The August waiver period can be an interesting time, because it gives you a little bit of insight into how teams around the bigs value certain players. For example, it came as absolutely no surprise that the overpriced and under-performing Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier made it through waivers, or that Cole Hamels, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg did not. It came as a bit of a surprise that Jon Niese did get through, which maybe tells you something about how other teams view his shoulder and that he’s perhaps not as valuable as Mets fans seemed to think; if the worst-case scenario is that the Mets stick you with the $16 million he has left after this year and still nobody was interested, that’s not a great sign.

For guys like Crawford, Ethier and others, their contracts were signed years ago, and obviously much has changed since then, so it’s most interesting to see how the industry reacts to players who were popular free agents just last winter, a mere eight months or so ago. While obviously not every roster move or claim is public, we know of at least one: Curtis Granderson, who signed for four years and $60 million with the Mets. Even with the desperate need for offense around the majors, Granderson, on pace for only a two-win season despite a rebound from a slow start, went unclaimed. At 33, two years off his last good season and three years away from his last great one, the risk wasn’t worth it.

This isn’t about Granderson, though; it’s about one of the other major New York signings from last winter who is off to an atrocious start in his new home and has a considerable amount of money still coming: Brian McCann, who returned from a stay on the concussion list yesterday. We don’t know if McCann has been put on waivers or if anyone would put in a claim — you imagine a rich team with catching issues like the Dodgers would at least think about it, though not necessarily do it — but isn’t it fascinating to think that if someone did claim him, the Yankees might be best off just letting him go?

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Chris Capuano and Shane Greene have not given up an earned run in the last two Yankee games, and it’s just like Brian Cashman must have drawn it up. A veteran lefty who hadn’t started all year and a sinker-slider righty that put up an ERA in the high fours in Triple-A this year — of course it’s working out.

Capuano has a track record that suggests he’s not too far from his true talent level, but Greene’s rest-of-season ERA projections (by ZiPs at least) are two runs higher than what he’s showing right now. Given his minor league numbers, we know why that is. But given what he’s doing now, is there a chance he might beat those projections?

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Note: We’re thrilled to have Drew Fairservice join the FanGraphs team of writers. He’ll be contributing here on a regular basis, and we think you’ll like him a lot.

In the run-up to the trade deadline, we read countless reports of team X sending scouts to watch player Y’s next start, a standard baseball practice which seems weird because it isn’t as though Jon Lester, David Price, et al are unknown commodities. Why go watch them? What could scouts possibly see in a handful of July starts that might sway any decision to acquire such proven big league talent, especially on a rental basis?

Our projection systems provide a snapshot of the potential gains grabbing such a player delivers between the deadline and the end of the season. Using the available means, we roughly figure the Tigers can expect a couple wins from Price in the regular season over Drew Smyly.

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Several weeks ago, Drew Fairservice talked to Marcus Stroman about a pretty lousy start. There’s a lot in there that’s stuck with me, but in particular it was interesting to see what Stroman said about facing Brett Gardner. An excerpt:

A guy like Gardner, he battles. He’ll battle whatever pitch you’re throwing in there, he’ll foul off. He’s almost the guy you want to force him to put the ball in the play and whatever happens, happens.
[…]
You don’t want to be too “nitpicky” with him. He’s a great hitter but he’s not a guy you want to pitch around. If he gets a hit, he gets a hit. You don’t want to waste pitches.

The numbers have always suggested as much, but Stroman confirmed it from a pitcher’s perspective: the idea with Gardner is to make him put the ball in play early, because he’s only so much of a threat. He’s not a guy you want to be too careful with. He was just ranked the second-best bunter in the American League, and he didn’t get that good by chance. Gardner’s perceived as a pesky, disciplined slap hitter, and pitchers always try to be aggressive around the zone so as to not get unnecessarily fatigued.

As I write this, Gardner’s tied in home runs with Carlos Gomez and Adrian Beltre. He’s ahead of Yasiel Puig and Buster Posey. Gardner’s hit as many home runs as he hit in the majors between 2008 – 2012 combined. For years, Gardner was pitched to like he was one thing. That much remains true, but he’s not that one thing any longer.

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Another piece in this year’s trade deadline mosaic fell into place on Monday, as Chase Headley was dealt from the Padres to the Yankees in exchange for 3B Yangervis Solarte and High-A RHP Rafael De Paula. Headley promptly jumped on a plane, was inserted into what became a 14-inning marathon with the Rangers, and delivered the game-winning hit. Moments like this have been hard to come by for the switch-hitting third baseman since 2012, when he unfurled a .286-.376-.498 line with 31 HR and an NL-leading 115 RBI, while playing his home games in a pitchers’ park.

