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.

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.