After a couple of years of intense debate, the 2014 AL MVP race looks like it’s not going to be much of a race at all. Mike Trout is unquestionably the best player in the league, is in the midst of a typically awesome Mike Trout season, and his team is basically guaranteed a postseason berth this year. Miguel Cabrera, while still a pretty great hitter, isn’t really in the picture this year, and the rest of the would-be contenders don’t really stack up against Trout, even by traditional voting standards.

Jose Abreu has the offensive numbers, but his team is bad, and the BBWAA just spent two years telling everyone that great seasons on non-winning teams aren’t to be rewarded with MVP trophies. If they give the award to Abreu over Trout this year, they might as well have a public bonfire for the remains of their credibility.

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A few months ago, we announced that we were proud to be partnering with the guys who put together the annual Saber Seminar in Boston, and as always, the event ended up selling out. With a line-up that includes Ben Cherington, Jeff Luhnow, John Farrell, and a long list of some of the smartest people involved with baseball, that wasn’t a big surprise. However, the demand for tickets was so high that the event has actually had to change buildings, and the move has allowed them to free up a few more tickets for those who procrastinated and missed out.

So, here’s the deal; in a week and a half, a couple hundred devoted baseball nerds will be descending upon Boston for a weekend of insightful talks, entertaining conversations, and general enjoyment of the game. I’ll be there — along with Tony Blengino, Paul Swydan, and David Appelman — representing FanGraphs, and it’s always one of my favorite weekends of the year. If you are going to be in Boston on August 16th and 17th, you should absolutely come to the event.

Tickets, which gets you into both days, are $140, and 100% of the proceeds go to The Jimmy Fund. The entire event is fantastic, and it raises money for cancer research, which makes it about as easy an organization to support as there is.

And don’t forget that we’re hosting a big get together the night before, so if you’re more interested in the drinking and hanging out part of things, you can come do that on Friday night, August 15th as well. The whole weekend is a lot of fun, and you should come.

While it’s really only fair to base one’s assessment of a trade on the information available at the time of said trade, that doesn’t preclude one from also exhibiting some interest in how the various traded parties end up performing with their new respective clubs.

What follows are two links designed to monitor that kind of performance — each to a leaderboard featuring players traded both (a) during the month of July and (b) to a contending club, where contending is defined, in this case, as a club that possessed better than 10% odds of qualifying for the divisional series as of July 31st.

Here are the relevant links: Traded Batters / Traded Pitchers.

Please note that:

• Leaderboards are set to the “August” split; and
• It’s entirely possible that the author has omitted a name or two, nor should readers hesitate to leave a comment to that effect; and
• Through Sunday, at least, Justin Masterson has recorded the highest park-adjusted batting line (tied with Jonny Gomes) of all players traded to a contending team.

CK One is a unisex fragrance released originally by Calvin Klein in 1994 and worn around that same time by an awkward, teenaged version of the present author with a view towards attracting the attention of less awkward, but equally teenaged, young women.

Under different, but similarly embarrassing, circumstances is how that same author has decided to utilize CK One today — not the actual fragrance itself, but at least the brand name, as a succinct means by which to identify publicly which of two pitchers, Clayton Kershaw and Corey Kluber, produced the better figures in July. Because their initials are C and K, is why. And then the one indicates which of them was the best pitcher with C and K for initials.

These painful explications aside, here are those same pitchers’ respective totals and rates from the past month:

The exact same strikeout and walk rates, is what Kershaw and Kluber produced last month — plus a collection of other, very similar figures, as well. Even as Kershaw finds himself in the midst of a historically great season, the right-handed Kluber — commonly referred to as the People’s Champion — matched the Dodgers lefty in all the most relevant categories. Which, if I’m being honest, to write that last sentence is why I’ve bothered to write every other sentence in this post. That having been accomplished, then, this addition to InstaGraphs is complete.

Yesterday, FanGraphs set some traffic records that we might not break for a very long time. It turns out that having like 15 trades go down in the span of six hours is good business for a site that specializes in transaction analysis. Who knew, right?

But maybe the most fun thing wasn’t that David Price and Jon Lester generated a lot of interest, because that was always going to happen, but that the activity allowed a guy like Sam Fuld to take the spotlight for a little while. How much did people care about Sam Fuld yesterday compared to prior days? Well, here’s a graph of the page views for his player page this year.

Sam Fuld, this is what it looks like to be internet famous for a day.