He basically became the poster child for an underachieving, and dare I say boring Padres club. It’s clearly unfair to heap all of the 2013-14 Padres’ problems on the back of Headley, but it goes with the territory when you bat in the middle of the order daily and haul down a large salary by San Diego standards. What on earth has happened to Headley since 2012, and what can the Yankees expect to get from their new third sacker for the rest of the 2014 season? Read the rest of this entry »

In 2012, 28-year-old Chase Headley put up one of the five best seasons in the history of the Padres franchise, a 7.2 WAR year that made him one of the six most valuable hitters in baseball that year. He had two years of team control remaining, he was on the right side of 30 and he was playing a position that is always difficult to fill ably. His value was through the roof; the Padres could have had almost anything they wanted for him. Preferring to try to win, they made a few extension offers that didn’t pan out, and kept him around to go 119-141 since the end of 2012.

Less than two years later, he’s been traded to the Yankees for a 27-year-old infielder who was a minor league free agent last winter (Yangervis Solarte), an inconsistent (though talented) 23-year-old A-ball pitcher who wasn’t on anyone’s top-100 list (Rafael De Paula), the loss of the option to give Headley a qualifying offer if they wanted, and they even had to kick in a million dollars to the Yankees to make it happen. When you talk about holding on to an asset too long, well, this is the prime example right here. Headley is no longer part of the Padres’ future, and he didn’t turn into anything that is very likely to be a big part of that future.

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They say all games are created equally, and that each outing in a long season is just one of 162 games. That’s certainly true, from a mathematical perspective – 90 wins is 90 wins, regardless of how a team gets there.

From a practical perspective, however, not all games are equal. While the primacy effect may make it seem like it’s the games late in the season, within a tight race, that “matter more,” the argument can be made that it’s the games earlier in the year that can shape a team’s endpoint the most. In particular, success in the games ahead of the July 31 trade deadline, when looked at together, is paramount.

The American League East is a great example of this. With five teams projected to perform similarly before the season, the spread in the division so far is perhaps wider than most anticipated, with 9.5 games separating first and last. The team quality evaluation hasn’t changed all that much, however, with each team projected to win between 35 and 37 games (.480-.521) the rest of the way. The teams who have performed well early are in the driver’s seat for a playoff push, even though they don’t necessarily project as better than the others the rest of the way.

This is important not just for building an edge within the division – it’s made three teams buyers and two teams sellers ahead of the deadline.
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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

In this installment, I’ll discuss three pitchers I’ve come across in A-ball who boast more polish than most at their level.

Summary
Plutko gained plenty of prospect helium with a dominant run at Low-A early in the season, but he’s found the going tougher after a promotion to the Carolina League.

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Author’s note: literally simultaneous to the publishing of this post, news emerged that Tanaka is getting an MRI on his arm. Welp! Nothing below is entirely invalidated, but it’s been a while since I’ve had such lousy timing. Let us all learn a valuable lesson.

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When we analyze new players, there’s always a multi-step process. Analysis is nothing but a series of questions, and the first question is always the simplest: is the new player good? Overall, is the new player mediocre, average, good, or great? From there, over time, we start to get a little more detailed. You begin with finding out whether a player is good. Then you can start to understand how a player is good. Within the majors, there are plenty of good players, but they all achieve that level in their own particular ways, and it’s that variety that helps to keep this analysis fresh.

It didn’t take long to answer the first question about Masahiro Tanaka. Yeah, he’s good. He’s real good, as a matter of fact, and he’s one of the players most responsible for keeping the Yankees somewhere within the race. How does Tanaka succeed? Well, we all saw the splitter coming, and, yep, he throws a dynamite splitter, and with his command and unhittability, it’s hard to imagine Tanaka not being successful. By this point we know a lot about the Yankees’ new ace, but we are still filling in details. And here’s another one: Tanaka bears down with runners in scoring position. When situations are at their most dangerous, Tanaka has responded, in an interesting fashion.

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The Yankees just pulled a rare feat by trading Vidal Nuno to the Diamondbacks for Brandon McCarthy. Only once in the last five years has a team traded for a pitcher whose results were so out of whack with their process and peripherals. Of course, that was when the Dodgers traded a player to be named later to the Phillies for Joe Blanton in 2012, but the Yankees have a few reasons to believe that this will turn out better for them than that trade did for the Dodgers.

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