They apparently got close last night before a physical issue with a prospect derailed the deal, but after a morning of working through things, it appears the Royals are going to acquire Johnny Cueto from the Reds.

Source: #Royals getting Cueto.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 26, 2015

I made the case for the Royals to acquire Cueto last week, and it’s a fit that seemed to make the most sense of any out there. The Royals were throwing out replacement level starters on a regular basis and lacked anyone who you’d want to start in Game 1 of a playoff series, so Cueto not only upgrades their chances of winning the division — which were already quite high — but gives them a guy who can keep their bullpen from getting overworked early in the postseason.

The price hasn’t been announced yet, but the Royals have a lot of high upside/high risk prospects, so the Reds probably are getting some guys with real potential, but they may have to wait a while to see the rewards at the big league level. Raul Mondesi Jr would make a lot of sense as the center piece, but that’s just my speculation. We’ll have more analysis later when the whole deal is announced.

Earlier today, Dave wrote about how we might be in a buyer’s market now. He was referring mostly to starting pitchers, but might that apply to relievers as well? The only reliever we seem to be getting news about is Jonathan Papelbon, and the news is that his market seems to be drying up. And with the Red Sox and Rays now looking to trade relievers, there may be more guys in play than previously thought. Either way, the Cardinals, true to their form, weren’t waiting around for the market to heat up. They have acquired the first relief pitcher of the trade deadline season, and didn’t pay much for it. Via Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald:

#marlins to receive double A RHP Kyle Barraclough from cardinals for Steve Cishek

— clarkspencer (@clarkspencer) July 24, 2015

Steve Cishek is an interesting get. Entering the year, he was one of the better relievers in the league. From his full season debut in 2011 through the end of 2014, he had the 19th-best FIP- among qualified relievers, and three of the guys on the list ahead of him are out of baseball now. Last season, he whiffed a career best 30.6% of the batters he faced. He rode his slider — which he didn’t learn until 2009 — into prominence, and last year leaned on it more than ever.

This year, he hasn’t been as effective. Or, he wasn’t as effective in the season’s first two months. At the end of May, he had a 6.98 ERA, 4.20 FIP and 4.37 xFIP, and he had struck out 17 batters against 10 walks in 19.1 innings. He finished the month by taking the collar in a loss to the Mets, and that was the final indignity that got him sent packing.

After six scoreless, walk-free innings in Double-A, he was called back up, and has been much better since — a 0.71 ERA, 2.27 FIP and 3.49 xFIP in 12.2 innings. He has struck out 11 and walked just 4 since being recalled. And those strikeout numbers may come up in the near future, as Cishek’s contact percentage hasn’t changed since 2012. While his strikeout percentage last year may have been on the high end of the spectrum, this year’s 19.4% K% would seem to be on the far low end.

With the positive recent results and the harbinger of better results in the future, there is a decent chance that Cishek’s early season troubles are behind him, and that he’ll be a vital member of the Cardinals bullpen moving forward. They don’t need him to be the closer, Trevor Rosenthal has that job covered. The Cardinals in fact already had a pretty strong bullpen. Kevin Siegrist and Seth Maness both have good SD-MD numbers as well, and overall the unit’s FIP- ranks 10th for the season, though it has been just 15th over the past 30 days. Add in Cishek and the rehabbing Jordan Walden, and there is quality depth there. And it didn’t cost St. Louis hardly anything.

A seventh round pick in 2012, Kyle Barraclough didn’t reach Double-A until his age-25 season this year, and in his first 24.2 innings there, he has walked 17.7 percent of the batters he has faced. He also walked a higher percentage of batters in his second turn at High-A than his first. He gets a decent amount of strikeouts, but he is not going to generate much excitement, and he represents another data point that the trade market thus far is favoring the buyers.

When examining the Rest of Season projections from either ZiPS or Steamer, one will notice in both systems that Giancarlo Stanton is expected to finish just short of the league lead in home runs. While this is a tremendous accomplishment on its own, Stanton’s projected presence near the top of the home-run charts looks like an even more tremendous feat considering that Stanton has already missed 22 games this season, and will be missing even more as he recovers from a fractured left wrist.

At first glance the two projection systems regard Stanton very differently: ZiPS projects Stanton to finish second in the league in home runs at 43 — a single dinger behind Mike Trout — and Steamer projects that Stanton will finish tied for sixth, at 36. Upon further inspection, both projection systems regard Stanton’s on-field skills very similarly: ZiPS is projecting a home run once every 13 PAs, and Steamer once every 12.67 PAs. (Stanton has deposited a souvenir in the bleachers once every 11.7 PAs so far this season.) The true difference is that ZiPS is more confident in Stanton’s continued health, projecting only nine missed games from Stanton for the rest of the season, while Steamer projects that Stanton will finish the season with about 100 fewer PAs, or I guess about 25 missed games on top of the ZiPS projection.

