A bevy of trades went down over the weekend, as this year’s trade deadline-season entered into full swing. Here are the prospects who changed teams the last couple of days, as evaluated by my newly updated KATOH system. KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

The Andrew Miller Trade

Clint Frazier, OF, New York (AL)

KATOH: 2.7 WAR
KATOH+: 4.7 WAR

Frazier had been promoted to Triple-A a week ago after slashing a strong .276/.356/.469 with 13 steals at Double-A this year. He pairs a high walk rate with decent power and speed, making him one of the most promising offensive prospects in baseball. Despite possessing average speed, Frazier plays mostly the corner-outfield spots these days, and hasn’t graded out particularly well there defensively. This suggests most of his big-league value will come from his hitting. Still, considering he’s a 21-year-old who’s already mastered Double-A, his future looks bright.

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The Marlins had to pay a decently high price for Andrew Cashner. Jon Morosi is unironically tweeting about the ongoing Jeremy Hellickson sweepstakes. It’s important to establish the market context in which the Orioles have now traded for Wade Miley. It’s been obvious for months the Orioles could use some help in the rotation. The farm system didn’t make it realistically possible for them to look at higher-level solutions. They’d have to settle for what they could afford. Wade Miley is what they could afford, with the Mariners getting Ariel Miranda in exchange. There’s no money changing hands. This is about as uncomplicated as a move can get, with Miley being tremendously dull and still presumably helpful.

That’s the thing about the Orioles. Even though they’re a first-place team, it’s a team that had issues. Recent results be damned, the Orioles, in theory, can hit. We all know they can relieve. The rotation has been bad behind Chris Tillman — so bad that Wade Miley is an improvement. There aren’t many contending teams that Miley would make meaningfully better, but that’s the Orioles’ burden and blessing.

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Most All-Stars weren’t born into baseball this way. Most of them had to alter their approach, or their mechanics, in order to find that a-ha moment. They threw a pitch differently, or decided to pull the ball more, or changed their swing, and then found a run of sustained success that put them in the All-Star game that’s being played tonight.

So, given fairly fettered access to the All-Stars from both leagues, that was the question I posed: what was the big adjustment, mechanical or approach-wise, that brought you to this podium today?

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On June 29, the Baltimore Orioles reached their high-water mark of the season, according to our playoff odds. They’d defeated the San Diego Padres, 12-6 to win their seventh consecutive game, putting them 17 games above .500 with a 5.5-game lead in the division and a 71% chance to make the postseason.

And then the pitching staff happened. It’s been one week since that day, and in that week, little good has come out of the Orioles’ rotation. Baltimore followed up its seven-game winning streak with a five-game losing streak, due largely to the fact that its starting rotation averaged just five innings per start with a 7.46 ERA and 6.74 FIP. Sweeping conclusions aren’t to be drawn from any seven-game stretch, of course; the Cubs’ rotation has been equally underwhelming over the last week and there’s no alarm bells going off there. But unlike in Chicago, what we’ve seen from Baltimore’s starters over the last week only reinforces what we already knew: this Baltimore rotation isn’t very good.

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“Keep your eye on the ball” is one of baseball’s oldest adages. According to John Russell, it doesn’t apply to managers and coaches. The Baltimore Orioles bench coach and his professional brethren have responsibilities that go beyond watching the flight of the cowhide sphere.

Russell, who skippered the Pittsburgh Pirates prior to joining Buck Showalter’s staff in 2011, expounded on the subject during a mid-June visit to Fenway Park.

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Russell on watching the game: “I think different managers do different things, but you run little checklists in your mind. First, there’s a lot of preparation involved before the game begins. Once it does, you obviously keep an eye on your pitcher. But one of the biggest things — we talk to young managers about this when they first start out — is that you don’t want to be caught following the baseball. When the ball is hit, you don’t want to just lock in on it. If you do, you’re going to miss a lot.

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Brian Duensing’s baseball future is tenuous. The 33-year-old southpaw is currently an Oriole, but his time in Baltimore could be short. Signed off the scrap heap a few weeks ago, he’s failed to impress in five outings. He could easily be the odd man out the next time a roster move is made.

Duensing was cast aside by his long-time team over the winter. A member of the Minnesota organization since being drafted out of the University of Nebraska in 2005, Duensing hit the open market when the Twins “opted to go in another direction.” It didn’t come as a shock. He’s never been overpowering, and last year he was more underwhelming than ever. His ERA was 4.25 and his 4.4 strikeout rate was a career low.

