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The Cleveland Indians finished in third place in the AL Central last season, but just 4.5 games out of the Wild Card, and 13.5 behind the eventual World Series champion Royals. With a pitching staff fronted by Corey Kluber and a young talented infield headed by superprospect Francisco Lindor, the Indians are looking at 2016 as a chance to take the next step and make the playoffs for the first time since 2013. But, being the Indians, they have a problem.

Taking that next step towards the playoffs means adding to the team’s offense. Last season Cleveland scored 669 runs. Only Seattle, the Angels, the White Sox, and Tampa scored fewer, and nobody scored much fewer. The Indians were 47 runs ahead of the last place White Sox, but 222 runs behind first place Toronto. The team wasn’t wholly without merit, though, as they also allowed just 640 runs, the second fewest in the AL and one fewer than those darn Royals. So, if we can speak in broad generalizations for the moment, we can say that the Indians have pitching and fielding, but to become a championship-caliber team, they need to score some runs. They need offense. So get some offense. That’s it. The end! Thanks for reading!

But, wait! This is the Indians we’re talking about. They can’t just go out and get offense. They can’t sign Jason Heyward or Chris Davis. Like your roommate, they’re perennially short on funds, dude (but if you front them for some pizza they’ll totally get you back next Thursday). So the problem is twofold: the Indians don’t have the ability to simply sign someone at market rates because to do so would blow up their salary structure. This means a trade. And, as shell-shocked Red Sox fans trying to talk themselves into the Craig Kimbrel trade will tell you, you have to give up something to get something.

Further, if Cleveland is going to acquire a major league player who can hit and play the outfield passably well, the likelihood is they’ll have to give up major league players to do it. Sure, the Brewers might be inclined to deal Ryan Braun and the Padres will gladly give you a steaming helping of Matt Kemp, but that will detonate the ol’ salary structure as well, and then there’s that whole “we’re trying to win” thing. So that’s a polite no thanks. This is all by way of explaining why the Indians, a team that is trying to win now, have been mentioned so prominently in trade rumors recently and even going back to the end of last season.

And, in fact, even while I’ve been writing this, here it comes again. Via MLB Trade Rumors:

The Blue Jays, Dodgers and Yankees are among the teams that have reached out to the Indians and had “preliminary” trade talks about Cleveland’s starting pitching, reports Jon Morosi of FOX Sports (links to Twitter). The still-very-early frameworks being discussed would each send a controllable starter away from Cleveland in exchange for an everyday outfielder, he continues.

The problem with this is obvious. It robs Peter to pay Paul, as they old saying goes, and I’m not sure it doesn’t rob Peter’s wife, and their neighbor Frank as well. The cost of giving up a Carlos Carrasco or Kluber is significant. Sure, you’re saying, the Indians would get something significant back, and I’m certain you’re right. They would. But this is simply a reallocation of resources. This is taking four WAR and moving it from your rotation to your outfield, and that’s if you do it right. If you don’t, like the beaming ray in Spaceballs: The Movie, you lose something in the translation.

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Chris Davis is a man of prodigious strength. His efforts, or sometimes lack thereof, have been chronicled by FanGraphs multiple times. Since Davis’ first season with the Baltimore Orioles in 2012, he leads all of major league baseball with 159 home runs and only Edwin Encarnacion is even within 20 home runs of him. Just 10 players are within 50 home runs of Davis over the last four years, which means even if Davis had hit zero home runs in 2015 instead of 47, he would rank in the top 10 over the last four years. As power has become increasingly rare over the past decade, Davis made a great comeback after a disappointing 2014 and is set to get paid in free agency this winter. Looking for comparable players, we can attempt to find out how much that great power is worth as Davis heads into his 30s.

To find historical comps for Davis, first I looked for players from 1960 through 2008 who’d produced a similar number of wins in a similar time framce — in this case, between 10 and 20 WAR through their age-29 seasons. As this is not an incredibly high bar, there were more than 300 players in resulting pool. To further narrow sample, I looked for players who fit a similar offensive profile, so within 10 points of Davis’ 121 wRC+ mark and at least a .200 isolated slugging (Davis’ is .251). This narrowed down the list to 42 players. Limiting the list only to players within 25% of Davis’ 3,512 plate appearances left just 31 players. Davis is coming off 47 home runs, a 147 wRC+, and a 5.6 WAR. Eliminating all players with a wRC+ below 125 or under 400 PA in their age-29 seasons left 15 players, many of whom appear very Chris Davis-like.

