No catcher has quite been like Joe Mauer.

Since his first full season in the big leagues, he has easily been the best catcher in baseball. Between 2005 and 2010, he compiled a 32.7 WAR — Victor Martinez finished a distant second with 22.2 WAR. He was a solid defender;  he routinely contended (and won) batting titles; he got on base at ridiculously high rates; and he even contributed stolen bases. Needless to say, he obliterated his catching competition. Mauer’s performances were truly unique.

And now that time might have come to a premature end.

With Mauer getting his first start at first base Thursday, it’s clear that the Minnesota Twins are willing to move the 28-year-old around the diamond to keep him healthy. But this creates an interesting conundrum since Mauer stands to lose a ton of value.
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The Milwaukee Brewers’ “all in” offseason, during which they traded a good chunk of young talent (including some of their best prospects like Brett Lawrie and Jake Odorizzi) to dramatically improve their pitching staff, seems to be working. New Brewers Shaun Marcum and Zack Greinke are dominating so far (although it hasn’t shown in Greinke’s ERA), and Milwaukee is currently in first place in the National League Central. However, as part of the price for acquiring Greinke from the Royals, the Brewers had to take on shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt. Betancourt has somehow been even worse than the Brewers might have expected (perhaps he’s the victim of a curse), and is at -0.5 WAR so far. Betancourt isn’t hitting, and he has only exacerbated the Brewers problems in the field. The Brewers are in the divisional lead, as mentioned, but some might doubt whether the Brewers can make the playoffs with Betancourt playing like, well, Betancourt. What does history tell us about replacement level players and playoff teams?

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In sports, age is a tricky thing. Consider Delmon Young‘s 2010 season. After three seasons of mediocrity at the plate and butchery in the field, Young finally put together a productive season for Minnesota. He slugged 21 HRs and posted a career high in OBP, SLG, wOBA, and WAR. And, because he was only 24, the belief was there was nowhere to go but up – or, at the least, to a respectable career similar to Carlos Lee’s.

Yet here we are, watching a 25-year-old Young struggle through one of the worst seasons imaginable for a top-prospect stud left-fielder entering what should be the prime of his career. Through two months and change, Young has only managed two home runs. Much like the rest of his Twins’ team, his batting line is in shambles. To date, his .246 batting average is a career low, as is his .272 on-base percentage, his .316 slugging percentage and his .264 wOBA.

Were Young 28 or 29 years old, none of this would surprise. Pundits across the internet would have declared him as regression candidate number one after posting a career-high isolated power score by 50 points despite moving to Target Field, one of the toughest home run parks in the league. Nothing else was different. The poor plate discipline was still there. The good contact numbers were still there. The high BABIP was still there. The only difference between Delmon Young prior to 2009 and Delmon Young in 2010 was more pop.

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Baltimore Orioles shortstop J.J. Hardy got his season off to a somewhat predictable start with an oblique injury that kept him out for most of April. However, since coming back, he’s not only played typically good defense, but is having the best offensive season of his career. The contact rate and strike zone judgment have always been there, but his power surge so far this season (.186 ISO from a shortstop) hearken back to his 2007-2008 heyday in Milwaukee. In a tough 2011 run environment, a .287/.383/.473 (129 wRC+) from a good defensive shortstop is quite valuable. While Hardy is likely due for some regression, it’s not hard to imagine that his former employers who traded him away — the Brewers and Twins — looking back with some regrets.

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Every season, there’s always one thing in demand at the trade deadline — starting pitching. Nearly every contender outside of Philadelphia is in the hunt for another rotation arm, and the demand always outstrips the supply. While there’s no Cliff Lee on the block this year, there are still some interesting arms who could make a difference down the stretch. Here are the best candidates:

PLAYER: Edwin Jackson
TEAM: White Sox
POSSIBLE DESTINATION(S): Yankees, Red Sox, Reds
CONTRACT STATUS: $8.35 million, free agent at end of year
PROJECTED WAR: 1.8

The White Sox might end up trading Jackson even if they get back in the race for the AL Central title, as they currently have six starting pitchers for just five slots. Jackson is no stranger to changing teams, as he’s been dealt by Los Angeles, Tampa Bay, Detroit, and Arizona since arriving in the Major Leagues. Given the White Sox surplus of arms and his impending free agency, he’s a good bet to be packing his bags once again.

