Kevin Kiermaier is not going to be voted American League Most Valuable Player. I personally would not vote for Kevin Kiermaier as American League Most Valuable Player. He’ll be on zero radars, and that’s perfectly fine. Other players will be more deserving — I just want to quickly expand on something that came up during my chat last Friday.

Let’s say you really really really wanted to make the Kiermaier MVP case. I don’t know why. Maybe you’re a family member. Maybe you have money on the line. Maybe you just enjoy getting into statistical arguments. Where could you start? I’d recommend starting on May 21. That’s when Kiermaier sustained an injury that knocked him out of action for almost two months. After the Rays game on May 21, they stood at 20-20. They had a strongly positive run differential. Since then, the Rays have posted the worst record in the majors. The run differential has sucked. Kiermaier just returned Friday.

Kiermaier is a decent hitter, all things considered, but you’re a FanGraphs reader and you know him for his defense. So let’s focus on that defense for a second. To what extent could we consider Kiermaier a difference-maker in the outfield? This year, when Kiermaier has started, the Rays have allowed a team BABIP of .260. Meanwhile, when Kiermaier hasn’t started, the Rays have allowed a team BABIP of .341. That’s not all Kiermaier, of course, because not all balls in play are directed toward center field, but that’s an absolutely enormous difference. When Kiermaier went down, the Rays’ run prevention cratered, and that probably isn’t all on the pitchers.

That would have to be around the core of the Kiermaier argument. That, when Kiermaier has been unavailable, the Rays defense hasn’t been able to make up for it. It’s not just center field — Kiermaier’s presence allows the other outfielders to position themselves differently, too. Kiermaier would be thus presented as the keystone. You don’t have to buy it. Obviously, Kiermaier alone isn’t responsible for that whole difference. But there are still so many people who downplay the importance of an elite-level defender. The Rays would argue the opposite.

As long as I’m here, what if we were to expand beyond just 2016? Kiermaier has been a regular or semi-regular going on three years, now. How valuable has his outfield defense been to the Rays? This is one way you could choose to look at it. It would suggest that he’s been extremely valuable.

I know there are a lot of variables folded in here. I know this captures more than just Kiermaier by himself. But we already have numbers that try to capture individual defenders by themselves. This looks from the team perspective, and when Kiermaier has started in the outfield, Rays pitchers have allowed fewer runs per nine, by 70 points. There’s a 38-point gap in BABIP, which works out to nearly a hit a game. Kiermaier has a career DRS of +63 runs. He has a career UZR of +50 runs. The team-level numbers do nothing to make those look silly. If anything, they make them look like under-estimates. Which sounds crazy, but here we are.

The Rays know that Kevin Kiermaier is valuable. You presumably already knew that Kevin Kiermaier is valuable. Could be he’s even more valuable than we thought. And he could be a crucial reason why the Rays are seemingly about to start selling. In a way, when Kiermaier got injured, they just didn’t have a chance.

At one point not too long ago the Rays were a game under .500 and hanging around the fringes of the developing wild-card race. It’s never easy for an organization to hover around .500 because it’s unclear in which direction you want to try to make the team go. Thankfully for the Rays front office, the team went and made things simple, suddenly playing like the worst team in the league. The Rays have bottomed out, and while there are still elements to like, the July approach is obvious: Sell. Sell for prospects, so as to accumulate prospects. Heaven knows there are organizations that practically run on prospects.

As has been discussed, the landscape of available starting pitchers hasn’t looked very sexy. The Rays could conceivably change that. Odds are, they won’t be real interested in moving Chris Archer. Jake Odorizzi, though, has generated attention. And then there’s Matt Moore. Moore’s numbers don’t look great, and he hasn’t scratched his once un-seeable ceiling. If you glance at Moore, you might see something like a fourth or fifth starter. Yet it’s also easy to convince yourself that Moore’s on the rise. He looks like one player with legitimate upside.