So I wondered: how often does a player reach the league lead of a cumulative counting stat while missing such a huge chunk of the season? It turns out that players who finish on the edge of qualification actually hit the top 10 in some category just about every year — except when it comes to total hits, and home runs.

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Back in spring training, I had a chance to talk hitting with Kyle Schwarber. As fate would have it, our conversation was brief. The Cubs’ clubhouse closed a few minutes after we began chatting, and I was airport-bound by the time it reopened.

In May, I arranged a follow-up phone interview while Schwarber was playing at Triple-A Iowa. We spoke for a little over five minutes, but fate once again intervened. Upon disconnecting, I discovered that the frayed cable – the one I should have replaced months earlier – leading from ear to Digital Voice Recorder had failed. Not a word spoken by Schwarber was audible on tape.

I opted not to call back and ask if he was amenable to a re-do. Rather than aplogetically impose, I decided to wait for my planned visit to Wrigley Field in late June, knowing there was a good chance he’d be called up by then. He was, but as luck would have it, three days before I arrived in Chicago, he was returned to Iowa.

The slugger is back with the big club, and given his offensive explosion, he’s likely to be sticking around this time. But even though I’ll be returning to Wrigley in a few weeks, I’m not going to tempt fate yet again. Here is what Schwarber had to say in Mesa: Read the rest of this entry »

Just to be clear, there are two separate positions here.

Position: Milwaukee Brewers Developer – Baseball Systems

Location: Milwaukee

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When we first picked Dan Warthen’s brain about his specific slider, Noah Syndergaard did say that he’d played around with the pitch, but only to improve a different pitch. “I played with it a little bit to pick up the RPMs on my curveball,” he said then. Yesterday, Syndergaard did more than play with it — he threw eight of them, making it the second time this year that he’s thrown the pitch that often.

It looked like this:

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Position: Atlanta Braves Baseball Operations Analyst

Location: Atlanta

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Last night, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale made some pretty big waves with his report that the Tigers are preparing to become sellers, making David Price and Yoenis Cespedes available to teams looking to upgrade their rosters for the stretch run.

It’s going to be awfully painful, and the Detroit Tigers sure hate to do this, but for the good of the organization, they simply have no choice.

The Tigers, barring a veto from owner Mike Ilitch, are going to surrender and be sellers within the next 10 days at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline.

For the first time since 2008, the Tigers have no choice but to inform teams that two of their marquee commodities will be dealt by the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline.

That’s some pretty strong language, and given that “they simply have no choice”, you’d think the Tigers were in the midst of a total meltdown, or had squandered any chance they had of reaching the postseason. But while Nightengale may be right in his reporting, his editorializing isn’t really all that rooted in factual basis. Consider, for instance this graph of the projected final standings in the American League, based on our depth charts forecasts.

The Royals, Yankees, and Angels have put themselves in strong positions to win their divisions, and the Astros remain the most likely Wild Card team, with a real shot at the AL West themselves. Those four teams are each more likely to make the postseason than not.

But look at the drop-off after Houston. The Blue Jays, Twins, Orioles, and Indians are in a virtual tie with the Tigers for fifth place, with none of them expected to finish with more than 82 wins. Someone will break out from the pack and likely win 85-87 games and capture that second Wild Card spot, but the Tigers are just as likely to be that team as any of the other four, and in no way are they in a position where 2015 is a total write-off. In fact, the Tigers have better odds now than the 1997 White Sox did when they initiated the infamous White Flag Trade.

The Tigers should probably be listening mode, as it’s possible a team will make them an offer that justifies giving up their estimated 26.5% playoff odds; if you can flip Price for a guy who can step right in to the big leagues and is under control for next year as well — similar to last year’s Jon Lester for Yoenis Cespedes trade — then it could be worth downgrading this year’s chances to upgrade next year’s shot. I wouldn’t say that the Tigers odds are so strong that they shouldn’t even consider moving Price or Cespedes.

But I just don’t see how we can look at the landscape in the American League and determine that the Tigers have to move Price and Cespedes for whatever they can get. The Tigers season is far from over, and there are plenty of reasons to keep this group together and try to make a run. If someone makes a crazy offer that you just can’t turn down, okay, but the Tigers shouldn’t be throwing away legitimate playoff odds just because they aren’t as good as they’re used to.

Update: Everything should currently be up and running!

Due to scheduled maintenance, FanGraphs will be unavailable tonight between 11:30pm and 2:30 am ET. We’ll try and get things back up and running as quickly as possible and hopefully won’t need the entire 3 hour window.

Before this season began, I wrote at The Hardball Times about the best modern triple-hitters (a.k.a. triplers), or the active players who have the best shot at challenging the post-war record, Roberto Clemente’s 161 career triples.

What I learned is: it’s basically impossible. (As is, arguably, the pursuit of just about any other counting-stat record.) In order to have a shot, the player must begin their major league career early as an everyday player, and average a triple once every 50-60 plate appearances throughout their twenties, followed by a graceful decline of a triple once every 60-70 plate appearances throughout their thirties. Read the rest of this entry »