On Tuesday, we looked at the best pitches in baseball last year when judged by whiffs and grounders. One thing we learned in that exercise: they were all thrown by relievers. Makes sense. They get a lot of advantages when it comes to short stints and leveraged situations. Let’s not hold it against them because the rest of the reliever’s life is very difficult. On the other hand, let’s also celebrate the starting pitchers separately, because many of them have pitches that are excellent despite the fact that they have to throw more often, to batters of both hands.

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Earlier today, the Boston Red Sox traded starting pitcher Clay Buchholz to the Phillies in exchange for minor-league infielder Josh Tobias. In so doing, both teams have more or less crystallized their plans for their 2017 starting rotations.

For the Red Sox, this is about nailing down just who will be on the 2017 pitching staff. In his remarks to reporters, Red Sox head honcho Dave Dombrowski made specific mention that he feels the team is done wheeling and dealing for the 2017 squad, save some depth moves. In other words, those who are on the roster right now are the players with which the team expects to move forward. So, who are they? Let’s take a look:

Definite Starting Pitchers:

• Chris Sale
• David Price
• Rick Porcello
• Eduardo Rodriguez

Likely Starting Pitchers:

• Drew Pomeranz
• Steven Wright

As you can see, the rotation picture is now a lot more clear. Before Buchholz was traded, you had to wonder what his role would be. He pitched begrudgingly in relief last season, but his clear preference was to be in the rotation. But with six qualified starters ahead of him on the depth chart, that didn’t seem to be a likely scenario. And if it weren’t, how much fuss would Buchholz kick up? We’ll never have to find out now that he has been dealt.

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The Phillies have acquired long-time Red Sox starter Clay Buchholz in exchange for minor-league second baseman Josh Tobias. Here’s how Tobias grades out by my KATOH system. (KATOH denotes WAR forecast for the first six years of a player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses a similar methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.)

The Phillies snagged Tobias in the 10th round in 2015, and he’s performed admirably in the minor leagues. He increased his prospect stock by hitting .321/.362/.475 in short-season A-ball to close out his draft year. He had similar success in Low-A last year, but saw his performance crater following a late-season promotion to High-A. He hit a weak .254/.324/.357 at the latter level with a concerning 21% strikeout rate.

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We can all agree that WAR does a pretty good job of sorting, right? Like, even if you can quibble with the numbers, it paints a pretty good general picture. Good players tend to have better WARs than worse players. Great, okay. Over the past couple seasons, 130 different players have batted at least 1,000 times. Recognize right away there’s selection bias here — it’s mostly just decent players, and better players, who would play that much. The sample is already skewed somewhat toward quality, toward talent. Within that pool, by WAR, Odubel Herrera ranks 38th. He’s statistical neighbors with Daniel Murphy, Dexter Fowler, Dustin Pedroia, and Kole Calhoun. Herrera turns 25 in a couple of weeks, and as a Rule 5 grab, he’s been fantastic.

It makes all the sense in the world that the Phillies would want to get Herrera locked up. And from Herrera’s side, of course he’d want guaranteed money. Two winters ago his old team left him unprotected. There’s vulnerability there, vulnerability no one wants to feel again and again. Herrera now has an extension, which isn’t strange. But it’s another extension that leaves a young player looking like he sold himself short.

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There’s a genre of baseball discussion known as the “fun fact.” You might also call it “trivia.” A player is the first to accomplish a particular feat in 40 years; another is the only one to reach a notable career mark in a particular season. The genre doesn’t demand rigorous analysis; it’s merely a collection of interesting tidbits which may or may not be relevant in more thorough discussions. Some fun facts are amazing and others are forced to the point of farce.

There’s another genre of baseball discussion we’ll call “can he keep doing this thing?” analysis. This is very familiar to the loyal FanGraphs reader. We do this kind of thing all the time. We notice a player trying something new and try to determine if it’s meaningful. This article will subject Cesar Hernandez’s 2016 season to both sorts of discussion.

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In valuing relievers, you really have the same two questions that you have with other players — how good were they last year, and how good have they been consistently — but the consistency seems to be even more important. The samples are small and the position ages poorly, so the ability to show production from the pen year-in and year-out is valued highly. Unless you’re Joaquin Benoit, apparently. In that case, you just keep making teams look smart for signing you to smaller deals, because you keep putting up great numbers every year.