For readers who prefer context-dependent statistics, there aren’t many better options than RE24. Despite the statistic’s popularity, our explanation of the statistic was previously housed in a few separate blog posts rather than one entry in the FanGraphs Library. Today, that changes with the newly minted entry for RE24.

RE24 is based on run expectancy and the 24 base-outs states and tells you how many runs above or below average a player has been relative to the situations in which they have been placed. You can head over to the Library for a full breakdown, but feel free to post questions in the comment section of this post or contact me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44 for any related or unrelated questions about RE24, FanGraphs, or advanced statistics. Also, be sure to check the Library for updates and blog posts about the site and our data.

For much of today, it seemed like the Red Sox were going to be the only active American League East team, but then the Orioles and Yankees got in on the act (you can read all of our trade deadline analysis here). For the Yankees part, they acquired Stephen Drew and Martin Prado. Both could be important to the team, but Prado’s acquisition may affect the 2015 Yankees as well, which makes it a little more interesting.

Of course, the most interesting part of this deal is which Martin Prado are the Yankees getting? There’s a big difference between the .345 wOBA version of Prado and the current .305 wOBA incarnation. Either way, they are unlikely to miss prospect Peter O’Brien, who despite hitting some impressive home runs, was unlikely to find much time behind the plate for the Yankees — if he can even remain behind the plate. O’Brien has played some first base and right field this year, and it’s unclear exactly where he will fit with the Dbacks, if and when he reaches the majors.

Getting back to Prado, both ZiPS and Steamer think that he’ll do better, and it’s possible that Prado’s performance was dragged down by the sinkhole that has been the Diamondbacks’ season. Assuming just for a moment that the change of scenery reinvigorates Prado, he should be able to help in a number of ways. For starters, he is going to right field, which will mercifully push Ichiro Suzuki and his sub-replacement-ness back to the bench. But Prado is probably going to play all over. He’s going to help out in left field on occasion, and at third base as well. Maybe even a little at first base.

The key question, however, is how much time he sees at second base. Carlos Beltran may be ready to resume some work in right field soon, and when he is, there will be an opportunity created to move Derek Jeter to designated hitter — Beltran in right, Prado at second, Drew at short, and the Captain at DH. At this stage, Jeter is never going to play another defensive position, but he has started at DH four times this year, and adding Prado and Drew will give them the flexibility to rest Jeter’s legs more frequently down the stretch without sacrificing offense the way they would have been by starting Brendan Ryan at short.

Finally, there is the consideration beyond this year. When the team traded for Chase Headley, general manager Brian Cashman hedged on whether or not he would be in their 2015 plans, but between Prado being under contract and Alex Rodriguez returning, it would seem that the Yankees now have little to no motivation to retain Headley.

Neither Prado nor Drew is going to make the Yankees a title contender, but they are better than the players they replaced, they help push Ichiro to the bench, and might be able to buy Jeter some easier nights. That’s not a bad bit of work considering all they sacrificed was one fringe prospect, and it should keep the Yankees viable in the AL East for the rest of the way.

Earlier today, the Cleveland Americans received infield prospect Zach Walters from the Washington Nationals in exchange for Asdrubal Cabrera. Less early today, my amusingly coiffed colleague Eno Sarris considered Walters’ possible future as a major-leaguer.

In Sarris’s piece, he cites work by Chris St. John which suggests that players who’ve recorded similar walk and strikeout rates as Walters at Triple-A — that those players have failed to make any sort of positive impact at the major-league level about 88% of the time. That’s a reasonable framework by which to evaluate Walters, and a not particularly optimistic conclusion. As Sarris concedes, however, St. John’s work is position agnostic. Moreover, one notes that it ignores the possible influence of power numbers. Indeed, it appears to be the case that Walters’ positional value and his home-run rate are likely to be his primary sources of value.

With a view towards attempting to better understand how Walters might perform at the major-league level, I’ve produced five different lines below, each of which represents a different version of Zach Walters prorated over a full season’s worth of plate appearances.

Line (1) is an average non-pitching major-league batter in the year 2014. This is what a Marcel-type projection system might produce for Walters. Line (2) is Walters’ current Steamer projection just prorated to 550 plate appearances. Steamer doesn’t care for Walters’ defense. Consider: for a shortstop to produce an overall defensive mark of -4 runs, he’d need to record a single-season UZR of something like -11 or -12 runs. Line (3) is Walters’ current major-league line — through just 52 plate appearances — prorated to a full season. Walters has managed to hit three home runs on the 31 occasions he hasn’t either walked or struck out — about three times the normal major-league rate. Line (4) is a verbatim rendering of Walters’ Triple-A line this year — with baserunning estimated from speed score and defense based entirely on positional adjustment. Line (5) is the least important of all the above insofar as it represents a sort of “scouting” projection by the author. Walters will strike out at a rate greater than average, is the suggestion, and will walk at a rate below average. But both his power and defensive skills are considerable enough in concert — is my own half-educated opinion — so as to produce an average major-leaguer.

