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.

Though it wasn’t very flashy, the Brewers quietly made a deadline trade with the Diamondbacks, dealing a couple minor leaguers for a guy with a negative WAR. Going to Arizona: Mitchell Haniger and Anthony Banda. Haniger is the better prospect of the two, although he’s got a low ceiling and an unspectacular 2014 campaign under his belt. Going to Milwaukee: Gerardo Parra, who joins an outfield that already includes Carlos Gomez, Ryan Braun, and Khris Davis. Parra’s WAR stands at -0.3.

But, a year ago, it was 4.6, tied for 26th in all of baseball. With that kind of massive decline, you assume an offensive dropoff, and, sure enough, Parra’s wRC+ has dipped. But his modest skills are intact, and the biggest reason for the statistical dip is on the defensive side. The numbers think that, this year, Parra’s been a roughly average defensive outfielder. Last year he was fourth in baseball in overall Defense rating, right by the spectacular Gomez. Beyond that, Parra’s played all over, and here are his league rankings between 2009 – 2013 (1000-inning minimum):

Left field: 8th out of 60 in UZR/150
Center field: 20th out of 64
Right field: 1st out of 47

There’s a good bit of evidence that Parra is one of baseball’s better and more rangey outfielders. He hasn’t been hurt in 2014, and his own manager thinks he’s been fine. The Brewers are assuming that Parra is better than his 2014 statistics, and you can’t really blame them:

Assuming Parra’s still a good defensive outfielder, then he has value, and he improves a Brewers team that’s still fighting for its life. At the plate, he’s weakest against lefties, but as it works out, Parra’s left-handed and Davis is right-handed so we could have the makings here of something of a platoon. At least, Parra’s a fourth outfielder and defensive replacement, and few teams have a guy with such a great standout skill available on the bench. It’s a somewhat low-impact move for the Brewers, but Parra’s better than Logan Schafer, and this raises the team’s floor. Plus, if they’re extra daring, they can control Parra for 2015 as well. So far the Cardinals have made the NL Central splashes, but the Brewers paid relatively little for a guy who, several months ago, would’ve cost an upper-level prospect. It was a good time to strike.

The Mariners are one of the pseudo-contenders who are are hanging around the second wild card chase, leaving them in the somewhat awkward position of wanting to upgrade but not being in a position where a significant move makes good sense. We currently estimate their playoff odds at 18%, about the same as the Indians, and that’s entirely tied to making the Wild Card game, so their chances of reaching the division series are a little less than half of that. But, at 55-52, they weren’t going to entirely stand still, so the task for the day was to find a player who could make them better without costing them something that they’ll miss in the future.

Enter Chris Denorfia. He just turned 34 a few weeks ago, will be a free agent at year’s end, and is hitting .242/.293/.319 for the Padres. That’s the kind of trifecta that will basically guarantee a low acquisition cost, and sure enough, the Mariners gave up little to get him, sending Abraham Almonte and Stephen Kohlscheen, who you have never heard of and probably will never hear of again.

In Denorfia, the Mariners get a guy who has a history of hitting left-handed pitching well and playing solid defense, though the hitting part hasn’t really happened this year. Still, a longer view of his talent level suggests he should be something like an average hitter, or maybe a tick below. Toss in the defense and some baserunning value, and Denorfia is a nifty little part-time outfielder. Not a guy you want in the line-up everyday, but a useful role player.

For the Mariners, though, that’s a massive improvement, considering that they have been using Endy Chavez as their starting right fielder. Since the start of the 2012 season, covering his last 617 plate appearances Chavez has been worth -2.3 WAR. If ever there was addition by subtraction, it is in replacing Chavez with an actual Major League player.

This move probably won’t help the Mariners enough to make a difference down the stretch, but it makes them better, and it makes them better at basically no cost. This is exactly the kind of move a team with a one-in-five chance of winning the second Wild Card should be making.

Since attempting (somewhat haphazardly) to identify the top performances of the Futures Game by way of game scores, I’ve been experimenting both with a pitcher and also batter version of same that might weight the relevant inputs in a manner that reflects the rate at which those various inputs become reliable.

Because it’s likely flawed — and also because the prospect of doing so is tedious — I won’t provide a particularly detailed explanation of my own methodology here. But what I’ve got seems to produce reasonable enough results, which is really my only concern.

What I did was to start with the FIP-based pitcher game score proposed by Tango Tiger in these same pages a few years ago — the formula for which starts at 40 (as opposed to 50) so as to reflect the idea of replacement level. What I did then was to weight strikeouts three time more heavily than in the normal FIP formula (because it becomes strikeout rate becomes reliable three times more quickly than home-run rate) and walks about a third more heavily. Hits of any sort are excluded from consideration, as BABIP requires far too large a sample to integrate meaningfully with the other three variables. Multiplying plate appearances by 3 centers the equation.

