As I write this, Chris Sale is still a member of the White Sox organization. Based on the rumors from the last 24 hours, though, that might not be true much longer.

Sources: Legitimate chance of Sale trade to #Nationals. Robles, Giolito would go to #WhiteSox. Teams haggling over final pieces in deal.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 6, 2016

The #Whitesox did not come close to trading Chris Sale tonight but acknowledge the #Nats were very aggressive in proposals

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 6, 2016

At this point, signs seem to be pointing towards Sale ending up in Washington, joining Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg to form a remarkable group of starting pitchers. There doesn’t seem to be a deal in place, but the White Sox asking price seems to have scared off most other interested buyers, with the Astros choosing to hang on to Alex Bregman and the Braves declining to put Dansby Swanson in a deal. The Nationals aren’t willing to include Trea Turner, but they have enough other highly valued assets to get the White Sox interested, and right now, it seems like the smart money is on the two teams completing a deal for Sale that would net Chicago Lucas Giolito, Victor Robles, and some other stuff.

I have to say, though, from my perspective, this feels like a bit of an underwhelming return for Chicago. Depending on what the other stuff is, it seems possible that Sale is going to command not that much more now than Shelby Miller did a year ago.

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Around the trade deadline, there was ever so briefly a rumor that the Nationals might entertain the idea of moving Lucas Giolito for Andrew Miller. It didn’t happen, and more importantly, it wasn’t true, but I wrote up a quick little post entitled The Case for Trading Lucas Giolito. The circumstances haven’t changed very much in the months since. Giolito is in the news again, mostly in connection with Chris Sale rumors. It’s possible that, by the time you read this post, Giolito will be property of the White Sox! The White Sox would be happy about that, because Giolito remains incredibly talented. He’s also been a declining asset. Since the end of July, Giolito kept on not retiring major-league hitters. He’s a 22-year-old top prospect, but there are more questions about him than ever.

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For two or three days, I’ve been sitting around, waiting for the Nationals to make a big trade. This isn’t the one I was expecting, but, the hell with it, as long as I’m here anyway, the Nationals have picked up Derek Norris from the Padres, at the cost of Pedro Avila. Avila is as 19 as any other 19-year-old, and last year he was fine as a low-level starting pitcher. You know the rest of this. Intriguing stuff, many years away. I will not be discussing Avila again in this post.

Norris is the more interesting of the two. The Nationals wanted a catcher to pair with Jose Lobaton, and Norris can slide right in for cheap. The Nationals will have him for two years if they want, and this year he’ll cost about $4 million. Not much. But, the thing I didn’t expect: Norris was baseball’s worst hitter last season.

That is, if you go by results, and if you set a minimum of 400 plate appearances. The minimum is arbitrary, so, you might say someone else was worse. But Norris did the least with the most playing time. I’m not sure how that escaped my attention as it was playing out, but actually, yes, I am sure how, because Norris played for the Padres, and why would I have been paying attention to them? Norris was dreadful, as you can see in this table.

He finished 203rd out of 203. It was an extremely brutal offensive season, and, related to that, Norris had a career-worst strikeout rate. Yet, it wasn’t all terrible. Fancy yourself an optimist? I like to subtract soft-hit rate from hard-hit rate. Here is a selection from that leaderboard, with the same 400-PA minimum.

No one’s impressed by being close to Marwin Gonzalez, but, Anthony Rizzo? Robinson Cano? Carlos Santana? Wilson Ramos was actually right after Cano. By this measure alone, Norris’ contact was just like Ramos’ contact. The point being, Norris didn’t fall completely apart. He can still sting the baseball, and his career wRC+ is almost league-average. The Nationals assume there’ll be a bounceback, just as Ramos’ three-year wRC+ marks went from 93 to 63 to 124. Like Norris, the bad, 2015 version of Ramos had a career-high strikeout rate. Last year he was one of the Nationals’ more valuable players.

And Baseball Prospectus also considers Norris something of a defensive plus. While he’s not much for throwing out runners, Norris has put together two strong years of receiving, and it stands to reason that should continue into Washington. Acknowledging that we have no idea if Norris actually calls a good game — he seems above-average defensively, and at the plate, he’s been above-average before. This is a pretty painless buy-low, even if it seemingly removes the Nationals from the justifiably perplexing Ramos free-agent sweepstakes. His tale is a sad one, but the Nationals had to move on.

From the Padres’ perspective, easy space has been cleared for Austin Hedges, who deserves this opportunity. And for Norris, while he still won’t be a full-time catcher, at least now his 2017 job share will come with a contender instead of with a rebuilder. That’s not bad news to take a man into a weekend.

Teams have gotten pretty good about handling trade rumors. The teams themselves don’t operate any differently, but whenever any big name is discussed, you just about always hear the team isn’t shopping him. Rather, the front office will frequently indicate it’s open to anything. “Listening to offers,” as if there’s any other way. Big names still get traded as often as ever, but teams try to reduce anxiety in the meantime. They don’t want people stressing out until or unless there’s something worth stressing over.

