The market has moved forward as we approach the trading deadline, but its shape is still difficult to make out, especially in terms of hitters. We have seen the mega-deal, with franchise cornerstone Troy Tulowitzki moving from the Colorado Rockies to the Toronto Blue Jays. We have seen the rental, with Ben Zobrist helping the already strong Kansas City Royals. There appear to be solid outfielders remaining on the market, including Justin Upton, Yoenis Cespedes, and Gerardo Parra all available as rentals. Even so, it still looks to be a sellers’ market on the hitting side. The Cincinnati Reds and Colorado Rockies are in a decent position to move two hitters, neither of whom are rentals nor franchise cornerstones. Jay Bruce and Carlos Gonzalez are remarkably similar players and both could provide a jolt of offense for a team needing help this season and in the future.

Both Bruce and Gonzalez were called up to majors in 2008, and while Gonzalez has played some center field, both are good-hitting corner outfielders. Both are left-handed hitters with platoon splits that make them just good enough to hit everyday. Both have contracts lasting potentially through 2017, with Bruce carrying a reasonable $13 million team option in 2017 after a $12.5 million salary in 2016 and Gonzalez owed $37 million over the next two years. In addition to being cheaper, Bruce is also slightly younger, at 28, compared to the 29-year-old Gonzalez. In Gonzalez’s favor is slightly better production over the course of their respective careers. Their career lines are below.

Even factoring in Coors Field, Gonzalez has been the better hitter than Bruce, who plays in a decent hitters’ park himself. The pair have both been adequate on defense while losing some overall value due to the negative positional adjustment produced by a corner-outfield spot. Gonzalez has been the better runner, as well, but Bruce has closed the gap in overall value by staying healthy and recording nearly 1,000 more plate appearances than Gonzalez. They have accumulated their WAR in a very similar manner, though, both breaking out in 2010 and having very good years in 2013 before experiencing major struggles last season. Their cumulative WAR chart below is remarkable for the singular progression between the two players.

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There’s no such thing as ideal circumstances under which to trade Troy Tulowitzki. The best-case scenario is that Tulowitzki is both healthy and performing well, and then, you’re still a front office trading one of the most talented players in baseball. And in Colorado, of course, Tulowitzki has been more than just a good player, having been the beloved face of the franchise. Do something like this, and it’s going to hurt, regardless. But it’s been increasingly clear that a separation would be necessary. That both parties needed to move on. The Rockies just couldn’t get Tulowitzki to stay at peak level. So they did what they did, doing about the best they could do at the time, and with Carlos Gonzalez probably following Tulowitzki out the door, this is a watershed. No longer will the Rockies be caught trying to build future success around present-day veterans.

Tulowitzki was no stranger to trade rumors. There was thought he could go a year ago, but after lighting the league on fire, he got injured. The injury questions hung over him during the offseason, making it tricky to find a match, and now that he’s been mostly healthy in 2015, his performance has been uncharacteristically mortal. So the injury questions morphed into performance questions, and the Rockies had to accept that. Your opinion of the trade is dependent on your level of Tulowitzki optimism. Given what he’s capable of being, you could argue the Rockies sold low. Alternatively, you could consider it meaningful that the Rockies had trouble getting the 30-year-old Tulowitzki both healthy and great.

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While many of you were snuggled up in your beds last night, Alex Anthopoulos and his henchmen were hard at work acquiring Troy Tulowitzki from the Rockies. You can read Dave Cameron’s piping hot take on the trade here and Kiley McDaniel’s scouting-oriented contribution on the three pitching prospects going from Toronto to Colorado here. Below, I’ll be taking a data-driven look at those same three prospects, as follow: Miguel Castro, Jeff Hoffman, and Jesus Tinoco.

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Lead Prospect Analyst Kiley McDaniel is currently scouting the East Coast Pro prep showcase in Tampa, Florida. What follows is a collection of scouting reports written by McDaniel concerning the three players traded by Toronto to Colorado in exchange for Troy Tulowitzki — compiled and updated to account both for recent developments and/or likely role with the Rockies.

