In February of 2015, 19-year old Cuban infielder Yoan Moncada agreed to a contract with the Boston Red Sox that included a $31.5 million signing bonus. In the 18 months that have elapsed since then, the baseball world has anticipated his arrival to its biggest stage and, this weekend, it’s going to get what it wants.

While we’ve all understandably been following and analyzing his progress and development in anticipation of things to come, possibly lost on us has been that Yoan Moncada is already a significant historical figure in baseball’s history. His departure from Cuba with the country’s unexplained blessing came at a time when the public was just beginning to understand what his predecessors and their families endured during their defections just as relations between the island and the United States began to change. He symbolizes the end of a historic era of Cuban baseball excellence, the most remarkable talent in a wave of defectors who have left the country, at least momentarily, dry.

His delivery to America and, eventually, the major leagues was preordained. There was too much money on the table for all parties involved for Moncada to take a bow behind an isolated archipelagian curtain. Unlike several supreme Cuban baseball talents who preceded him, American baseball fans are fortunate that they don’t have to ask themselves, “What if?” as they do with players like Yulieski Gurriel, Jose Contreras and Orlando Hernandez who debuted stateside past their primes, in their 30s. They instead have been asking, “When?”

Moncada’s relevance extends beyond international baseball popular culture and deep into the business end of things. He is so talented that, at the age of just 18, he shined a very public light on a multi-billion-dollar business’s flaccid and discriminatory system designed specifically to suppress the wages of teenage Latin American ball players by single-handedly pushing it to its limit. He forced Major League executives to confront a once-in-history scenario, a stoned sports fan’s hypothetical question about loopholes and generational talents: “How much money is the best teenager on the planet worth, up front?”

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Khris Davis has maintained excellent exit velocity all year, and has 33 home runs to his name, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t pressed at times with his new team. His walk rate is less than half what it used to be, and his swinging-strike rate is up nearly 20%.

The Oakland outfielder admitted that his decision on when to swing hasn’t been at its finest this year. “I was putting pressure on myself in a new environment,” he told me recently before a game against the Indians. “It was mental. Just kinda settled down.”

It’s something we can easily see in his swing percentages — but, perhaps more importantly, it’s totally normal and has happened very often to other big bats changing teams.

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It’s been pretty much impossible to ignore what Mookie Betts has been up to. I know that FanGraphs has been rather pro-Betts from the beginning, but even we didn’t think he was likely to hit for this much power. So, he’s exceeding everyone’s expectations, on the way to becoming a legitimate candidate for the league MVP. Dave has written about Betts plenty. He just wrote about him the other day, in fact. And there’s one thing Dave has pointed to a few times: Pitchers should probably change the way they’re pitching. They look at Betts and see a little guy, so they’ve peppered the zone. Results would suggest they should attack with greater caution.

Even now, Betts still sees a lot of strikes. That much, there’s no denying, and any downward trend has been gradual. Maybe that’s going to prove to be a lagging indicator — maybe we shouldn’t expect the zone rate to plummet until 2017. But an adjustment has taken place. It’s been quiet, and it hasn’t even worked out to this point, but pitchers have caught on to the fact that Betts represents a hell of a threat in the box.

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On Sunday, and for the second time this season, Mookie Betts launched three home runs in a game. He now has 26 home runs on the season; for comparison, Giancarlo Stanton has 25, Chris Davis has 24, and Mike Trout has 23. Mookie Betts has a higher isolated slugging percentage this season than Miguel Cabrera, Ryan Braun, or Carlos Gonzalez. This is not what anyone expected.

I’ve long been one of Betts biggest supporters, but it’d be dishonest to pretend that we saw this coming. Even back in 2014, when I wrote the “Don’t Trade Mookie Betts” post extolling his value, I included the following paragraph.

Due primarily to his size (5-9) and the potential limits that puts on his power, Betts has not generally been viewed as a franchise cornerstone type of prospect the way Xander Bogaerts was as he ascended the ranks. And while it might seem unfair to make generalities about Betts’ future based on his height, there is merit to the idea that he probably won’t become a big-time power hitter in the big leagues.

In that piece, I noted that Betts’ combination of a low swing rate and a high contact rate put him in the company of mostly low-power slap hitters, but noted that it looked like he had enough doubles-power to become a Matt Carpenter or Ben Zobrist type of hitter, and those guys were worth holding onto. I liked Betts a lot, but I liked him because of the overall game, not because I thought he was going to turn into a slugger.

Even the following spring, when Betts went bananas in the Grapefruit League, his teammates sought to praise him by comparing him to Andrew McCutchen. And those comparisons were met with pushback, even by myself, as I continued to not see that kind of power development as Betts’ likely path to success. But now, a year and a half later, the McCutchen comparison looks wrong not because Betts didn’t develop McCutchen-level power, but because he’s already surpassed McCutchen-level power, and has become a very different player than he looked like coming up through the minors.