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The following data is current through 5-30-2011.

If you, dear reader, are like me, then you agonize unnecessarily over every lineup on every team in every game. Aaron Rowand leading off?! Yargh! No! Carlos Gomez batting second for the Brewers?! WRONG. Aaron Miles batting anything?! Unforgivable.

Holding egos constant, inefficiency is the greatest enemy of success. With regards to lineups, however, teams can really only lose a handful of runs over the course of full season, but a handful of runs, in real terms, can mean the difference between the division or a boring October. So it’s a dicey proposition. A mismanaged lineup on the Royals team does not mean a whole lot because they will lose the division by several trillion runs. A few lost runs for the Rays, Yankees, or Red Sox, though, can mean the season.
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The month of June marks the unofficial beginning of the trade season, and so we thought it would be helpful to run down a list of which players might be for sale at some point this summer. But, rather than just run down a list of potential trade targets, we thought that we would spend the week discussing the most interesting players at each position and have compiled a list of the best players available at each spot, along with their expected production going forward and notes about which teams might be possible fits as buyers. We hope you enjoy the series.

Kicking off our week of looking at trade targets are the players who will be acquired primarily for their work with the bat: first basemen and designated hitters. Note that there might be some overlap across the posts as some players can handle multiple positions.

Here are five realistic trade candidates at the position(s), based on projected WAR over the rest of the season, contract status, the state of their current employers and the needs of various potential contenders.

PLAYER: Billy Butler
TEAM: Royals
POSSIBLE DESTINATION(S): Angels, Rays
CONTRACT STATUS: Four-year, $30 million deal through 2014
PROJECTED WAR: 2.1

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I think I’m like most baseball fans in that when I think of a designated hitter, I think of home runs. The DH spot has usually been filled by power hitters since its inception in 1973, and that makes sense. If a player is playing a position with no defensive value, he needs to produce on offense. Home runs are the most valuable offensive event. The most valuable hitters in any given year usually have plenty of home runs and extra base hits. One often hears that a player who doesn’t hit for power doesn’t have the bat to play on the “easy end” of the defensive spectrum, and and even moreso in the case of a player who is primarily a DH. Billy Butler is a current example of a player who mostly fills the DH spot, but since he hasn’t hit for much power (yet), you will sometimes hear people say that he doesn’t fit the profile of a DH. Without focusing specifically on Butler, I’d like to write briefly about what it means to “hit well enough to be DH,” and then to see how often that actually happens with a relatively low amount of power.

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If you want a quick glimpse of some players who probably shouldn’t qualify for the batting title, go to the leader boards, click on Advanced, and then click on wOBA. There you will see a list of players whose wOBAs range from pretty damn bad, Will Venable at .285, to downright putrid, Miguel Tejada at .224. Some of these players figure to rise from their unworthy starts and earn their spots in the lineup. Others will find spots on the bench, or, in some cases, the waiver wire. Such is life in baseball.

Despite their horrible overall production, some of these players have managed to get their scant few hits in a timely manner. A few of the bottom dwellers have racked up a decent number of runs and RBI in their travels. While it’s not at all indicative of their talent, it has helped their team in some small way. I’d like to highlight a couple of these instances today.

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It’s only May 17th, but for the Minnesota Twins, the 2011 season is essentially over. Losers of nine straight, they now stand just 12-27 and are 13 1/2 games behind the first place Indians. They’ve been atrocious at nearly every aspect of the game; they rank last in wOBA and last in xFIP, a pretty awful combination. Even the eventual return of Joe Mauer won’t be enough to right the ship – there are just too many problems to overcome to save this season, and the Twins need to start playing for 2012 and beyond.

The problem is that I’m not sure how much they can actually do. For most teams, when they fall out of the race they promote youngsters from the farm and put the veterans on the trade block to try and add a few prospects to the organization. The Twins don’t really have all that much in the way of interesting assets to sell off, though.

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