Chris Davis Comps Through Age 29

Name	PA	HR	ISO	wRC+	Off	Def	WAR
Lee May	3716	176	0.214	127	107.9	-58.2	19.6
Kirk Gibson	3104	126	0.205	128	112.9	-31.8	19.1
Trot Nixon	2739	106	0.218	122	77.9	-1.4	16.8
Carl Everett	2726	103	0.202	117	63.0	19.2	16.4
Tino Martinez	3495	157	0.211	115	67.4	-19.1	16.4
Cliff Floyd	3556	132	0.209	121	107.4	-54.8	16.3
Ryan Klesko	3369	165	0.242	128	120.8	-61.3	16.0
Jason Bay	3259	149	0.234	130	141.4	-88.2	15.9
Frank Howard	3445	162	0.210	127	108.2	-77.1	15.4
David Ortiz	3584	177	0.252	129	116.9	-89.3	14.9
Bobby Higginson	3434	134	0.208	118	80.9	-60.3	13.5
Dave Kingman	3385	204	0.252	115	55.4	-44.8	13.2
Pat Burrell	4145	188.0	0.221	117	73.1	-78.5	12.9
Tony Clark	3212	156	0.225	117	67.8	-61.8	11.5
Jay Buhner	2944	129	0.215	122	73.4	-69.3	10.2
AVERAGE	3341	151	0.221	122	91.6	-51.8	15.2
Chris Davis	3512	203	0.251	121	86.8	-67.6	14.5

Davis comes up a little bit higher in terms of power, but in offensive value, he is right around the midpoint of the group. In a comparison Scott Boras is likely to love, Davis’ career through age-29 looks a lot like David Ortiz’. Nor is it just through age 29 where the comparison exists. As only players with good age-29 seasons were included in the group, here are the above players’ age-29 seasons, among which group Davis compares favorably.

Chris Davis Comps at Age 29

Name	PA	HR	ISO	wRC+	Off	Def	WAR
Tino Martinez	685	44	0.281	141	35.9	-5.9	5.3
David Ortiz	713	47	0.304	157	45.7	-17	5.3
Trot Nixon	513	28	0.272	152	33.6	-0.2	5.0
Carl Everett	561	34	0.286	135	27.1	3.3	4.7
Bobby Higginson	679	30	0.238	131	30.5	-8.5	4.3
Cliff Floyd	609	28	0.244	139	35.0	-18.4	3.7
Kirk Gibson	521	28	0.224	136	27.3	-9.5	3.6
Ryan Klesko	590	26	0.233	135	29.2	-13.7	3.2
Jason Bay	670	31	0.236	133	32.8	-24.8	3.0
Lee May	647	29	0.206	137	26.6	-24.0	3.0
Jay Buhner	436	21	0.263	138	21.5	-10.6	2.5
Frank Howard	549	18	0.164	127	16.4	-10.4	2.3
Dave Kingman	448	28	0.276	131	14.5	-8.8	2.2
Tony Clark	497	16	0.194	125	15.3	-14.7	1.7
Pat Burrell	567	29	0.245	126	14.6	-18.1	1.5
AVERAGE	579	29	0.244	136	27.1	-12.1	3.4
Chris Davis	670	47	0.300	147	36.3	-5.5	5.6

While Davis’ age-29 season puts him even with some great seasons by David Ortiz and Tino Martinez, his inconsistent past, including a 2014 season in which he hit just .196/.300/.404, keep his comps on a more terrestrial level. The end of 2014 resulted in a 25-game suspension for Davis after he tested positive for Adderall twice. He had a therapeutic use exemption for the drug prior to 2013, but did not have one for either 2013 or 2014 when he was suspended. He gained an exemption this past season for a different drug to treat his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, so the matter is unlikely to cause trouble again.

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Dallas Keuchel won a Cy Young last night, becoming the second pitcher in as many seasons to complete the two-year transition of “some guy with a 5.15 ERA” to “American League Cy Young Award winner.” Keuchel’s career turnaround, as was Corey Kluber’s, is absolutely remarkable, though the similarities between the two elite hurlers mostly end there.

Kluber, of course, is a righty, while Keuchel throws left-handed. You think of the way Kluber pitches, and you think of all the strikeouts. You think of the way Keuchel pitches, and you think of all the ground balls. Granted, Kluber gets his grounders, and Keuchel started getting his whiffs this year, too, but their primary methods of success lie on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Despite what FIP may lead you to believe, contact management is a real skill that certain pitchers have. Sure, the ability to miss bats entirely is a more reliable skill, and if you had to take one over the other you’d take the whiffs over the weak contact. But some pitchers miss bats, and some pitchers miss barrels. The best pitchers in the world do both, and that’s how Dallas Keuchel got to where he is today.

The whiffs are easy to see. The pitcher throws the amazing curveball and the batter tries to hit it but doesn’t. That’s a whiff. Do that a bunch of times and you have a bunch of whiffs. Soft contact isn’t quite as obvious. I mean, we can see it when it happens, but how? Why did the ball come off the bat like that? I know this is something people struggle with, grasping what it is exactly that a pitcher does to consistently generate weak contact. I’ve seen it asked in chats, live blogs, on Twitter and in comment sections. Understandably so. There’s only one kind of whiff. There’s like a million different ways the ball can come off the bat.