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Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell entered the season as one of Major League Baseball’s top prospects. Among the top-20 names on a number of the industry’s preseason lists and a dark-horse Rookie of the Year Candidate, there were rumors that the young left-hander might agree to a contract extension with the Rays that likely would have placed him on the club’s Opening Day roster. That didn’t happen, however. Finally, after sufficient time had passed to secure an extra year of service time for the Rays, Snell was called up to make a start and pitched well. Following that, however, a series of off days allowed Tampa Bay to deploy a four-man rotation. That, combined with a series of solid starts from Matt Andriese, meant Snell stayed down in the minors. Now he’s back and the results so far are mixed — but also easily corrected.

When a pitcher has compiled just three starts in the majors, and the first one of those is separated by more than a month from the other two, evaluating his statistics is a glass-half-full-half-empty situation. If you want to believe Blake Snell is doing well, look at his ERA and FIP — they’re 2.40 and 2.92, respectively — and how he has yet to concede a home run. For those who’d like to view the glass as half empty, consider instead that Snell has allowed five unearned runs for which his ERA (by definition) doesn’t account — and that, in his last two starts, he’s recorded as many walks as strikeouts. While giving up no home runs is good, it likely can’t continue like that and could lead to higher run totals in the future.

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Over the first eight plus years of his major league career, from 2008 to 2016, Evan Longoria has led position players with 45.1 WAR.  That WAR total is by no means definitive proof that we was truly the most valuable player for those eight plus seasons, but it’s enough to establish the concept that Longoria has been one of the very best players in the league for a substantial length of time.

Longoria is essentially neck and neck with Cabrera (by the time you read this they may have swapped places again), and Mike Trout will likely pass him in career WAR later this year or early in 2017, but we don’t need to be exact in order to appreciate what Longoria has accomplished. He’s 30 years old and is two-thirds of the way to a surefire Hall of Fame induction.

Yet with the rise of Trout, Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Kris Bryant, and the zillion other incredible young stars, Longoria has fallen from our collective consciousness. In part, this is because the Rays haven’t won many games over the last couple of years, but it’s also a reflection of a troubling power outage.

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Closers tend to be dominant, because if they weren’t dominant, they wouldn’t be closers. The role is selective, which makes total sense, on account of the stakes that come along with the designation. Now, this statement isn’t fact-checked or anything, but I feel like the closers in the American League East are particularly dominant. Maybe I’m wrong, and I don’t care, but the Red Sox, of course, acquired Craig Kimbrel. The Yankees, of course, acquired Aroldis Chapman, and they also have Andrew Miller. The Orioles have the unbelievable Zach Britton. Even the Blue Jays are happy with Roberto Osuna, who last year got himself some playoff exposure. The division knows how to finish games. It’s one of the reasons it’s a good division.

There’s another guy, and by process of elimination, you can see he closes for the Rays. Most good Rays players end up seemingly underrated, and the current closer is no exception. Jake McGee? They traded Jake McGee. Brad Boxberger? He’s been hurt. He’s on the way back, and they say he’ll close again, but if that happens, he’ll have to bump Alex Colome. Colome has been better than you probably realized. Colome has been better than I realized, and this is literally how I make a living.

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Jeremy Sowers doesn’t turn 33 until later this month. He’s young enough that he could still be pitching. Having succumbed to shoulder woes and ineffectiveness, he’s instead embarking on a new career with the Tampa Bay Rays.

Drafted sixth overall in 2004 out of Vanderbilt, Sowers never did fulfill expectations on the mound. In four seasons with the Cleveland Indians, the left-hander logged a 5.18 ERA while winning just 18 of 48 decisions. Known more for moxie than velocity, he fanned 10% of the batters he faced across 400 innings of work.

Unable to sufficiently school hitters, Sowers stepped away from the game and returned to the classroom, earning an MBA from the University of North Carolina. Now he’s back in baseball. After a summer spent interning with the Orioles, Sowers is currently a major-league operations assistant with the Rays, a position he sees as a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

Sowers talked about his path from first-round pick to entry-level baseball ops on a recent visit to Fenway Park.