The Andrew McCutchen offers have taken on a different feel. At first, it felt like, all right, maybe the Pirates would be open to trading him. But Wednesday, reports emerged that the Pirates are the ones being aggressive. I don’t know if that’s coming from the Pirates organization or somewhere(s) else, but this is pretty unusual. Pair that with the news that Austin Meadows will be playing an outfield corner and you definitely get the sense McCutchen’s days with the Pirates are numbered.

As Ken Rosenthal and others have written, it looks more likely than ever that McCutchen’s going to be dealt. If it happens, it would hardly be a shock to see it happen before the end of next week’s winter meetings. McCutchen is still to be considered a premium outfielder, so any number of teams would love to pick him up. After examining the landscape, though, I don’t see a better fit than the Nationals.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Washington Nationals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Even without the benefit yet of having acquired new talent through free agency, the 2017 edition of the Nationals looks strong. There are promising young field players in Bryce Harper (5.1 zWAR), Anthony Rendon (4.1), and Trea Turner (4.4), while all five members of the likely Opening Day rotation earn a projection of 2.5 wins or better.

The club’s greatest weakness appears to come in the form of two previous strengths: Jayson Werth and Ryan Zimmerman. Expected to earn about $35 million between them in 2017, they’re projected to produce roughly zero wins. Of course, that’s oversimplifying matters: players are often compensated for wins on the back end of a deal that they probably supplied at the beginning of it. That doesn’t change the situation facing the Nats, however — namely, that left field and first base might offer little for the club this next season.

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We’ve arrived at the point of the baseball life cycle where Father Time hangs up his Cubs jersey and ponders which jersey he’ll wear next year. A clown car full of free agents is about to hit the open market and already all 30 front offices are drawing up plans about which ones they’ll sign. This year’s free-agent class is woefully lacking in talent and in depth. There are a select few elite players who are sure to attract all sorts of attention, there are a handful of mid-level talents, and there are huge swaths of roster filler. Slim pickings will be had this winter.

However, for teams seeking a new closer, there are three men who present incredibly attractive options. Kenley Jansen, Mark Melancon, and recently crowned World Series champion Aroldis Chapman will be free to sign with any team they please, and Jansen and Chapman will almost certainly destroy any preconceived notions of what typical pay for an elite relief pitcher looks like.

It’s pretty safe to say that every team with intentions of anything resembling contention will be looking to add to their bullpen. These three are just about as good as it gets. Which closer is the absolute best commodity, though? Each has their attractive points and each has their warts.

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The playoffs roll on, with subplots galore, most of them involving pitching-staff usage patterns that are long overdue. Meanwhile, let’s conclude our two-part series examining macro team BIP data for the 10 playoff teams, broken down by exit speed and launch angles. (Read the Part 1 here.) We’ll examine what made these teams tick during the regular season and allowed them to play meaningful October baseball. It’s more or less a DNA analysis of the clubs that made it to the game’s second season.

First, some ground rules. For each club, all offensive and defensive batted balls were broken down (first) by type and (second) by exit speed. Not all batted balls generated exit speed and/or launch angle data; just over 14% were unread, most of them weakly hit balls at very high or low launch angles. How do we know this? Well, hitters batted .161 AVG-.213 SLG on them, a pretty strong clue.

BIP types do not strictly match up with FanGraphs classifications. For purposes of this exercise, any batted ball with a launch angle of over 50 degrees is considered a pop up, between 20 and 50 degrees is a fly ball, between 5 and 20 degrees is a line drive, and below 5 degrees is a ground ball. For background purposes, here are the outcomes by major-league hitters for each of those BIP types: .019 AVG-.027 SLG on pop ups (5.7% of measured BIP), .326 AVG-.887 SLG on fly balls (30.9%), .658 AVG-.870 SLG on liners (24.4%) and .238 AVG-.260 SLG on grounders (39.1%).

As you might expect, there are massive differences in production within BIP types based on relative exit speed. If you hit a fly ball over 100 mph, you’re golden, batting .766 AVG-2.739 SLG. If you drag that category’s lower boundary down just 5 mph, however, you get to the top of the donut hole, where fly balls go to die. Hitters batted just .114 AVG-.209 SLG on fly balls between 75-95 mph. All other fly balls — yes, even including those hit under 75 mph — fared much better, generating .387 AVG-.786 production.

Line drives tend to be base hits at almost all exit speeds. All the way down to 75 mph, hitters bat over .600 on batted balls in the line-drive launch-angle ranges; down to 65 mph, hitters still bat around .400 range in each velocity bucket. At 65 mph and higher, a liner generates an average .673 AVG-.889 SLG line. Under 65 mph, liners tend to land in infielders’ gloves; hitters batted just .170 AVG-.194 SLG on those. On the ground, hitters batted a strong .423 AVG-.456 SLG on grounders hit at 100 mph or higher. Under 85 mph, however, the hits dry up almost totally, with hitters producing a .107 AVG and .117 SLG. Between 85-100 mph, hitters bat closer to the overall grounder norm, at .267 AVG-.294 SLG.