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When I click over to the leaderboards, I see that, right now, Jose Altuve is the major-league leader in wOBA. Which means that, by that measure, Altuve has been baseball’s best hitter, which is absolutely nuts. Not that we didn’t know Altuve was good, but he’s having a Mike Troutian season. Altuve is simultaneously breaking down pitchers and breaking down barriers, and it’s just so much more fun to have him leading the stat than some ordinary muscle-bound giant. It makes us second-guess what’s possible. Lots of things are possible.

Like this. When I click over to the leaderboards, and then significantly drop the minimum number of plate appearances, I see that, right now, the major-league leader in wOBA is Sandy Leon. Unlike Altuve, Leon’s offensive season isn’t “qualified.” So we can’t take it close to so seriously. But you might not understand how ridiculous this is, and you might not understand how critical it’s been for a Red Sox club trying to hang in the race.

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Marcus Stroman ended June with a bloated 5.33 ERA that was mostly deserved, so he went back to the drawing board. He’s since had an ERA two runs lower, once again deserved, since he changed things in early July.

After a good start in early July, he made general reference to some adjustments after the game, and Shi Davidi went and asked pitching coach Pete Walker for some specifics. So we know some of what Stroman did to recover. He cleaned up the delivery, he moved his hands, he changed his release point, and he altered his pitching mix. It’s the kind of stuff pitchers do to bust a slump.

The most interesting thing might be where he learned these things, though. Who knows when he picked them up from the Red Sox lefty, but these adjustments have made Stroman a bit more like David Price these days. Even if Price is struggling a bit, you have to count that as a good thing compared to where Stroman was earlier this season.

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The Red Sox made Andrew Benintendi the seventh pick in the draft last summer after he hit a torrid .376/.488/.717 as a sophomore at Arkansas, giving him easily the highest OPS in the SEC. Benintendi wasted no time proving his mettle in pro ball. He kicked things off by slashing .313/.414/.556 between two levels of A-ball, pairing a minuscule strikeout rate with loads of power.

Benintendi’s done more of the same in 2016, only this time at High-A and Double-A. He’s posted equal strikeout and walk rates — both 9% — while also hitting for power and stealing bases. The end result has been an unequivocally excellent .312/.378/.532 batting line. Considering he grades out as an above-average center fielder by Clay Davenport’s numbers, there really isn’t anything Benintendi can’t do.

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As it has been the past few years, the 2016 non-waiver trade deadline brought about a flurry of activity that was hard to keep up with even if it was the only thing you were doing. Since most of us have other things that we have to or would like to occupy our time with, we figured we would save you some hassle and create an omnibus post with all of our trade deadline content so that you have it all in one place. For clarity’s sake, I’m going to limit this to articles about trades that actually took place.

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This deadline has, thus far, been pretty boring. When Andrew Cashner and Eduardo Nunez are headlining notable trades, you know it’s a slow market. There is one guy who could change all that though, and could have a significant impact on how the postseason shakes out. That guy, of course, is Chris Sale.

The White Sox ace is a legitimate difference maker; even with just a couple months left in the season, he still projects to add another +2 WAR to whatever team he’s on, not counting what he’ll do in the postseason. He’s a high-end player in the prime of his career, and since he’s signed for three more years after this one, he’s also one of the most valuable assets in the sport.

When we did the Trade Value series a few weeks ago, I ranked Sale as the 15th most valuable trade chip in the game. Here is the table that we used to summarize his value.

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Trade-deadline hysteria can lead to a dehumanization of players. In our effort to feverishly re-imagine our favorite team’s roster, all of us can be guilty of rooting to exchange this piece for that piece without considering all of the havoc that a trade can create for the people concerned.

I don’t mean to be a wet blanket. It’s fun to dream on that big acquisition that will put our teams over the top, and let’s please continue to do so.

But! We can also appreciate how difficult it must be to weather the constant speculation about your status, and then, if the trade is consummated, to then figure out how to move your life to another city — quickly.

So David Laurila and I set out to ask players about the experience. How did they find out? What were the conversations with the family like? What was the emotional roller coaster like? Thanks to the players that opened up, we can get a better sense of the human side of the trade deadline.

*****

Jeff Samardzija, Giants starting pitcher: “The first time, I watched all the rumors, and it ended up being Oakland, which wasn’t even on the radar, anywhere. The second time around I just ignored it all, and then I almost went to the White Sox and it fell through, and then a few days later it actually happened. Following for entertainment purposes is kinda fun.

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