Over the coming weeks, Eric Longenhagen will publish brief, informal notes from his looks at the prospects of the Arizona Fall League and, until mid-October, Fall Instructional League.

Athletics OF Lazaro “Lazarito” Armenteros continues to take better at-bats than I anticipated and has an advanced feel for his strike zone. The power is as advertised, too, though he’s extremely vulnerable against breaking balls and is often so far out on his front foot against them that he can’t do anything but foul them off and live to see another pitch. He has a 40 arm, is a 50 runner and a left fielder for me going forward.

Also of note for Oakland yesterday in a Fall Instructional game against the Angels was RHP Abdiel Mendoza, who just turned 18 in September. Mendoza is extremely skinny but loose and quick-armed. His fastball sat in the upper 80s but I think there’s a good bit more coming and I like Mendoza’s athleticism. He’s purely a teenage lottery ticket but one I think who’s worth following.

For the Angels, INF Julio Garcia took the field at shortstop, which is notable because I hadn’t seen him play there for over a year. Garcia, a switch-hitter, came over from the DSL late last summer and looked tremendous at SS, but has spent this year playing a lot of 2B and 3B in deference to, in my opinion, inferior prospects — and also lost a significant amount of playing time to a facial injury. Scouts like the glove, body and bat speed but want to see a more measured approach to hitting, especially from the left side. The Angels’ middle infield is crowded at the lower levels, a group that includes 2016 draftee Nonie Williams, who posted an above-average run time for me yesterday.

Also of note for the Angels yesterday was the cage work of 2016 2nd rounder, OF Brandon Marsh. Marsh has not played in games since signing (neither in the AZL nor during instructional league) but showed above average raw power during a side session yesterday. The body should grow into even more pop. Mid-way through his session Marsh paused to take instruction from a coach behind the cage and immediately made an adjustment on his subsequent swings.

In last night’s Arizona Fall League game between Peoria and Salt River, Mariners OF Tyler O’Neill posted a plus run time for me yesterday and showed off his plus bat speed on several occasions but I thought his at-bats were a little overaggressive. Seattle LHP Luiz Gohara sat 95-97, touched 98 and flashed a plus slider in the mid-80s but struggled with command and, at age 20, is already carrying what looks like 240-plus pounds.

Padres utility prospect Josh VanMeter squared velocity several times and had three hits. Orioles LHP Tanner Scott was touching 99 but not getting as many swings and misses as you might expect from a 95-plus mph heater and his low-90s cutter/slider wasn’t all that effective, either.

Seattle Mariners’ backup catcher Steve Clevenger is not particularly sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement. Rather than keep his feelings on the matter to himself, however, he decided to share them with the world on Thursday afternoon in the following tweets:

Not surprisingly, the public response to Clevenger’s comments was swift and unforgiving. Within hours, the Mariners released an official statement distancing the team from the remarks. And although Clevenger later apologized for the tweets, the Mariners nevertheless announced on Friday that the team was suspending him without pay for the remainder of the season.

On the one hand, the impact of the suspension on Clevenger will be relatively modest, as he was already on the 60-day disabled list with a broken hand, and thus was unlikely to play again for the Mariners this season. On the other hand, however, by being suspended without pay, Clevenger will forfeit the roughly $32,000 he would have earned over the season’s final 10 games.

It does not appear as though Clevenger will challenge his punishment, according to a report by Maury Brown. If Clevenger were to change his mind and file an appeal, however, then it is possible that he could get his suspension reduced by an arbitrator. Specifically, although Major League Baseball and its teams generally have the legal right to punish players in this manner, Clevenger could argue that a suspension of this length is at odds with those handed down in similar, prior cases.

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According to our playoff odds, there are currently 13 teams which feature playoff odds below 2%. As that number grows throughout the month, an increasingly large percentage of baseball fans will be bidding farewell to the hopes that this is the year for their preferred teams and looking to adopt other rooting interests. There’s no full replacement for the satisfaction of your team winning in October, but playoff baseball is still worth enjoying as much as you can. So, for whom do you root this month?

In recent years, Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated has popularized Team Entropy — spending your September rooting for the chaos generated by ties testing the limits of baseball’s tie-breaker system. With a range of 5.5 games separating the seven teams atop the AL Wild Card standings, Team Entropy is as in play as ever. The theoretical implications of a three- or four- or five-way tie for a Wild Card spot are delightful to imagine. It would be a blast to watch and, as someone with no skin in the game this year, I’d enjoy the hell out of it. That said, my strongest loyalties lie with another team — I’m not Team Entropy, I’m Team Cinderella.