That being said, there’s plenty of ways we can examine the nature of Keuchel’s contact-management game. For now, we’ll stick to one.

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When you come up through the ranks as a young lefty starter, you learn about the importance of the changeup. By breaking away from the right-handed batter, that pitch offers the best way to neutralize the natural platoon advantage those hitters have against you. By the time you get to the big leagues, it’s part of your approach, like it or not. That’s why lefty starters throw changeups 65% more often than righty starters in major league baseball.

If you look at Jon Lester’s career, though, his best years have come when he’s thrown his changeup the least. The flippant reason for that truth might be because his changeup isn’t that great, and his other pitches are better. The long version is much more interesting, though, as it gets to the theory of changeups, and a new concept called tunneling.

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There’s a difference between saying a pitcher has a changeup, and saying a pitcher throws a changeup. Pretty much every pitcher has a changeup — all it takes is once or twice having messed around with the grip and the delivery. If a guy has thrown a changeup, and remembers what he did, it could be said the same guy has a changeup. But to say a guy throws a changeup — that’s something active. That says, not only does the pitcher possess a changeup in his arsenal, but he could throw it at any point. It’s a part of his approach. The pitcher has a fastball, a changeup, and a curve, say.

I don’t know where the point is where one becomes the other. I don’t know how many times a pitcher has to use a pitch before it can be said the pitch is a part of the pitcher’s attack. Here’s what I can tell you about Craig Kimbrel: for years, he’s had a changeup. Now he’s closer than ever to regularly throwing one.

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The other day, August wrote about how the Tigers’ bullpen was in desperate need of improvement. That is, if the Tigers intend to compete in 2016, and they do intend to compete in 2016, while simultaneously trying to keep the longer-term picture in mind. So it made sense when, earlier Wednesday, reports came out the Tigers didn’t love the asking prices for the higher-tier relievers available. It’s not like the Tigers have all that much youth to move around, anyway. This all led to an unsurprising end: the Tigers have picked up the more affordable Francisco Rodriguez, from the Brewers. The Brewers are getting a low-level prospect. There are some players to be named later. This will probably just be remembered as the Rodriguez trade, if it’s remembered at all.

Of course a team in the Brewers’ position had little reason to hang on to a veteran closer. And of course a team in the Tigers’ position was looking to add a veteran closer. Doesn’t get more veteran closer-y than picking up the active leader in career saves. You could say Rodriguez is only 34 in January, and that’s true. He’s also looking ahead to his 15th season in the major leagues. He’s survived for a long time, and he’s even thrived for a long time. You can only do that by adapting. Francisco Rodriguez is a tremendous example of how a pitcher should want to age.

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When Dave Cameron wrote up the Athletics’ signing of Rich Hill yesterday, he titled it “A’s Sign Rich Hill, Because Of Course They Do.” He focused more on the fact that Hill was a resurgent pitcher that represented a low-risk, high-reward, low-money signing — a bit like Scott Kazmir before the 2014 season. That makes a lot of sense, given Oakland’s budget constraints and past practices.

There’s another way Hill is the perfect major league acquisition for the Athletics, though. He’s a fastball/curve guy with an iffy changeup. He’ll fit right in.

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So you want your team to spend in free agency. You think to yourself, “This is the year. We’re just a couple pieces away. Go out and get ’em, [insert name of General Manager who, in all likelihood, will not ‘go out and get ’em’ the way you envision].”

Maybe you look to a pair of recent World Series winners as the way to do the offseason without committing a massive chunk of payroll on a big-ticket acquisition. Look at how much value the Royals extracted out of mid-tier signings like Kendrys Morales, Edinson Volquez and, on a smaller scale, guys like Kris Medlen and Ryan Madson. Or the Red Sox, and their insanely cost-effective 2013 offseason that netted them Mike Napoli, Shane Victorino and Koji Uehara — crucial pieces to their championship run.

That’s how you do it! You don’t even need to catch the big fish. Just plug your holes with a few of the middle-class free agents to put around your stars and you win the world championship. All there is to it!

Except, remember that time the White Sox:

• signed Adam LaRoche to extend their lineup, and
• signed Melky Cabrera to shore up their outfield, and
• signed Zach Duke to pitch the late innings?

And then:

• Adam LaRoche posted a negative WAR, and
• Melky Cabrera posted a negative WAR, and
• Zach Duke posted a negative WAR?

At the times of their signings, there wasn’t a real discernible difference between the Victorino/Napoli/Uehara trio and the Cabrera/LaRoche/Duke trio, except the Red Sox trio turned out to be awesome and help win a World Series, and the White Sox trio became a complete trainwreck and now the White Sox are stuck with those guys. They’re deals that were totally defensible at the time, but deals that wouldn’t be made were Rick Hahn given a do-over.