With that as a backdrop, let’s conclude our look at each playoff club’s offensive and defensive BIP profiles. Last time, we profiled the Orioles, Red Sox, Cubs, Indians and Dodgers; today, we’ll look at the other five, in alphabetical order:

New York Mets
Two of the 10 playoff teams played well over their true talent this season, at least based on my BIP-centric method of team evaluation. Both will be covered today. First, the Mets hit significantly more pop ups than their opponents (+69), not including untracked ones in that 14% “null” group. On the positive side, the Mets hit 160 more fly balls than their opponents; they were a whopping +86 vis-à-vis their opponents in the 95-105 mph buckets. This explains why they hit 66 more homers than their opponents.

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It’s safe to say that Dusty Baker is not exactly the most progressive manager in baseball. Baker has always been an old school guy, and relative to what is becoming the new normal, he’s definitely a traditionalist. So as we live-blogged game five of the NLDS last night, one of the common questions in the early innings is what mistake Baker would make that would cost his team the game. The expectation was set in advance; if the Nationals lost, Baker’s old-school philosophies would be part of the reason why.

Of course, the Nationals did lose, 4-3, in one of the most intense playoff games you’ll ever see. And as is the case in any one run loss, there’s always second guessing of decisions the next morning, wondering if things would have turned out differently if other choices would have been made. But in reality, Dusty Baker’s big expected mistake last night never came, and we shouldn’t blame him for last night’s loss.

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Let’s pick it up in the bottom of the sixth, shall we? In a decisive Game 5, the Nationals held a 1-0 lead, and they were looking to stretch it. With two outs and someone on first who can run faster than you can, Ryan Zimmerman knocked a double to the left-field corner, and the Nationals’ third-base coach got aggressive. He waved Jayson Werth around, figuring that an insurance run would be absolutely massive. An out and, well, you tried, and you’ve still got the late lead. Werth gave it what he could.

That’s Werth at the bottom, running his tail off. Coach Bob Henley isn’t even looking anymore, now that the matter would be out of his hands. By this point he must’ve had a suspicion. Based on my calculations, the break-even rate here was 35%. That is, it made sense to send Werth around third if you thought he’d be safe at home at least 35% of the time. With the throw coming from just past third base, it looked like Werth would be safe at home about 0% of the time.

The camera has panned, and you don’t see the baseball. That’s because the baseball is in the glove of the catcher, and Werth is maybe, what, two-thirds of the way to the plate? Less than that? Werth is out. He’s so out. Baserunners are practically never this out. Werth is so out he might’ve given brief consideration to turning around. Until just a few years ago, a play that developed like this might’ve at least resulted in an exciting collision. Collisions are easy sells to the members of an average audience. Runners used to have one way out. That way was dangerous, and sometimes electrifying.

Werth stopped. He didn’t stay stopped — he went to the trouble of closing the distance. But Werth gave up. He was out, and he knew it, and he accepted it, and the Nationals still had the lead. So concluded a thrilling baseball sequence, by which a casual baseball viewer might not have been thrilled.

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In a few hours, the Dodgers and Nationals are going to play for their seasons; one team will advance, one will go home. The Nationals are in a pretty good position, hosting the game in Washington while throwing their ace, Max Scherzer; it’s hard to ask for much more than that if you’re in an elimination game. The Dodgers used their ace in Game 4, however, so they’re going to be mixing and matching in order to try win this one.

While they haven’t officially announced anything, the team is expected to start Rich Hill. Given his health track record, however, and the fact that he’s going on three days rest, they’re probably not going to have him work too deep into the game. In fact, reading the tea leaves from Andy McCullough’s game preview, it sounds like the Dodgers are going into this game planning for something of a tandem start.

“We talked about Rich as an option, obviously,” Manager Dave Roberts said after the Dodgers’ 6-5 win on Tuesday. “But so is Julio, and how we want to strategize to win Game 5, we’re going to talk through it.”

…

The combination of Hill and Julio Urias is unorthodox, but it would reduce the chances of Washington’s top four hitters — Trea Turner, Bryce Harper, Jayson Werth and Daniel Murphy — from getting comfortable at the plate against either. Hitters tend to perform better when they have seen a pitcher more than once in a game. The Dodgers will try not to allow that to happen on Thursday.

If the Dodgers are serious about limiting Hill and Urias to one trip through the order, that would be something indeed; they’d be limiting themselves to getting likely six or seven outs from each pitcher, and would be relying on the rest of their bullpen to get the other ~13 outs, despite being worked pretty heavily in both games in Los Angeles. It would be the most aggressive kind of bullpen game we’ve been expecting so far in the playoffs, but unfortunately for the Dodgers, I’m not sure how well set up they are to actually pull it off.

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