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.

Last Friday night, Nelson Cruz faced off against Felix Hernandez, and in the second inning this happened to a baseball:

Perhaps you might prefer:

According to the ESPN Home Run Tracker, the dinger had an apex of 41 feet. Apex is defined as “the highest point reached by the ball in flight above field level.” By the numbers, Cruz’s homer stands as the lowest homer of the 2014 season, that wasn’t of the inside-the-park variety. The last time there was a lower home run: June 25, 2011, when Carlos Peguero hit a homer with a 39-foot apex. Also, on May 16 of that same year, Peguero hit another homer with a 39-foot apex.

Technically, according to his FanGraphs player page, Cruz this year has 29 homers and 131 fly balls. Hence, he has a HR/FB of 22.1%. But some home runs are different from others, and this was an absolute, hands-down line drive. The difference that makes with regard to our understanding of Cruz, Hernandez, and the sport: not anything at all. But, holy crap, Nelson Cruz.

Last year, then-Washington outfield prospect Billy Burns produced the most stolen-base runs among every minor-league player in the whole minor leagues — about 12 of them, it would appear, using the major-league linear-weight values for stolen bases and caught stealings*.

*Caughts stealing?

Now employed by the Oakland franchise — and, indeed, having been promoted to that organization’s parent club just yesterday — the 24-year-old Burns once again appears atop (or very nearly atop) the minor-league leaderboard for stolen-base runs.

Regard, the top-10 basestealers by that measure, through yesterday:

Notably, two other players appear here after having appeared among last year’s top-10 list, as well: both Terrance Gore and Jose Peraza — of Kansas City and Atlanta, respectively.

As for Burns himself, Oakland manager Bob Melvin has stated that he’ll likely start in center field against lefties — this, according to MLB.com Jane Lee.

Yesterday, I saw a nifty little tidbit in my Twitter timeline. It basically sums up the dominance of Clayton Kershaw about as well as any statistic I can think of.

Clayton Kershaw has a higher OBP than he has allowed. Let that sink in for a minute. #Dodgers #LAD

— Jonathan C. Mitchell (@FigureFilbert) July 27, 2014

It’s true. Opponents are hitting .189/.220/.288 against Kershaw this year. Kershaw is hitting .194/.237/.194 when he steps up to the plate to do the thing he’s not paid to do. Yes, he gives up a few more extra base hits than he hits himself, but just in terms of getting hits or out avoidance, opposing hitters against Kershaw have been worse than Kershaw against opposing pitchers.

And this is actually a bad year for Kershaw at the plate. Over the last four years, spanning 295 plate appearances, he has hit .202/.245/.231. Over those same four years, opponents have hit .202/.252/.298 against Kershaw.

For four years, Kershaw has posted the same batting average and on base percentage as he’s allowed actual professional hitters to put up against him. Yeah. This guy is ridiculous.

With a view towards collecting the sort of hot internet clicks that’ll keep him employed into the near future, the author has purposely attached a half-divisive title to this short weblog post. That having been said, one notes that nothing about its (i.e. the headline’s) contents is actually incorrect.

Regard, by way of illustration, the pitching leaderboard below — which leaderboard features the top-10 qualified starters of the last 30 days by park-adjusted xFIP.

Of note regarding that leaderboard is how it features Cleveland right-hander Josh Tomlin. Over five starts, beginning with June 28th, Tomlin pitched like one who would prevent runs at a rate about 40% better than league average. He didn’t do that, of course, but his fielding-independent numbers indicate that such a performance wouldn’t have been a surprise.

If and when he does begin preventing runs at an above-average rate, Josh Tomlin will likely be doing that for Triple-A Columbus after having been demoted over the weekend.