On the day of baseball’s non-tender trade deadline, the San Diego Padres traded first baseman Yonder Alonso and lefty reliever Marc Rzepczynski to Oakland in exchange for left-hander Drew Pomeranz and minor-leaguer Jose Torres. For those interested, Craig Edwards examined the trade in a general way earlier this morning. The point of this post is to look more closely at one part of the trade: Drew Pomeranz.

If Pomeranz is just a good reliever, then the deal amounts mostly to this: three years of control for a good reliever in exchange for two years of a first baseman who can be league average two-thirds of the time. Maybe, to make a trade like that even, you’d have to add a piece or two to get Alonso, but that’s when the deal makes the most sense for the Athletics.

The deal makes better sense for the Padres if Pomeranz is a starter. And it looks like the team is considering him a starting pitcher for the time being.

The question of whether or not Pomeranz can be a good starting pitcher for the Padres hinges on three things, most likely: his health, his changeup, and his curveball. Earlier this season, I talked to the pitcher about all three.

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With the non-tender deadline approaching on Wednesday, deals for arbitration-eligible players were going to be much more likely than the big free-agent contract we saw the Boston Red Sox hand David Price on Tuesday. Teams, especially small-market teams like the San Diego Padres and Oakland Athletics, have a tendency to move around players whose production on the field is becoming less valuable relative to the increasing expense (due to arbitration) of employing those players. The A’s and Padres completed a four-player deal on Wednesday. Not surprisingly, three of the four players were arbitration-eligible. The Padres will receive starter-turned-reliever Drew Pomeranz and minor-leaguer Jose Torres while the A’s will receive first baseman Yonder Alonso and lefty reliever Marc Rzepczynski.

The motivations for both clubs are fairly transparent. Last season, the Padres attempted an experiment that involved putting Wil Myers in center field and putting Matt Kemp and Justin Upton alongside him. The experiment did not go well. Myers, who had been a right fielder, was ill-equipped to handle center field. Placing the poor defense of Matt Kemp next to him did not help matters. The Padres have apparently seen the error of their ways and will not attempt a similar alignment next season. Myers recently said he would prefer to play first base, and this trade will allow him to do so and leave the Padres open to pursuing a new center fielder while they spend a few years waiting for Manuel Margot.

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Three winters ago, we got into a lot of arguments about James Shields. He was at the center of a very polarizing trade and people took sides. You remember it, so I won’t rehash things other than to remark on how funny it is that the James Shields-Wil Myers blockbuster has actually become the Wade Davis trade. Wade Davis! The guy who gave up 5.92 runs per nine in the season following the deal.

Life’s little insanities aside, Shields was very good for the Royals during his two seasons in Kansas City. He was worth 4.0 and 3.3 WAR, respectively, and helped push them over the hump and back into relevance. Would they have gotten there without him? It’s entirely possible, but he was a key player on the team during their renaissance and deserves some recognition for it. You will note, however, that Shields signed elsewhere after the Royals lost the 2014 World Series and then the team won the 2015 title without him.

One of Shields’ hallmarks, and one of the main reasons the Royals acquired him, was his consistency. You were pretty much assured more than 200 innings of good, non-elite run prevention and above-average fielding independent numbers. Shields was as predictable as a person could be in baseball. Then he signed with the Padres.

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The sabermetric movement has grown up over the last decade. A thing that you regularly hear now that you maybe wouldn’t have heard 10 years ago is this: I don’t know. So that’s where we start today. We don’t know what the going rate for ace relief pitchers is. That said, we do have one strong data point following this weekend’s trade of Craig Kimbrel by the Padres to the Red Sox, and it suggests that the cost to grab one of the best relievers in baseball is now substantial, akin to what it might have cost to get an ace starter some years ago.

Kimbrel is an elite relief pitcher, but it was surprising to see Boston acquire him for four prospects, including two top-50 prospects in outfielder Manuel Margot and shortstop Javier Guerra. On top of that already substantial talent the Red Sox tossed in starting pitcher Logan Allen and infielder Carlos Asuaje. That’s a ton of young talent to give up for anyone, let alone for three years of a reliever. It looks quite possibly as though the Red Sox have reset the cost for acquiring a top reliever. But have they?

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The Padres and Red Sox swung a deal on Friday night that sent Craig Kimbrel to Boston in exchange for a quartet of prospects: outfielder Manny Margot, shortstop Javier Guerra, second baseman Carlos Asuaje and left-handed pitcher Logan Allen. As Dave Cameron noted immediately following the trade, the Red Sox coughed up quite a package for the rights to Kimbrel. Not only did San Diego receive a high-quality prospect in Margot, but they got quantity as well. Here’s what my fancy computer math says about these prospects. The numbers next to their names refer to their projected WAR totals through age 28 according to KATOH.

Manny Margot, 10.2 WAR

The Red Sox signed Manny Margot as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican back in 2011, and he’s hit at every stop since then. He put himself on the prospect map in 2014 with a strong showing in Low-A, but he outdid himself in 2015 by essentially replicating those numbers in both High-A and Double-A. Margot makes a ton of contact, hits for modest power and runs wild on the base paths. All of that bodes well for his future in the show, especially considering he’s always been very young for his levels. Here are some comps that were generated using a series of Mahalanobis distance calculations.