Below is the resulting equation:

Applying the formula to an “average” game — that is, league-average rates prorated to 4.5 plate appearances — results in a game score of 51. A player going 4-for-4 with four home runs produces a score of 104. To produce a 0, a player would need to strike out in about 13 of 13 plate appearances — which, that’s an unlikely result. Away from the margins, however, the scores are reasonable.

Here, for example, are yesterday’s 10-best players:

And 10 worst:

One of the nice things about having InstaGraphs is that there are some transactions that are maybe worth mentioning in passing, but probably aren’t worth full length write-ups. Now that we have a section dedicated to shorter, quick-hit type pieces, we can justify writing about things like the Cubs trading for Felix Doubront.

On the one hand, there are some things to like about Felix Doubront. He’s 26, left-handed, and has a career FIP- and xFIP- of 103, which are essentially league average for a starting pitcher. He’s also under team control through 2017, so unlike a lot of guys getting moved today, he’s not going to be a free agent for a while.

Of course, there are a lot of things to not like about Doubront as well. His career ERA- is 116, as he’s never been able to get his results to match his peripherals. And even those underlying numbers have gone the wrong way this year, as both his K% and GB% have gotten much worse. His 2014 xFIP- is 127, so for the last 60 innings or so, Doubront has been basically a replacement level arm. And while he’s under control for three more years, those are his arbitration years, so he’s going to cost some really money, especially if the Red Sox figure out how to him.

In some ways, Doubront is not that different from what Jake Arrieta was when the Cubs got him from the Orioles last year. The Cubs struck gold with Arrieta, and it’s understandable that they’d want to take another shot at grabbing a young pitcher from the scrap heap and seeing if they can turn him into something useful.

It probably doesn’t hurt that Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer, and Jason McLeod were all part of the Red Sox when Doubront was acquired and developed, so they all saw him as the promising young pitcher he once looked like, rather than the going-the-wrong-way guy headed for a non-tender this off-season.

Not every Jake Arrieta works out, though, and Doubront probably won’t. For every 10 of these guys you throw at a wall, maybe one or two stick. But if you’re the Cubs, there’s little harm in trying.

With the trade deadline 48 hours away, the Phillies have apparently made Cole Hamels available in trade talks. This is good news for Phillies fans, as Hamels will likely never have more value than he does right now. However, if Bob Nightengale’s sources are correct, the Phillies asking price for Hamels is insane.

Yet, according to one-ranking official directly involved with the talks, the Los Angeles Dodgers recently asked for Hamels. They were told the price would be three of their top prospects – center fielder Joc Pederson, shortstop Corey Seager and left-handed pitcher Julio Urias.

On their midseason Top 50, Baseball America ranked Urias as the #13 prospect in baseball, with Seager at #16 and Pederson at #18. MLB.com had them in the same basic area, with Seager at #17, Urias at #18, and Pederson at #19. Here, Marc Hulet had Seager at #6, Pederson at #18, and Urias as having “just missed” the top 25.

Needless to say, the consensus is that these are three of the ~20 or so best prospects in baseball. As Jeff Sullivan wrote yesterday, the more recent estimates of the value of prospects in this range is something like $30 to $40 million. Each. In other words, if all three were made free agents tomorrow, the estimates are that teams would spend something in that range to sign those guys, and when you look at what the unrestricted international free agents have signed for lately — $42 million for Yasiel Puig and Hyun-Jin Ryu, $68 million for Jose Abreu, $30 million for Aroldis Chapman — there’s plenty of evidence to support the claims, and they might even be on the low side.

But, just for fun, let’s say that each of the Dodgers’ prospects is worth something like $30 million. To receive all three, the Phillies would have to give up about $90 million in surplus value. As I noted in last week’s piece, Hamels has about $5 million in surplus value in his future contract, not counting the remainder of his 2014 production. Even if you get very aggressive with the value of a win down the stretch, you probably can’t justify more than $15 or $20 million in 2014 value for Hamels.

But, hey, let’s give him $20 million in surplus value for the rest of the year, just for fun. Wins are insanely valuable to contenders right now, and teams pay premiums to add pitching this time of year. And a team acquiring him should expect to get to the postseason, so they’re not just paying for the 11 or 12 regular season starts he has left, but that additional postseason boost as well.

But even with that accounted for, Hamels total surplus value still doesn’t even match up to the conservative estimate of the surplus value of one of the three Dodgers prospects.

To ask for all three and not think they are going to get laughed at, the Phillies would have to be selling a genetic clone of Mike Trout or something. The Phillies would do well to land one top 20 prospect for Hamels. Demanding three of them is just being ridiculous.