For me, there’s no more exciting storyline than a September longshot bucking the odds and finding its way into the postseason. Two years ago, the Pirates had roughly a 20% chance to make the postseason on September 3rd according to The Baseball Gauge and then proceeded to secure themselves a spot in the Wild Card game. But I’d argue an even more exciting September Cinderella storyline unfolded a year before that when the 2013 Indians finished off the season by winning 15 of 17 and beating out the Rangers for a Wild Card Spot despite possessing 15% playoff odds at the start of that final 17-game run. Now that’s my idea of brilliant September baseball.

It’s been a few years and, though it may be a virtue, patience is certainly no fun. It’s time for a new September Cinderella team, so let’s go searching for one. For this exercise, I’m considering the cases of the five teams with playoff odds currently in the 3%-20% range.

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Here is one of my favorite clips of the season:

That’s Ronald Torreyes, attempting a delayed and perfunctory swing at a pitch-out to try to protect the running Aaron Hicks, who ends up in a heap on the ground after getting jarred in the marbles. Torreyes swings for no reason other than he’s always been told to swing in these situations, so the decision was entirely out of his hands. You can see that he’s temporarily overruled by his own brain, which properly identified that a swing would come with no upside. But then the training kicked in, and Torreyes whispered the bat in a vaguely forward direction while Hicks sprinted like the dickens, unaware the situation would end with teammates discussing his sterility.

Pretty obviously, no swing has been attempted this season at a more-outside pitch. Yet I don’t know if that should really “count,” since Torreyes didn’t swing because he wanted to. The swing was mandated by the hit-and-run play. So let’s take that off the table. Now the most-outside swing attempt of the season belongs to Jose Abreu, as of Thursday night. Abreu should probably be ashamed of himself.

Though I looked at everyone, the swings at the very most-outside pitches have been attempted by righties. Allow me to read off to you the top three:

1. Ronald Torreyes, June 30, swinging pitch-out
2. Jose Abreu, August 25, swinging strike
3. Jose Iglesias, May 24, swinging pitch-out

The only worse swing was at a pitch-out. The next-worst swing was at a pitch-out. The next-worst swing at a non-pitch-out was at a pitch more than five inches closer to the plate. That swing was also with two strikes, attempted by Javier Baez. Baez will do that sometimes. So, evidently, will Abreu.

Exclaimed Mariners announcer Dave Sims, after Abreu’s strikeout with runners in scoring position:

Swing and a miss, he got him! What a big pitch.

It’s easy to get fooled on the fly. Strikeouts are strikeouts, and when the batter swings, that implies a pitch could have been only so bad. Abreu chased this slider from Steve Cishek; therefore, it must have been a good slider from Steve Cishek. Yet it’s not hard to see how that could have been a disastrous slider from Steve Cishek. You don’t want a pitch in that situation to get away. And Abreu had never before swung like this. I went to Baseball Savant. I plotted all of Abreu’s career swings. The swing above is highlighted below.

I mean-

Eleven inches. The difference between that pitch and the next-most-outside pitch Abreu had chased is 11 inches. Nearly a whole damn foot. There’s really no excuse for that kind of swing. The easy explanation is “Abreu was trying to do too much,” but trying to do anything with that pitch is trying to do too much. It’s a brain fart. It has to be a brain fart. I don’t know what else it would be unless, as of Thursday night, in the seventh inning, Jose Abreu suddenly became, on camera, the single worst hitter in Major League Baseball.

By the way, the Baez swing? The one that’s the next-worst of the season?

That swing was also against a Steve Cishek slider. It’s probably just a coincidence. But, maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get it.

Khris Davis has maintained excellent exit velocity all year, and has 33 home runs to his name, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t pressed at times with his new team. His walk rate is less than half what it used to be, and his swinging-strike rate is up nearly 20%.

The Oakland outfielder admitted that his decision on when to swing hasn’t been at its finest this year. “I was putting pressure on myself in a new environment,” he told me recently before a game against the Indians. “It was mental. Just kinda settled down.”

It’s something we can easily see in his swing percentages — but, perhaps more importantly, it’s totally normal and has happened very often to other big bats changing teams.

