules by which 16-year-olds are bound. He’ll receive a signing bonus of some size (up to about $10 million) depending on which club he ultimately joins and then sign a standard uniform player contract that binds him to the arbitration system until he accrues six years of service time.

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When the Rockies set out on their road trip Thursday, the conventional wisdom was that the team needed to pick up at least three wins during their time away from home. Expectations are usually modest for Rockies road trips, but particularly when they’re travelling to Los Angeles, Phoenix, or San Francisco. Historically, the Rockies have fared very, very poorly in those cities. And yet, the Rockies skipped LA on Sunday night with a four-game sweep of the Dodgers in their back pocket. What? To say this was unexpected would be a severe understatement. Yes, the Dodgers haven’t looked right lately, but most honest Rockies fans would tell you that they expected LA to get right against Colorado in this series. Such a belief would be well founded.

The Rockies, simply put, haven’t ever played well against the Dodgers. Entering the series, Colorado had a .366 winning percentage in LA, one of their lowest against any competitor. But it’s even worse than that. During the team’s first seven seasons, they went 22-19 in Los Angeles, a respectable showing to be sure. In those seven years, they swept the Dodgers in LA three times, and weren’t swept once. Since 2000, it’s been quite a different story. In the 18 seasons since, up to the start of this series, Colorado had a 52-109 record in LA, good for a .323 winning percentage. Since 2000, LA has swept the Rockies 16 times in LA (including in 2017, the last time Colorado had been in town from June 23-25) and the Rockies had only swept them once. That one time was in 2007, during the magical Rocktober run.

Historical records from over a decade ago obviously don’t possess much (or even any) predictive value for the present. It’s the identities of the players on each roster — not their uniforms — which ultimately dictate the course of play. It makes the recent result no less surprising or rare, however.

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Last Tuesday, I felt obligated to write about the Dodgers’ slide. At that point, they’d lost nine of their last 10 games and were just playing some outright terrible baseball. So, I headlined the piece “The Dodgers Look Terrible Right Now.”

They haven’t won a game since that post was published. They’ve turned a four-game losing streak into a 10-game losing streak, and they’ve now dropped 15 of their last 16. During their current losing streak, they’ve scored just 24 runs, putting up no more than five in any single game. On the other hand, they’ve given up at least six runs in seven of the 10 contests and have now conceded 64 runs in total during that stretch.

Getting outscored by 42 runs in 10 games is not particularly easy. And this doesn’t even include the prior five-game losing streak that they broke when Kershaw shut down the Padres on September 1st. Dating back to August 26th, when this slide began, the Dodgers have been on their own level of awfulness. Especially on offense.

Yep, that’s a 56 wRC+, almost 20 points worse than the 29th-ranked Marlins. And it’s a wholesale offensive collapse.

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Last night, the Diamondbacks beat the Dodgers 13-0 to record their 11th consecutive victory. Now 80-58, Arizona has effectively wrapped a Wild Card berth, and given how they are playing, everyone else in the NL has to be hoping they lose that play-in game. Because they look formidable right now.

But as good as the Diamondbacks look, the Dodgers look equally bad. Last night’s drubbing was their fourth loss in a row and their ninth loss in their last 10 games. If it wasn’t for Clayton Kershaw returning to throw zeroes at the Padres on Friday night, in a game the Dodgers won just 1-0 over one of the worst teams in baseball, they’d be staring at a 10 game losing streak. And it’s not like they’re just playing well but losing close games due to some bad fortune. During this 10 game slide, the Dodgers have played like a team that deserved to get beat every night.

Since August 26th, the Dodgers 57 wRC+ is the worst in the Majors. They are hitting .201/.267/.320 thanks to a combination of the third-highest strikeout rate and the second-lowest ISO. Over this span of 10 games, their offense has been 20 runs worse than the average line-up.

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I was in the Dodgers clubhouse before a game last week at PNC Park when the Sports Illustrated cover was released featuring Justin Turner immersed in Gatorade, the orange liquid nearly a match for the hue of his iconic mane and facial hair.

The amiable Turner was of particular interest that day due to his cover-boy status. He accommodated round after round of media interviews before his locker in the road clubhouse. The Dodgers have perhaps the largest traveling media contingent in the National League.

I waited not for not an interview but an introduction. As someone who has promoted the Air Ball Revolution, I wanted to express my appreciation for his work and to note our mutual acquaintance, private hitting instructor Doug Latta, who helped Turner rebuild his swing and philosophy. In passing, I asked Turner not about the photo (which is tremendous), but about a passage from the accompanying article by Stephanie Apstein.