Free agency didn’t go as he’d hoped. Quality offers weren’t forthcoming, and opt-out clauses have subsequently become a meaningful part of his life. There’s a chance he will remain an Oriole, but he could just as easily be elsewhere in the not-too-distant future. He might be wearing a new uniform in a new city. He might be at his home in Omaha, with his wife at his side and three toddlers in tow.

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Duensing on first-time free agency and his future: “This was the first time I was a free agent. I was somewhat excited to see what would happen, but it didn’t really pan out like I’d hoped. I ended up signing with Kansas City, a non-roster minor-league deal, and then didn’t make the team out of spring training. I began the season in Omaha. That’s where I’m from, so I was able to live at home with the wife and the kids.

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The draft happened recently. I’m not a draft expert, which is why I seldom write about it, but one of my favorite and least-favorite things about the draft are the player comps. I like them for the color, but I dislike them for the hype. The draft does have to do something to sell itself, and the casual public wouldn’t benefit if drafted players kept getting compared to guys who never made it out of Double-A, but too many drafted players draw comps to elites, like, say, Roger Clemens, or Clayton Kershaw, or Cal Ripken. It’s like the amateurs are set up to disappoint from the get-go. Comparing amateurs to Hall-of-Famers sets expectations impossibly high, and does little to inform the viewers of the reality that most draft picks go nowhere. Tough sport.

We all remember players who were hyped as something they never became. We all remember players who fell short of their big-league comps. It’s almost impossible for a high pick to turn out as good as his comp, given that comps have mostly had long and successful major-league careers. There are some success stories. Obviously, there’s that Mike Trout fellow. And there’s Manny Machado. Even before he was drafted, Machado was compared to Alex Rodriguez. There were, in fairness, a lot of similarities. In unfairness, Rodriguez is one of the best players in the history of the game. The pressure was on from the beginning. And, say, would you look at that, but Machado is actually starting to resemble the very player who seemed to set too high a bar.

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If you woke up this morning, looked at the WAR Leaderboards for position players and saw Mike Trout, Jose Altuve, and Manny Machado near the top, you might have had an inclination that all is right with the world. After all, those three players are some of the very best in major-league baseball, and we would expect to see them at the top of the list. Of course, when you look closely at the leaderboard, it’s important to note that there are 171 qualified players. To regard the WAR marks as some sort of de facto ranking for all players would be foolish. For some players, defensive value has a large impact on their WAR total, and it’s important, when considering WAR values one-third of the way into the season, to consider the context in which those figures.

“Small sample size” is a phrase that’s invoked a lot throughout the season. At FanGraphs, we try to determine what might be a small-sample aberration from what could be a new talent level. Generally speaking, the bigger the sample size, the better — and this is especially true for defensive statistics, where we want to have a very big sample to determine a player’s talent level. Last year, I attempted to provide a warning on the reliability of defensive statistics. Now that the season has reached its third month, it’s appropriate to revisit that work.

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You put it off, and you put it off, and you put it off, but at some point, you have to just suck it up and write a post about Mark Trumbo. Why a post about Mark Trumbo? He’s major-league-leader-in-home-runs Mark Trumbo. Granted, a guy tied for fourth is Adam Duvall, and he’s even more surprising, but, one thing at a time. Trumbo leads in dingers. He’s eighth overall in wRC+. Trumbo already has his highest WAR since 2013, and he’s a bad defensive outfielder, and it’s June. He can’t not be written about, right? Here, watch a dinger. It was yesterday.

Something that’s always struck me with Trumbo — even though he wouldn’t put up elite numbers, he always looked so natural hitting homers. The swing wouldn’t look exaggerated; it would look quick, somehow both short to the ball and powerful. Trumbo’s always swung and missed, and he’s always gone out of the zone a little too often, and those things were limiting. To be better, he’d either have to change one of those, or he’d have to make more of his batted balls.

Thus far, he’s been making more of his batted balls. So, he’s sitting on career-best results. Why has this been happening? It might actually be really simple.

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Believe it or not, I actually agonized over how to title this post. Ultimately, I couldn’t come up with anything better, not if I didn’t want to outright deceive. Because this is a post about Hector Neris, and about Brad Brach, and there’s no way around that. You should be aware of that from the start. Now the only people in here are people who might give a damn, and that’s better than me feeling like I tricked you.

Neris is someone who’s been on my radar for a few weeks. Before that, he was absolutely not on my radar, even though he pitched in the majors in each of the previous two years. I became aware of him after a Phillies person told me to become aware of him, and Neris is in the early stages of a breakthrough major-league campaign. It’s been quiet, because he’s not a closer, and because he’s not a starter. Non-closing relievers take a while to command attention. But Neris has allowed four runs in 20 innings. More impressively, he’s increased his strikeout rate by more than fifty percent.

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