Those who remain curious about Walters might derive some pleasure from his appearance on FanGraphs Audio last August.

Andrew Miller has been phenomenal for Boston this season. He has struck out over 40 percent of the batters he has faced, and has been death against both lefties (0.65 FIP, .194 wOBA allowed) and righties (2.41 FIP, .243 wOBA allowed). He has been one of the best relievers in baseball this year — his WAR is 11th-highest among qualified relievers, and his 43 FIP- is fifth-best — and he will surely help the Orioles bullpen down the stretch. But he is also a free agent at the end of the season, which could make the price paid for him — reportedly pitching prospect Eduardo Rodriguez — steep.

Let’s start with Baltimore. As a unit, their bullpen FIP- is 16th-best in baseball as we sit here right now. Over the past 30 days though, it has been considerably better — their 64 FIP- in this most recent period ranks second-best in baseball. Between Zach Britton, Brian Matusz, Tommy Hunter and Darren O’Day, the team has four relievers that they can trust in high-leverage situations. And Ryan Webb and Brad Brach have flashed potential at times as well, though neither gets the strikeouts requisite for being elite in a bullpen role.

In adding Miller to this group, but not adding a starting pitcher, it seems as though the Orioles didn’t like the options available to them in the starting pitching market, or the prices needed to acquire one of the options that they did desire. It would seem that their strategy then is to pray their starting pitching — which by FIP- has been the worst in the majors this season — can keep them in the game through five or six innings, and then turn the ball over to their bullpen. It’s not the prettiest of strategies, but it’s one that helped them get to the brink of the American League Championship Series in 2012.

This time though, they may have dealt away a bit more of their future than they would have preferred. Just last December, the Orioles were saying that they’d have to be blown away to deal Rodriguez, as the Venezuelan native reached Double-A last season at age 20. In 59.2 innings there, he struck out 23.4% of the batters he faced, and caught the attention of the prospect world. Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus and MLB.com all ranked him in the 60s in their top 100 prospect lists this year. At ESPN, Keith Law ranked him 43rd, and FanGraphs’ Marc Hulet ranked him 36th. Law had ranked him 100th the year before as well, so this didn’t just come out of nowhere.

Rodriguez missed some time this year thanks to a knee injury, and he has been inconsistent since returning, but the potential was there not even six months ago, and likely hasn’t vanished.

The Sox turning one-third of a season from a relief pitcher who wasn’t going to help much on a last place team into a top-60 prospect is a pretty nice return, but Miller has been mighty impressive this season, and if the Orioles do reach the postseason, he will be an important weapon for them in October.

At the beginning of the year, the Nationals’ infield might have seemed a strength. Ryan Zimmerman, Ian Desmond, Anthony Rendon and Adam LaRoche, with Danny Espinosa in reserve? Especially if you told then’s version of yourself that LaRoche would resurge and Rendon would surge, you’d be happy with what you had.

Even with the injury to Zimmerman, you could argue that that a team with a 93% chance of making the playoffs might be fine with their current infield. Sure, Espinosa is hovering too close to replacement level for comfort, but they could win enough games with him in there to make the postseason, and Zimmerman might be healthy by then.

Then again, winning the division and making the postseason are two different things. This team needs to keep pace with the Braves. And so they traded Zach Walters for Asdrubal Cabrera.

And the upgrade over Danny Espinosa is undebatable. Though Espinosa has recovered some of his value from his nadir, and is showing some power and speed, there are two facets of his game that have not recovered. His league-average or better walk rate has not returned (5.6% BB%), and his glove is not rated well this year (-1.1 UZR). Cabrera should be able to match that defense with the shift from short, and his offense is just about league average these days.

They’re trading a potential shortstop for a couple months of a second baseman. You can’t debate that. Even as he’s moved on to other positions, Zach Walters played twice as many games at short than any other.

But even while you acknowledge the risk, you can point to the risk inherent in Walters. Not only as a prospect, but as a prospect with a low walk rate and a high strikeout rate. Prospects with that sort of a profile at 24 years old in Triple-A had an 88% bust rate according to Chris St. John’s work.

So, yeah, they took a chance. A chance that has about 12% likelihood of burning them.