The Royals have struck again. First, they pried Johnny Cueto from the Reds for young arms Brandon Finnegan, John Lamb and Cody Reed. Now they’ve landed Ben Zobrist from the Athletics for two more pitching prospects — Sean Manaea and Aaron Brooks. Awful lot of pitching prospects changing hands these days. Anyway, here’s what the stats say about the young arms headed to Oakland.

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Yesterday, the Angels picked up Shane Victorino to serve as the right-handed portion of an LF platoon, presumably spelling Matt Joyce against left-handers. Today, though, the team imported two left-handed part-time outfielders, making Joyce particularly redundant. In a pair of moves reported at virtually the same time, the Angels have acquired David Murphy from the Indians and David DeJesus from the Rays.

Murphy and DeJesus are basically the same player; both are low-strikeout, gap-power types that provide roughly league average offense and are best used in part-time roles. For his career, Murphy has hit .274/.335/.433, while DeJesus is at .276/.351/.415. DeJesus is the better defender, so I’d guess that he’ll end up splitting left field with Victorino, while Murphy will serve as the strong side of the Angels new DH platoon, sharing time with C.J. Cron.

Certainly, neither of these acquisitions are major upgrades, but simply having decent performances from LF/DH will be big steps up from what the Angels have gotten from those positions this year. With the Angels making a strong run towards a playoff appearance, these marginal gains could end up having an impact in October.

To acquire the pair of platoon outfielders, they sent Eric Stamets to the Indians and Eduar Lopez to the Rays. Neither one was included in Kiley McDaniels write-up of the Angels top 19 prospects, though Stamet did warrant a comment in the others-of-note section. Here’s what Kiley wrote about him in the spring:

SS Eric Stamets – He’s an easy plus defender and runner and he’ll be in Triple-A next year, but the bat is light and there’s very little power, so the upside is utility guy and he may be more of an emergency, glove-first type.

Lopez is a 20 year old who hasn’t made it out of rookie ball yet, and has put up a 5.03 FIP in 33 innings this year. Suffice it to say that he wasn’t likely to appear on any top prospect lists next year either.

So the Angels basically got two decent part-time big leaguers for nothing of real value. These aren’t the sexiest additions of the week, but they should improve an Angels team that needed these upgrades, and they come at essentially no cost.

With the acquisition of Johnny Cueto over the weekend, the Royals got themselves a legitimate #1 starter for the postseason. Today, they’ve reportedly turned their attention to upgrading at second base.

Source: #Royals getting #Athletics’ Zobrist.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 28, 2015

While Ben Zobrist isn’t the defensive asset he was earlier in his career, he remains one of the best hitting middle infielders in baseball, running a 125 wRC+ while posting the lowest strikeout rate of his career. Zobrist might be slowing down in the field, but there was no better way for the Royals to upgrade their offense than by swapping Zobrist in for Omar Infante.

Over the rest of the season, Zobrist projects for about a +1.5 WAR, while the Royals were projected to get just +0.3 WAR out of some combination of Infante, Christian Colon, and Dustin Coleman. Zobrist might spend some time in the outfield as well, but he should add something like one expected win to the Royals ledger over the remainder of the regular season.

Of course, the Royals already have the AL Central all but won, so the marginal value of that win isn’t particularly high. Like Cueto, Zobrist was acquired for what he can do in the postseason, and the team will certainly be significantly stronger with his presence in the line-up instead of Infante.

No precise word on the return yet, but Jeff Passan notes that the A’s are getting “two pitchers”. We’ll have a full post on the trade when the details are known.

For the second time in a span of four days, the Mets have dipped into their surplus of young pitching talent to strengthen their 2015 roster. Over the weekend, they dealt two unremarkable pitching prospects — Rob Whalen and John Gant — to add Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson to their sputtering offense. Last night, they cut a deal with the Athletics for Tyler Clippard. In return, they coughed up another fringy arm in Casey Meisner.

Kiley McDaniel saw the 6-foot-7 righty in person over the weekend and provided a nice little write up (with video!) in a post last night. He concluded that Meisner’s fastball-curveball combination made him a potential league-average (#4) starter. That’s not particularly sexy, but it would be a fine return for 2-3 months of a reliever.

Meisner’s stat line isn’t quite as optimistic. Meisner split the 2015 season between Low-A and High-A, where he’s pitched to a sparkling 2.35 ERA as a 20-year-old. Sounds great, right? Not so fast. His .265 BABIP disguises his unremarkable 3.98 FIP. His 20% strikeout rate and 7% walk rate, meanwhile, are merely average.

As a result, KATOH forecasts Meisner for just 1.6 WAR through age-28, which is actually a notch down from his 2.2 mark following his performance in the New York-Penn League last season. The statistical comps paint a similarly dismal picture.

*Pitchers who have yet to play their age-28 seasons.

Meisner appears to be one of those pitchers whose performance lags behind his stuff. He’s 6-foot-7 and throws a mid-90s fastball, so the ingredients for success are certainly there. So far, however, he hasn’t performed in a way that suggests he has much of a big-league future. At age-20, though, he still has plenty of time to figure things out.

We are in the thick of Trade Deadline Week, and it is exciting. If you are like me, you have activated push notifications on your phone for trade-rumor tweets. There are a lot of moves made this week, specifically on July 31, the non-waiver trade deadline. While we are bogged down by the details and the rumors, I want to present the frequency of trades throughout the year.