The Phillies, who just signed Benoit for one year and seven million dollars, should be happy with their acquisition on both fronts, but particularly when it comes to consistency and track record.

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The season’s most lopsided game was a Clayton Kershaw start. That shouldn’t surprise you — the Dodgers were good, and Clayton Kershaw was great, and the Dodgers with Clayton Kershaw were fantastic. As a matter of fact, five of the season’s 10 most lopsided games were Clayton Kershaw starts. His opponents in those games: Bud Norris, Jered Weaver, Brandon Finnegan, Chad Bettis, and Tom Koehler. Four of those games, the Dodgers won. They lost the Kershaw/Koehler game. It was nearly the season’s biggest upset.

For every game all year long, we publish pregame win probabilities. At first, they’re based on general team projections, and the starting pitchers. Then they update to account for the actual starting lineups. Every calculation includes a home-field-advantage boost of four percentage points. This year, there were 58 games in which the favorite was given at least a 70% chance of winning. Our math predicted 42 wins. In reality, there were 43 wins. The odds work pretty well, provided you don’t take them too seriously. They’re wonderful estimates.

On April 26, Koehler and the Marlins went into Los Angeles and beat Kershaw and the Dodgers. Before the game, the Dodgers’ chances of winning were 74.3%. On July 22, Zach Eflin and the Phillies went into Pittsburgh and beat Gerrit Cole and the Pirates. Before the game, the Pirates’ chances of winning were 74.4%. There is no meaningful difference between these numbers. The calculation error is far greater than one-tenth of one percentage point. But, a difference is a difference. A leader is a leader. I have no choice but to designate that game on July 22 as the biggest upset of 2016.

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Around this time in 2015, right-hander Jeremy Hellickson had just completed a three-year stretch during which he recorded a cumulative ERA near five and experienced some injury troubles to boot. Following his one and only season in Arizona, he was traded to Philadelphia for a young righty who wasn’t even among the Phillies’ top-25 prospects at the time. There wasn’t a great deal of reason for optimism.

A year later, circumstances are considerably different. Following a three-win season, Hellickson received a qualifying offer from the Phillies — and now the 2017 edition of Hellickson will earn $17.2 million. The results were pretty different, in others words. But what about the process? Are these the same Hellicksons?

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We have our first qualifying-offer acceptance of the offseason, and it’s Jeremy Hellickson who’s taken $17 million to stay put for another year. He’ll remain with the Phillies for now, and get paid rather handsomely to do so.

A guarantee of $17.2 million isn’t bad at all for a pitcher with Hellickson’s past. He was a somewhat interesting commodity given that he was coming off easily the best year of his career. Hellickson threw 189 innings of 3.71 ERA ball — or 3.98 FIP ball, if that’s more your speed. DRA, however, rated him at 4.34. Basically, Hellickson pitched like a middle-back-end guy and got a little lucky. Because this year’s stable of free-agent pitchers is largely composed of Rich Hill and a band of merry — if also raggedy — men, Hellickson would have probably had more than a few suitors had he declined the qualifying offer. The Phillies made him the offer assuming that he would — and that they would, in turn, collect the draft pick attached to it, cashing it in this coming summer.

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A friend was asking a question about matchups in the coming month, and was talking about lefties and how Houston has done against lefties and maybe he should start A.J. Griffin against them and so on. I was playing along, pointing out that maybe it wasn’t a great matchup because Houston has a good lineup and they’re in a park that’s good for offense and all that. I didn’t even blink.

Of course, Griffin is a righty. No idea why we both thought he was a lefty, but we’re not alone. A quick Twitter poll — results below! — revealed Griffin as a top contender for “righty we most think is a lefty.”

Unfortunately, none of us know why we mentally mistake hands on some players. Or at least, we don’t have a quick answer to that question, other than vague references to arsenal (“crafty”), temperament (“different personalities”), or television time (“I don’t see them much”). Most responses to the poll included an “I don’t know why” of some sort.

Still, it’s something we do. And it’s sort of fascinating, because lefty starters do actually do things a little differently than righty starters — things we can actually define objectively. Which means we can apply the statistical definition of a lefty starter to the righty-starter population. And we can answer this question with stats!

So… which righty really acts the most like a lefty? Which righty is the most lefty-like? Turns out, it’s not Griffin, but the wisdom of the crowd was not far off, really.

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