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By most accounts, Justin Upton has delivered on his promise as a former number-one draft pick and top prospect, hitting 190 home runs and averaging roughly four wins per season since turning 21 years ago. Upton has a rare power-speed combination, he was called up at an early age, he hits for consistent power, and he is still just 28 years old. Yet, not unlike another former first-round pick also hitting free agency, Jason Heyward, Upton is regarded by some as a slight disappointment, if unreasonably so. It is Jason Heyward, with even more youth than Upton to go along with great defense, who is seen as the best position player on the market despite hitting just 13 home runs this past year. Upton’s age, however, should not be dismissed, as he is still younger than most free agents on the market and combines that youth with the promise of considerable power.

Justin Upton will still get paid. Jon Heyman hit a high mark publicly, predicting seven years and $161 million, but FanGraphs crowdsourcing came up with six years, $120 million with Dave Cameron adding an extra year at $20 million to sign with the Yankees. That Upton’s contract is likely to be only the fourth, fifth or perhaps even sixth biggest contract of the offseason speaks to the quality of this free agent class as well as the amount of money that has been added to baseball’s revenues over the past few years.

Six years ago, Matt Holliday signed a seven year, $120 million contract with the St. Louis Cardinals. Since then, nine position players have signed $100 million contracts in free agency and player salaries have increased by 50%. Upton’s six year, $51 million contract served to delay his free agency by two years, but because he debuted at just 19 years old, he is still in position to sign a big long-term contract before the aging process begins his decline.

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Here’s the difference between now and the trade deadline. At the trade deadline, when the Twins went out and picked up Kevin Jepsen, I shrugged and kept thinking about other, potentially bigger things. I forgot about the move five minutes after I learned about it. Now, this is a whole post about the Mariners going out and picking up Joaquin Benoit from the Padres. Not that Benoit and Jepsen are identical, but they belong in the tier of second- or third-class moves. As such, I’m sure many of you couldn’t care less about this, but before you go away, let me tell you — Benoit remains one interesting reliever. Good relief pitching is en vogue at the moment, and while Benoit will be 39 next July, he doesn’t seem to be on the verge of anything but another strong 65 innings.

Benoit is going to cost $7.5 million. The Mariners got him from San Diego for Enyel De Los Santos and Nelson Ward, and while De Los Santos is a young one with a big arm, there’s a reason those are two unfamiliar names. Neither is likely to do anything at the highest level; Benoit is likely to go another season or three. For the Padres, there’s nothing wrong with shedding salary and adding a live-armed project. But, necessarily, this is more interesting from the Mariners’ side. As long as Benoit has pitched, he still seems capable of keeping opponents off base.

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While working on something Erasmo Ramirez said — that his slider was always in the zone anyway, so he should probably use it to steal strikes rather than for swinging strikes — it became obvious that breaking pitches are much less effective in the zone than out when it comes to swinging strikes. Curves, in particular, are much better outside the zone. You get about one third of the whiffs on a curve in the zone as you do outside of the zone.

Separately, I’m working on a piece for The Hardball Times Annual about command. In it, a few pitchers talk about the difficulty of commanding breaking pitches. “Nobody throws anything that’s truly straight,” is how Trevor Bauer put it.

While sorting the in and out of zone whiff rates, and thinking about command, it came to me that the two are related. Maybe that’s a duh, but a big part of quantifying command is the problem of breaking balls and changeups and their movement. A breaking ball in the zone may often be a hung breaking ball, which contributes to the lower whiff rates.

Let’s take a look at the pitchers that have the most disparate results on their non fastballs inside and outside the zone first, and then try to find a way to spot these pitchers by movement.

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The Rangers sure are exciting these days. They’re only two games behind Houston for the AL West lead and one game up on Minnesota for the last Wild Card while still holding the title of The Best Team With a Negative Run Differential. That is, if nothing else, an unwieldy banner. It’s the banner equivalent of Jarrod Saltalamacchia’s name on a t-shirt in that it would start on one side and end on the other. Negative run differential or not, the Rangers are winning games and doing it in exciting fashion. Tuesday the Rangers beat the Padres while Elvis Andrus stole home. I’m happy that happened because that this is an article about Elvis Andrus stealing home and if he hadn’t stolen home this would be a pretty weird article.

The Rangers have had some good luck in addition to playing well. For example, the San Diego Padres just wanted to play a baseball game Tuesday. I’m not even sure they wanted to win it. I mean, they’d probably have been fine with winning, but they’d have been fine with not winning, too. Let’s just play a game, they probably thought, then get some sleep. Instead they got Tuesday’s game which was much, much worse.

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Three years ago, a struggling Red Sox team dumped a big part of their roster — and their payroll — on the Los Angeles Dodgers, shipping Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett to Los Angeles in exchange for a few prospects and a lot of financial relief. The deal freed up the team to reallocate a bunch of that money to free agents a few months later, and after hitting on signings like Shane Victorino, Mike Napoli, Stephen Drew, and Koji Uehara, the team celebrated a World Series title in 2013.

Things have fallen apart again since, however, and last winter’s free agent spending spree looks like a total disaster at this point. Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval have combined for -1.8 WAR while pulling in $40 million between them, and there’s no way the team can go into 2016 with this same defensive alignment. Ramirez is clearly not an outfielder, and Sandoval has been a bit of disaster at third base this year as well, leading to speculation that one of the two may move to first base next year. And that probably is the path of least resistance, but as rumors percolated of Red Sox-Padres trade discussion before last week’s deadline, I started wondering if there wasn’t an August deal to be made that might actually make sense for both sides.

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