Jeff Hoffman, RHP, Colorado Rockies, FV: 55

In Hoffman’s offseason scouting report, I noted that he was in contention to go #1 overall until his elbow surgery just before the 2014 draft, in which he went ninth overall. He made his first pro appearance this year and started making buzz right away, showing big velocity in a late big-league spring-training appearance, then in extended spring training and in his regular season debut at High-A Dunedin (he was just promoted to Double-A in the last few days). In the video, the first game shown is when I saw Hoffman about a month ago and the second game is when our own Chris King saw his first start for Dunedin about a month before that.

I like to keep all the clips we have of a player in the official video on the FanGraphs YouTube page (now over 1 million views and 1,000 videos in less than a year) for reasons just like this, so we can see the changes over time. Notice from the third game in the video (the summer before he was drafted, in the Cape Cod League) how aggressive Hoffman’s delivery is (and the knockout curve at 3:00) and note that much of that is still there in the second game, his pro debut in Dunedin. Now look at the first game, the most recent one, and notice how much more upright, stiff and generally tall-and-fall his delivery is, rather than attacking the plate.

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“I’ll be honest. I think pulling the ball is the best way to get hits,” Charlie Blackmon said before a game against the Athletics, as we went over the various changes in his hitting profile from year to year. Maybe that’s baseball 101, but going the opposite way has its prominent supporters.

In the age of the shift, though, is Blackmon’s assertion itself still so obvious? Pull the ball a ton and you’ll end up seeing more defenders where you want the ball to go. Unless you have a certain skill that has fallen out of favor in baseball.

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Whoa, that was a rough two days without baseball. But the wait is almost over. (And, in fact, the Royals and White Sox are in the first inning as of press time.) As we grind our nails into a fine paste waiting for the second half to start, here are 10 questions that I’ll be hoping the second half answers. Perhaps you have others. If so, let me know in the comments, but these are mine. Let’s get to it.

1. How many more younglings?

The first half saw the introduction of some really top-shelf talent, with some of those young players immediately vaulting to the top of Dave’s trade-value rankings, including Carlos Correa at #5 after just 32 major-league games. That probably won’t be topped, but the second half hasn’t even started yet, and we already know of one more prospect who is set for his big league debut in Frankie Montas. Montas was ranked 113th by Kiley before the season, and his 3.03 FIP ranks 10th across all of Double-A; his 2.47 ERA, 13th.

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It’s been a good stretch for Nolan Arenado. In the past seven games, he’s hit eight home runs. Going back seven games is an arbitrary endpoint, so, in the five games preceding, Arenado hit either a double or a triple. After a May 23 doubleheader, Arenado was batting .257; since then, he’s batted .333, and far more importantly, he’s slugged .811. Now, the Rockies themselves haven’t necessarily felt it. They’ve played .500 baseball over the course of Arenado’s hot stretch, and it’s not a team that’s about to compete. But the Rockies are no strangers to playing ordinary baseball while getting extraordinary performances. This time we just get to look beyond Troy Tulowitzki.

I’m not all that interested in trying to analyze Arenado while he’s on fire. There’s only so much to be said about a short-term awesome performance, and in a case like this, I think it’s best to just take a step back and try to consider the bigger picture. Arenado is starting to get a little more attention. God knows he deserves it. He’s not a mediocre player in the middle of doing well; he’s a good player in the middle of being amazing. Have we seen a player like Nolan Arenado before? What kind of asset is he, to the Rockies? In the interest of honesty, I went into this with an idea already in mind. It was just a matter of collecting evidence. I don’t think the initial bias invalidates the conclusion.

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Carlos Gonzalez is showing the worst power he’s shown since he was a rookie. He’s healthy, maybe, but he’s not producing, not yet. He’s still only 29, and there are signs of life — mostly centered around the velocity on the balls leaving his bat. Maybe he’s not done.

Batted Ball velocity is probably close to stabilization. Jeff Zimmerman found that the correlation between April and May’s batted ball velocities was already reasonably high (r^2 of .34, stabilization point is around .5) at the very least. So, in small samples like these, it does look meaningful to look at CarGo’s speedometer.