[Justin Turner] persuaded a fringe major leaguer with a career .598 OPS to spend last offseason overhauling his mechanics; Chris Taylor, now a starting outfielder, has been L.A.’s best second-half hitter, with an OPS of 1.105. Since Turner assigned right fielder Puig five pushups for every grounder he hit in spring training, Puig has pounded the ball harder than in any season since his first. Turner cues up the curveball machine and challenges 22-year-old rookie first baseman Cody Bellinger to fly ball competitions, with the winner taking home $10 per session. “I’m down a little bit,” Bellinger admits. It’s worth the lighter wallet, though: His .800 slugging percentage on curves is second in baseball. The team as a whole has cut its ground ball rate by 8%, the biggest drop in the league.

I’ve previously explored the idea of how air-ball advocates like Daniel Murphy might influence teammates in positive way, how they might be adding value simply by communicating ideas.

Turner is another.

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Yesterday’s start didn’t work out particularly well for Rich Hill. In his first appearance since bringing a perfect game into the ninth inning and then losing a no-hitter (and the game) in the 10th, the Dodgers left-hander conceded a single to the first Diamondbacks hitter he faced on Tuesday. He also conceded hits to the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh batters he faced. By the time he’d recorded his third out in Arizona, he’d allowed five runs. His club’s win expectancy? Less than 13%.

Hill’s night wasn’t a complete shambles, however. Because, even en route to allowing six runs, he also did this:

What this is, is Rich Hill executing a nearly perfect drag bunt against Zack Godley and the rest of the Arizona infield in the the third inning. This is, of course, unusual — a fact which even the casual viewer might have gathered by the reaction of Dodgers first-base coach George Lombard.

While it’s not uncommon for pitchers to bunt — nearly a quarter of their balls in play as batters are bunts, noted Eli Ben-Porat yesterday for the Hardball Times — almost all of those are sacrifice attempts. Of the 539 successful bunts recorded by pitchers this year, only 45 (or, 8.3%) have resulted in hits — and many of those batted balls ultimately classified as “bunt hits” are actually just sacrifice attempts with extenuating circumstances.

Consider the case of Cardinals righty Carlos Martinez. Martinez currently leads all pitchers with three bunt hits. As one can observe, however, he hasn’t really intended to reach base in any one of those instances.

Here’s one of those so-called “bunt hits,” from May 13th:

A second, from June 5th:

And the most recent one, from August 18th:

All three of Martinez’s bunt hints have actually been squeeze attempts in which the fielder has endeavored to record an out at home. In all three cases, the fielder has failed in that endeavor. As a result, a hit has been assessed — almost by default — to Martinez.

The only other pitcher with multiple bunt hits is Zach Davies. Both of them look very much like the sort for which Carlos Martinez is responsible.

Here’s the first one, from a July 25th game against the Nationals:

And from later that same game, on a play that very much resembles an error, but is apparently not an error.

Between Martinez and Davies, that’s five bunts scored as hits, but never intended to be hits — certainly not in the way Hill intended to bunt for a hit.

The difference, of course, is that Martinez and Davies were batting with men on base in every instance. Hill attempted his bunt with no one aboard. And this, for pitchers, is a much more rare event.

A data query by my colleague Jeff Zimmerman reveals that, including Hill’s attempt last night, pitchers have bunted with the bases empty on just 13 occasions this year. Along with Carlos Carrasco, Hill is the only pitcher credited with two bases-empty bunt attempts.

His first one, back on June 3rd, actually caused some trouble for the Milwaukee defense:

Notably, Dodgers pitchers account for five of the 13 bases-empty bunt attempts — and the only successful one before last night, executed by Julio Urias on May 9th.

Urias’s effort resembled Hill’s from last night:

There’s so much to like about Yasiel Puig, and the season he’s having in 2017. He has a career-high rate of walks, and a career-low rate of strikeouts. He has a career-high isolated power, and he also has a career-high 12 stolen bases. He’s remained, for the most part, totally healthy, even on a team that makes liberal use of the disabled list, and Puig’s even got easy career-best marks in both defensive runs saved and UZR. In so many different ways, Puig’s game is looking more polished. Yet his WAR is simply a hair over 2.

There’s only one thing that has held back that number. I mean, all right, sure, Puig could stand to have a higher BABIP. He’d look better if he gathered some missing singles. But there’s just one area where Puig doesn’t look good. If you know how WAR is calculated, you’re probably one step ahead, but I should issue some quick background context. Some numbers around these parts have changed.

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