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Sandy Leon isn’t the best hitter in baseball, but if you set the plate-appearance minimum low enough, then he shows up as the big-league leader in wRC+. He steadfastly refuses to cool off, and so far he has saved the Red Sox behind the plate. It’s a heck of a story.

Mike Zunino isn’t the best hitter in baseball, but if you set the plate-appearance minimum even lower, then he shows up as the big-league leader in wRC+. Maybe that’s not fair to Leon, but then, lowering the threshold for Leon isn’t fair to everyone else. Zunino was brought up for good about a month ago in order to bump Chris Iannetta, and he’s helped to fuel a Mariner surge in the standings. Given what Zunino had been through before, it’s a heck of a story, as well. Zunino is but 25 years old, yet he’s already been to baseball hell.

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Yesterday afternoon, Ichiro Suzuki became just the 30th player to reach 3,000 hits in the major leagues. He did so with a triple, making him just the second player ever to get to hit number 3,000 on a triple. It was a pretty glorious hit, and it will be one of the capstones on an awesome career. To celebrate, I thought we could take a walk back down memory lane and look at some of the most impactful hits of his Hall of Fame career. Some are his best according to WPA, some are postseason hits, and a few are just round-number hits, because we all love those. We’ll go in chronological order.

April 2, 2001, Mariners vs. Athletics
Ichiro wasted little time getting going. After grounding out to the right side in his first two major-league plate appearances, and striking out in the third, Ichiro would single up the middle in his fourth plate appearance, and drop down a bunt single in his fifth and final plate appearance of his first game.

The first hit came off of T.J. Mathews, and the bunt came off of Jim Mecir. Ichiro scored following the first hit to pull the Mariners within one run, and the bunt would push go-ahead run Carlos Guillen to third. The bunt came following a walk. Generally speaking, you don’t want to give away an out with a bunt when a reliever comes into the game and walks the first batter he faces on five pitches, but Ichiro did anyway, quickly serving notice that the normal rules of engagement did not apply to him. Guillen would cross home three batters later, and the Mariners historic 2001 season started with a bang.

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So far in his major-league career, Mike Trout has worn the golden sombrero four times. The first time, three of the strikeouts came against Max Scherzer. The second time, two of the strikeouts came against Drew Hutchison. The third time, three of the strikeouts came against James Paxton. Sunday marked the fourth occasion. Sunday, all four strikeouts came against Paxton. So that made Sunday the first time the best player in baseball had struck out four times against the same pitcher in the same game.

Just in isolation, such a four-strikeout game would be notable. But when you consider the context, I love writing about Trout, and he’s amazing. And I love writing about Paxton, and he’s quickly improving his profile. What does it look like when a pitcher does this to the best in the world? Let us watch the strikeouts together. Trout doesn’t give us these opportunities very often.

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If you’re a general manager itching to cause a stir among your team’s most devoted fan base, you can announce that you’re moving one of your most promising pitching prospects into the bullpen. For as little as some fans might actually know, one thing that’s widely understood is that a good starting pitcher is better than a good relieving pitcher. More valuable, anyway. So fans are inclined to be patient, letting pitching prospects sort their things out. Moving to the bullpen is often considered a last resort. Something that should happen only to lesser players. Fans don’t love when it’s a move that’s made early.

And just generally speaking, I’m sympathetic to that perspective. I’m mostly in alignment — I, too, like being patient with prospects. I want starters to have time to develop. But on the other hand, there’s the case of Edwin Diaz. Before the year, Baseball America ranked Diaz as the No. 2 prospect in an admittedly lousy Mariners system. Early in the season, the Mariners announced that Diaz was being transitioned to relief, citing an inability to learn a third pitch. At the time, the decision was questionable. I suppose it still is, and forever will be. But, why do teams move starters into the bullpen? Because relievers can move quickly, and the best ones can become hugely important. Diaz, already, has become hugely important. Diaz is already pitching like one of the very best relievers in baseball.

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As it has been the past few years, the 2016 non-waiver trade deadline brought about a flurry of activity that was hard to keep up with even if it was the only thing you were doing. Since most of us have other things that we have to or would like to occupy our time with, we figured we would save you some hassle and create an omnibus post with all of our trade deadline content so that you have it all in one place. For clarity’s sake, I’m going to limit this to articles about trades that actually took place.

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