It’s healthy. By Baseball Savant, he has the fifth-highest maximum exit velocity this year. His average exit velocity is 58th of 273, or in he top fifth. On fly balls and line drives, he’s up to 45th.

If it seems like these aren’t elite numbers, maybe they aren’t. But Gonzalez hasn’t been an elite slugger, maybe? He’s 21st in isolated slugging since 2011, and 11th in home runs per fly ball. That’s fairly elite. But the bar was lowered in 2014, when he would have been 28th in ISO and 24th in HR/FB, had he qualified. That sort of bar seems reachable with his current velocity.

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Things are not going particular well in Colorado, and I’m not just talking about the fact that it snowed in May. The state’s baseball team has lost nine straight games, and new GM Jeff Bridich isn’t particularly pleased with the results he’s seen as of late.

“We have a good collection of players,” said Bridich, the first-year GM whose team is 11-17 and last in the National League West. “And at this point, meaning the last two weeks of the season, they’ve added up to a bad team. I don’t think there’s any other way you can look at it. That’s not saying anything shocking. The players know that.

“There are bad stretches that befall every team in a season, or most every team in a season. This is where we see what type of resolve our players have — if they take a look around that clubhouse and deal with reality as adults and say, ‘We’re going to make some changes and do things necessary to start winning games.

…

“I continue to believe in our guys, but when you have to make changes like we did with Tyler Matzek [who was sent down to Triple-A Albuquerque over the weekend], when it’s in the best interest of the team and the player, you go ahead and give somebody else an opportunity,” Bridich said.

Unfortunately for Bridich and the Rockies, swapping out every underperforming player is logistically impossible. They’re not going to bench Carlos Gonzalez, but he’s been their worst player this season, putting up -0.6 WAR in his first 101 plate appearances. They could start taking some playing time from Justin Morneau and give it to Wilin Rosario, but that doesn’t seem like an obvious upgrade, and Morneau was pretty good for the Rockies last year, so that would seem like an overreaction to a slow start. And if the team had better pitchers than Jorge de la Rosa or Kyle Kendrick hanging around, they wouldn’t have spent some of their free agent money to sign those guys in the first place; this is not an organization overflowing with quality arms.

So yes, the Rockies can do things like demote Tyler Matzek or swap out Daniel Descalso for a different utility infielder, but moving the deck chairs around isn’t going to stop the ship from sinking. While Bridich is right that the team does have some good players, they just don’t have enough of them, and when the team’s two highest profile players aren’t performing like superstars, the rest of the roster gets exposed. And that’s what has happened early on; Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez have been mediocre and terrible respectively, and there just isn’t enough around them to pick up the slack.

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Troy Tulowitzki has been an integral piece of the Rockies lineup for years now. He’s racked up an impressive 34 WAR in his 10 seasons in Colorado, but it’s not clear if he’ll be a part of the team’s future plans. And if he is, it’s not clear that he should be.

The Rockies don’t have the looks of a playoff team this year. This is partly because they’re 11-17 and bringing up the rear in the National League West. However, even before the season began, the Rockies looked more like existers than contenders. Given the collection of players on their roster, they appear to be something worse than a .500 team on paper.

Teams like this don’t have much use for an aging star shortstop. As a result, it very well might be in Colorado’s best interest to hit the reset button and trade Tulowitzki in exchange for players who stand a better chance of helping the next playoff-bound Rockies team. After nearly a decade of Troy Tulowitzki at shortstop, it might be time for the Rockies to move on.

That brings us to Trevor Story. If Colorado does ultimately deal Tulo, and his replacement comes from within, Story will likely be the man getting the nod. Not all that long ago, Story looked like a big league shortstop in the making. The Rockies selected him 45th overall out of high school in 2011, and he quickly became a consensus top 100 prospect after a .277/.367/.505 performance as a teenager in the South Atlantic League. At that point, it seemed like he was only a couple of years away from knocking at the door of the big leagues. Read the rest of this entry »