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Sowers on working for the Rays: “Just because I played does not qualify me as an absolute source of information about this game. I think I offer a unique perspective, but my value is only increased by hearing out and understanding everybody else’s perspective. To use a really crappy movie analogy, in Sling Blade, everybody is trying to figure out how to make a lawnmower work. All of a sudden, the one character is like, ‘I reckon there’s no gas in it.’

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The Rays are big fans of Corey Dickerson. You don’t have to just take my word for it. Consider that the Rays exchanged a valuable trade commodity to get him. And since Dickerson has joined the roster, the Rays have at times gushed over his swing and his approach. They love his natural aggressiveness, and they love the way the ball comes off of the bat. Dickerson is skilled, for a purely offensive player, and if anything the Rays would like more hitters like him.

Dickerson is a great individual indicator of the Rays’ move toward a more aggressive lineup. As they say, Dickerson goes up there prepared to take a swing. Okay, now, think about aggressive hitters. Think about aggressive power hitters, and how they succeed, and how they fail. Dickerson has seen new opponents in a new league, but what they’re doing might in one sense not be surprising at all. Provided you forget about Dickerson’s background.

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It was barely a month ago that we ran our annual positional power rankings series. Perceptions of players and teams ought not to change too much after just a few weeks of baseball, but the neat thing about having projections is around is that they update themselves every night. Never by much, but they’re constantly re-evaluating to reflect whatever’s happened by the appropriate amount. In this sense, they’re like an overreaction guide, holding your hand through the early goings of a season and letting you know just how much to make of Player X’s early-season struggles/successes. Like, for example, if you’re wondering whether to freak out about Rich Hill, you look to see how much the projections have changed since the start of the year, and you listen to the projections when they tell you that it’s perfectly OK to freak out.

And just as the projections can be used as a guide to gauge how much early-season performances mean for players, they can do the same for teams. Team projections are just a composite of a bunch of player projections, after all. And while no one individual has improved their projection nearly as much as Hill, something stuck out to me while doing the research for that post:

In the interest of full disclosure, the Rays don’t possess the most improved rotation, overall. That’d be the Phillies, by a sizable amount. I’ve written about the Phillies and their ubiquitous curveball usage, but frankly, while it’s fun that they’ve seemingly accelerated their rebuild with an already-good rotation, it still doesn’t really matter, in the scope of 2016, that the Phillies have the most improved rotation. But for the Rays, who have the second-most improved rotation with another gap separating them from third, it does matter, because the Rays aim to compete.

When we ran the positional power rankings, we split the starting pitching rankings into two halves. The Rays made the cut for the first half, but just barely. Just over a month ago, the forecast had the Rays’ rotation ranked 15th, with a projected group WAR of +13.0. Now, the Rays are ranked eighth, with a forecast that would put the group around +15 WAR over a full season. It only took 21 games for the projections to give the Rays’ rotation an extra two wins in the future, based on what they’d seen.

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A year ago, Kris Bryant’s failure to make the Cubs Opening Day roster made a good deal of news because (a) Bryant, 23, had dominated the minors and was clearly ready for the majors, and (b) by holding him down for a couple weeks, the Cubs prevented Bryant from recording a full year of service time in 2015, which also prevented him from recording the necessary six years of service time for free agency before the end of the 2021 season. Bryant was the number-one prospect in baseball at the time, but he was not the only player kept in the minor leagues at least in part due to service time considerations. Carlos Correa, Maikel Franco, Francisco Lindor, Carlos Rodon, Addison Russell, and Noah Syndergaard all spent time in the minors last year before succeeding in the big leagues. There has been little uproar this year regarding service time shenanigans. While there is no Bryant-like player, the potential for some service-time manipulation is still there.

To identify players who are ripe for manipulation it’s best to begin with the very best prospects. Of the players mentioned above, six of seven appeared among Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list last year; only Franco appeared outside the top 20, down at 38 overall. Taking a look at Baseball America’s top 20 prospects this season, we can get a good start in identifying players.

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Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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