The White Sox were the epitome of a stars-and-scrubs team in 2015, led on offense by Jose Abreu and Adam Eaton, with a rotation fronted by typically excellent seasons out of Chris Sale and Jose Quintana. In Abreu and Sale, specifically, the White Sox can already cross off one of the hard parts in building a winner: get some of the best players in the world. Abreu is one of the very best hitters in the sport. Sale is one of the very best pitchers in the sport. These guys are real and play for the White Sox. They’re not the problem. The rest is the problem.

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Last week, MLB saw two of their first big trades of the winter, as both the Red Sox and Angels gave up significant pieces of their farm system to acquire upgrades to their big league roster; Boston acquired closer Craig Kimbrel, while Anaheim landed shortstop Andrelton Simmons. In both cases, the acquisitions are not rentals, as Kimbrel is signed for two more years with a team option for a third, while Simmons is under contract through the 2020 season. To get high-quality players with multiple years of team control, both teams had to give up significant prospects from their farm system.

For the Red Sox, that meant parting with a pair of consensus Top 100 prospects in outfielder Manny Margot and shortstop Javier Guerra, along with a couple of lower tier add-ons. For the Angels, the cost was left-handed pitcher Sean Newcomb, the team’s first round pick in the 2014 draft and the most coveted player they had in the minor leagues; they also sent along with a second pitching prospect and shortstop Erick Aybar, who had been their everyday player at the position for the last seven years.

Both teams surrendered talent they would rather have kept, but felt strongly enough about the players they were receiving to make the trades anyway. And both teams did get very good players, among the best at their respective positions. But in terms of what these deals did to the remains of their respective farm systems, the situations could not be more different.

In making the Kimbrel deal, Dombrowski referenced the Red Sox loaded farm system, which has regularly been seen as one of the best in baseball.

“You don’t ever like to give up young talent,” Dombrowski said. “We think they’re very talented individuals. But I do think that (because of) the good job that the people at player development, scouting, international operations have done, we do have some depth at those positions. And we do have some other quality young players that we were asked about repeatedly.”

Those quality young players Dombrowski is referring to? They are almost certainly Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts, the team’s pair of 23-year-old big league cornerstones, who happen to play center field and shortstop, respectively, the same positions that Margot and Guerra are playing in the minor leagues. With those positions locked down at the Major League level for the foreseeable future, Margot and Guerra were seen as somewhat extraneous to the team’s long-term plans, and were likely going to be traded at some point. The primary justification for paying a very high price for Kimbrel is that the team’s depth of prospects allowed them to make a trade like this, because even after surrendering good young talent, they have other good young talent to help them keep their future looking bright.

The Angels are in a very different situation; Newcomb was essentially their only prospect of significance, now that Andrew Heaney has too much time in the majors to qualify as a prospect. Roberto Baldoquin, the team’s top-rated prospect after Heaney and Newcomb heading into the 2015 season, just hit a meager .235/.266/.294 in A-ball, to give you some idea of the organization’s current crop of hitting prospect. With Newcomb, the team’s farm system would have been rated as one of the worst in baseball; without him, it unquestionably is so.

So, relative to their stock of future utility to the organization, the Angels probably gave up a greater percentage of their inventory than the Red Sox did, even though it’s pretty clear the package San Diego got for Kimbrel is a better one than the Braves got for Simmons. But even though Newcomb had more utility to his own organization than Margot or Guerra did, I can’t agree with the notion that highly talented prospects should be viewed as having significantly diminished value to an organization simply because of the presence of other highly talented players, even other talented players at the same position.

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You can make a strong argument that Brandon Crawford isn’t the best shortstop in baseball. If you’re a track-record kind of guy, the default might still remain Troy Tulowitzki. And there’s just so much young talent around. Carlos Correa came up and showed he can do almost anything. Francisco Lindor came up and arguably outplayed Carlos Correa. Xander Bogaerts is coming off an awful high average, and I haven’t yet said a word about Corey Seager. Or Addison Russell. Not to mention I’m a huge fan of Jung-ho Kang. There are enough possibilities out there that you might choose “field” over “Crawford.” I won’t judge you.

But to argue against Crawford, in a way, is to acknowledge he’s at least in the conversation. And he is, if he isn’t the front-runner. Just as you can argue Crawford isn’t the best, you can argue he is, what with Tulowitzki’s apparent decline. Then you have to take a step back and realize you’re talking about Brandon Crawford. Crawford wasn’t supposed to develop into the player he’s become, and the course of that development gave the Giants the confidence to sign Crawford to a six-year extension worth $75 million. It’s not a stunning agreement now, given what we know, but years back, we didn’t know we’d know this.

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