Major League Baseball’s attempts to narrow the gap between franchises has resulted in an incentive system. While other leagues have salary caps and floors, Major League Baseball has instituted a system of luxury taxes (to bring down the highest payrolls) and revenue sharing (to bring up the lowest ones). As I noted in a piece for ESPN The Magazine this spring, the system has been pretty effective too, as we are currently experiencing an age of parity unlike any time in MLB history.

However, incentives don’t work in every situation. You can carrot-and-stick your way to success on a broad level while still having some individuals fall through the cracks. Overall, I think MLB’s financial system is mostly as effective at promoting competitive balance as a hard salary cap would be, but that doesn’t mean that the system doesn’t have some flaws. And, with the Ricky Nolasco trade, the Miami Marlins are shining a bright light on the system’s flaws once again.

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Using veteran right-hander Ricky Nolasco as bait, the Miami Marlins have successfully hooked three hard-throwing arms. The Fish have acquired Angel Sanchez, Josh Wall and Steve Ames, while the two clubs also exchanged international signing dollars, and you can read more about the big league portion of the deal by checking out Jeff Sullivan’s offering from the weekend.

This deal can be best categorized as quantity over quality, in terms of the prospects heading to the state of Florida. Although all three young, right-handed hurlers can hit the low-to-mid 90s with their fastballs, their ceilings are tempered by command issues and lack of consistent secondary stuff. Despite having a weaker minor league system in terms of depth, none of the three arms appeared on my pre-season Top 15 prospects list for the Dodgers. The prospects have never appeared on any FanGraphs top prospects lists over the past four seasons, although Sanchez was highlighted as a potential sleeper on my pre-2012 Dodgers Top 15 prospects compilation.

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There are some things that it makes sense to hold on to. A collector’s item, perhaps, that’s gaining value every year. Your first childhood teddy bear, or some family heirloom. A new car you literally just bought. Then there’s Ricky Nolasco, of the 2013 Miami Marlins. Nolasco is about as obvious as trade bait gets. At its simplest, you could just refer to Nolasco as the expensive Marlin. He’s a free-agent-to-be, and the team around him is terrible, and it’s not like people show up to the ballpark in droves specifically to watch Ricky Nolasco pitch. Contending teams want starting pitchers, and Nolasco’s an available starting pitcher, and there’s a non-zero chance he’s traded by the time this very post is published. It’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen soon, by the sounds of things. The Marlins have nothing to gain by holding on to him, and they’re sure as hell not going to issue him a qualifying offer.

So Nolasco’s going to get moved, which means people — fans of contending teams — are going to be curious about Ricky Nolasco. What’s this guy’s deal? Here’s where we begin: Ricky Nolasco, as a starting pitcher, is fine. That’s the best, most accurate label I can give him. The question is how fine; is he more like a 3 who can look like a 2, or is he more like a 4 who can look like a 3? This is what’s most worth examining.

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Last year I reintroduced VOL, a custom metric that attempts to measure the relative volatility of a hitter’s day to day performance. It is far from a perfect metric, but at the moment it’s what we have.

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Last night, Alex Sanabia gave up a home run to Domonic Brown in the second inning, and as he was walking back to the mound, the video appears to capture him spitting on the baseball. Sanabia then proceeded to retire 14 more batters without allowing any more runs, and the Marlins beat the Phillies 5-1. Based on the video evidence, it seems as though Sanabia may have been throwing a spitball last night. Based on the fact that he had one of his best starts of the season, by results, it appears as though the spitball might have fairly effective.

Of course, this is all still highly speculative. We only have that one video clip of him spitting that one time, and because the clip is very short, we don’t actually know what happened before he threw the next pitch. Maybe he dried the ball off. Maybe the spit didn’t actually hit the ball, and it’s all a camera angle trick. If we’re going to assume that Sanabia was throwing a loaded baseball, we should investigate a little further.

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Let me preface all of this by saying that it’s always possible that a quick video replay could be missing necessary context and misrepresenting what actually happened. There is some uncertainty when viewing events from afar, especially in a narrow timespan. It is possible that what you’re about to see isn’t what it looks like.

But, uhh, it sure looks like Alex Sanabia was caught on video spitting all over the baseball after allowing a home run to Domonic Brown tonight. As pointed out by one of our commenters, you can see the video here, and pay attention at around the 13 second mark.

Or, if you’d rather, just watch this helpful GIF, care of Jeff Sullivan.

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Some weeks, there are major developments in the business of baseball — like a team signing a new local TV contract. Some weeks, there are little developments on the big developments. My posts tend to focus on the big developments, but that leaves you in the dark on the little developments, unless those little developments become big developments down the road.

Dollars & Sense keeps you up to date on the smaller stories that are important but may not justify a separate post. Today, we have news on attendance through the first quarter of the seasons and expanded in replay in 2014.

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How far can a player go on base running alone? Probably not too far. Speed as a tool is obviously quite valuable, especially at an elite level, as it feeds both into the ability to provide value on the bases and in the field. Strictly in terms of offense, though, how good can a player be with a terrible bat and good base-running skills? Just for fun, here are five recent individual seasons with the biggest differential between base-running value and batting value.

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Major League Baseball introduced interleague play in 1997, in part to boost interest in the game after the 1994 season was cut short by the players’ strike. More than 15 years after the first interleague game between the Giants and the Rangers at The Ballpark at Arlington, MLB continues to boast about attendance at interleague games. Last season, the average attendance at interleague games was 34,693, the highest since 2008, when 35,587 fans, on average, attended interleague games.

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Giancarlo Stanton is struggling and Giancarlo Stanton’s teammates are terrible. These two things are true. These two might be related. It would make sense that these things are related, because the drop-off from Giancarlo Stanton to the guys hitting behind him is absurdly large.

Stanton has played in 16 games this season, and has hit third in all 16 of those games. The cleanup spot behind him has been a rotation of Greg Dobbs (8 games), Placido Polanco (5 games), and Joe Mahoney (3 games). If you go by the rest-of-season ZIPS projections, Mahoney is the best hitter of the bunch, forecast for a .677 OPS, with Dobbs and Polanco both coming in at .650. Weighted for the number of games played, then, you could say that Stanton has been “protected” by three players with an aggregate OPS projection of .665, a 269 point drop off from his own .934 rest-of-season ZIPS forecast.

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