Before diving into the graph, let’s look at a little history. Trades were rather restrictive until 1986 when the rules changed to establish the current trade deadline. The trade deadline didn’t have activity level we have come to expect until the 1990s. In 1994-1995, there was a players’ strike that halted play and subsequently many baseball personnel transactions, so I chose 1996 as the starting point for the data set — that is, the first full year of baseball after the strike. All of the trade data is from Pro Sports Transactions. This data set contains the full spectrum of trades, not just major trades. This also includes trades for international signing-bonus slots.

July 31 has an average of 8.3 trades with an exponentially growing lead up to the deadline. I’ve annotated a few time frames within which there are lot of different trades: Spring Training, the non-waiver trade deadline, the postseason roster deadline and the winter meetings.

This is a more detailed version of the graph above, focused on July and August exclusively. The light blue highlights indicate an average greater than one trade per day. July 2 sees a bump in trades, mainly due to international-prospect signings. The August 31 roster deadline has a significant bump, but it has a quarter of the number of trades compared to July 31.

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The team that’s scored the most runs in baseball this year just made their offense better by trading Jose Reyes and minor leaguers to the Rockies for Troy Tulowitzki. Ken Rosenthal broke the news, but the full details are not yet available.

Because of the fit, there will be the inevitable questions about further moves — Toronto had been rumored in on most pitchers, and scores more than a half run more than the second-best offense in baseball, and Reyes now seems a poor fit on a rebuilding squad in Colorado — but a second move isn’t required to like this for the Blue Jays.

The game is about getting better, on the run scoring or run prevention side. And if the Jays score six runs a game, they should win more than if they score five and a half. Given that the difference between the yearly outlay for Reyes actually trumps Tulowitzki’s, this deal is even budget neutral. Maybe that’s why Dave Cameron thought it up a while back when he dreamt up some Tulowitzki trades:

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Casey Meisner, RHP, Oakland A’s

Meisner is listed at 6-foot-7 and 190 pounds, and that’s usually the first thing mentioned in any report about him. His long limbs make him projectable so you can dream on the average stuff improving and it gives him good plane to the plate but it also makes it more difficult for him to repeat his delivery and hit his spots.

I saw Meisner pitch yesterday and these same positives were still there, similar to two summers ago when the Mets took him in the third round out of a Texas high school. He had trouble keeping the ball down, particularly his changeup, which flashed average but was below average and down the middle many times in the outing. He sat 90-93 mph and hit 94 with occasional two-seam life and also flashed a hard overhand curve that was average to slightly above at its best, with good 11-to-5 shape, but often soft spin.

You can easily imagine the fastball and curveball becoming above average if there’s a velo bump (Pirates’ top prospect RHP Tyler Glasnow looked kinda like this when he was 18-19, so that’s a best case scenario) and then you’re looking at a league average (#4) starter or better. With just incremental adjustments the next few years, Meisner is an inventory arm that could be a back-end starter, but he’s only 20, so the chance for Oakland winning a projection gamble and getting a mid-rotation guy is still alive.

I had Meisner in the middle of the 40 FV group for the Mets list last year, ranking 22nd, and he’ll be there, if not near the top of the 40 FV group, at least somewhere on the A’s list this offseason.

Though the Mets need a bat most of all, their acquisition of Tyler Clippard makes good sense. By fielding-independent numbers, their bullpen has been middle-of-the-road so far this year, and the returns of Jenrry Mejia and Bobby Parnell might not be enough to push this bullpen into a strength as the end of the season approaches. Mejia’s post-season ban also creates a need, should they win the wild card and play extra baseball.

The prospect going back to the Athletics may not move the national needle much. 20-year-old Casey Meisner has spent the last 100+ innings striking out fewer than a batter per inning, and our own Kiley McDaniel wasn’t effusive in praise when he ranked Meisner the 22nd-best prospect in the Mets organization:
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In an attempt to strengthen their under-achieving lineup, the Mets swung a deal for infielders Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson from the Atlanta Braves on Friday evening. In exchange for the infielders’ services, the Mets sent right-handers Rob Whalen and John Gant to the Braves.

Neither of these arms are highly touted prospects. Kiley McDaniel gave Whalen a FV of 40 — essentially a middle reliever — on his offseason Mets writeup, while Gant didn’t even merit a mention. However, both of these pitchers have pitched fairly well in the minors this year.

Whalen, who’s 21, has spent all of 2015 as a starter for High-A Port St. Lucie. He’s put up a 3.36 ERA and 3.85 FIP in 83 innings. That’s not a bad showing for a 21-year-old, but his 17% strikeout rate leaves a little to be desired. Based on his 2015 numbers, KATOH forecasts Whalen for a meager 0.9 WAR through age-28 — down from 1.4 WAR in the preseason.

Gant has been slightly more impressive this year between High-A and Double-A. The 22-year-old opened the year at the former location, where he dominated over six starts. He struck out 30% of the batters he faced, and walked just 6%, on his way to a 1.79 ERA and 2.91 FIP.

Gant’s been much less dominant following a May promotion to Double-A. His strikeout rate’s cratered to 16%, while his walk rate has ballooned to 10%. Taking these two partial seasons together, KATOH forecasts him for 2.7 WAR through age-28, which would have put him 195th on KATOH’s preseason list. KATOH projected him for 1.7 WAR after the 2014 season.

Although Gant has the better numbers, both he and Whalen are in the same boat as prospects. Both were late-round draft picks — taken in the 12th and 21st round, respectively — and are fringy prospects at best. Their minor-league performances suggest they might be of some use to the Braves in a year or two, perhaps as middle relievers, but even that’s not guaranteed.