The Diamondbacks have added a big bat to the middle of their lineup, swinging a trade for slugging outfielder J.D. Martinez. In exchange for Martinez’s services, the Arizona sent Detroit a trio of minor-league infielders: Dawel Lugo, Sergio Alcantara and Jose King. I do not have a KATOH projection for Jose King, as all but 13 of his professional games have taken place in the Dominican. However, he signed for a mere $75,000 and didn’t even make the honorable-mention section of Eric Longenhagen’s Diamondbacks list. That tells you about all you need to know: he’s a low-probability lottery ticket.

Below are the projections for the other two players whom the Tigers receive. WAR figures account for the player’s first six major-league seasons. KATOH denotes the stats-only version of the projection system, while KATOH+ denotes the methodology that includes a player’s prospect rankings.

Dawel Lugo, 3B (Profile)

KATOH: 2.4 WAR
KATOH+: 1.3 WAR

Of the prospects headed to the Tigers, Lugo is the closest to the big leagues and is also the most promising. He’s spent all of 2017 at the Double-A level, where he’s hit a respectable .282/.325/.426. He hit a more impressive .311/.339/.492 last year between High-A and Double-A. Lugo makes a lot of contact while also hitting for a fair amount of power. Players who can do both of those things from a semi-premium position aren’t all that common.

That’s about where Lugo’s appeal ends, however. He rarely walks and is a non-factor on the basepaths. Despite having played shortstop, Lugo’s defense per Clay Davenport’s numbers place him a tick below-average at third, which jibes with Eric’s 40/45 fielding grade. Lugo is still just 22, but as someone who signed out of the Dominican several years ago, he’s unlikely to make any wholesale improvements at this point. Still, someone with his offensive skill set who can play a passable third base could be of some use in the near future.

To put some faces to Lugo’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps. I calculated a Mahalanobis distance between Lugo’s Double-A performance and every season since 1991. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues.

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When it comes to making moves for pending free agents at the trade deadline, it’s hard to say that any pure rental is going to be a bargain. In recent seasons, the most successful trade for a soon-to-be free agent is probably the New York Mets’ acquisition of Yoenis Cespedes from the Detroit Tigers two years ago. Cespedes caught fire over the last two months of the season, putting up a 156 wRC+ and helping the Mets to the World Series. The cost was steep, however: part of Detroit’s return, Michael Fulmer, came in at 22 on Dave Cameron’s Trade Value Series this year.

If there’s a Yoenis Cespedes-type player available this year, it’s the guy whom the Arizona Diamondbacks just acquired. And they don’t appear to have conceded any top prospects for him, either, with Detroit opting for some players further away from the majors, potentially indicating where their future is headed.

Here’s the deal in full:

Arizona gets

• J.D. Martinez

Detroit gets

• Dawel Lugo
• Sergio Alcantara
• Jose King

Arizona is win-now mode. Also, they don’t have a great farm system, and Daniel Descalso has been their regular left fielder of late. Even if the injured Yasmany Tomas returns, he’s still just a replacement-level player. J.D. Martinez, meanwhile, provides at least a one-win upgrade over the course of the rest of the season.

Nor does the price appear to have been particularly high. The Diamondbacks retain top prospect Anthony Banda. As for the players they dealt, Lugo was the Diamondbacks’ 10th-best prospect coming into the season. The 22-year-old second baseman has some power and is holding his own in Double-A. Alcantara is a strong-armed shortstop putting up an average line in High-A, while King is an 18-year-old infielder getting his first exposure in the US in Rookie-level ball in Arizona. Detroit seems to have opted for some lottery tickets in exchange for potentially the best hitter on the market.

You might be forgiven for not totally believing in J.D. Martinez. His career got off to a poor start, and of late, he can’t seem to stay healthy. You might even be forgiven for thinking that Martinez is an aging slugger in decline. He’s not that, though. Teammate Victor Martinez fits that bill, and J.D. certainly has the old-man skillset of power and walks while offering little on defense. J.D. Martinez is just 29 years old, though, and since he joined the Tigers in 2014, he has been one of the very best hitters in baseball.

A champion of the fly-ball revolution, Martinez has put up a 146 wRC+ since joining Detroit, which is ninth in baseball over that span, just behind Nelson Cruz, tied with Anthony Rizzo, and ahead of Josh Donaldson, Giancarlo Stanton, and Justin Turner.

Martinez isn’t relying on 2014 and 2015 to prop up his stats, either. Since the beginning of last season, his 148 wRC+ trails only Mike Trout, Freddie Freeman, Joey Votto, Jose Altuve, and Daniel Murphy. This season, Martinez has been even better, hitting .305/.388/.630 with a 162 wRC+. It’s possible the season has flown a little under the radar, as his name is absent from the leaderboards. That’s only because Martinez missed the first month of the season with a sprained ligament in his right foot, however. As a result, he’s accumulated just 232 plate appearances, not enough to qualify for the batting title. If Martinez had hit 16 homers with a 162 wRC+ in April and May instead of May and June, he probably would have made the All-Star team. He didn’t, and while we are mostly talking about past performance, his projections look great, as well.

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The White Sox already traded their most valuable asset. By shipping Jose Quintana to the Cubs, Rick Hahn got the trade deadline moving. And you could safely assume that Hahn and the White Sox aren’t finished — David Robertson is likely to go somewhere soon. Ditto Todd Frazier. Ditto maybe a few other guys. The White Sox are selling, and this is what a sale looks like. There’s little sense in keeping present assets when the focus is squarely on the future.

It might feel like Quintana was the last major splash. Frazier won’t fetch very much, and Robertson comes with a pricey contract. I have a name for you, though, and it’s a name we’ve previously discussed. Now, around trade-deadline time, the prices for good relievers skyrocket. Every team in contention wants a better bullpen, and good relievers can be leaned on more heavily in the playoffs. It makes a certain amount of sense, and earlier, Dave submitted one reliever name who’s mostly off the radar. Me, I want to revisit Tommy Kahnle. Kahnle’s going to be a tricky one, because on the one hand, he’s just Tommy Kahnle, but on the other hand, holy crap. Maybe you haven’t seen what’s been happening.

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You may have noticed, especially if you’re a Baltimore Orioles fan, that run-scoring has been trending up as the season has progressed. This isn’t new, or particularly surprising, as the coming of summer turns up the heat, enabling fly balls to carry farther.

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PITTSBURGH — Travis Shaw isn’t caught up in trends.

In a season when so many hitters are investigating their launch angles and trying to lift balls up into the mysterious jet stream that has settled over major-league playing surfaces, Shaw is engaged in the exact opposite endeavor. He is trying to put the ball on the ground, and he’s in the midst of a breakout season.

The Red Sox would love to have a mulligan on the December multi-player deal that sent Shaw and two prospects to Milwaukee for Tyler Thornburg, who is out for the season after surgery to treat thoracic outlet syndrome. Entering play Tuesday, Shaw was slashing .293/.361/.564 with 20 homers, acceptable defense at third base, and a 2.7 WAR. He was tied as the 22nd most valuable position player in the game to start the day.

Of course, this is a different hitter than the one whom the Red Sox traded away.

“Philosophy, honestly,” said Shaw of the reason behind his breakout with the Brewers. “Everyone talks about launch angle, launch angle, launch angle. This year, I’ve tried to hit the ball on the ground more. Everyone is trying to hit it in the air. For me, when I try to hit the ball on the ground, I hit more home runs. I am more consistent with my swing.”

This seems counterintuitive, bizarre. But it’s working. For the first time in his brief major-league career, Shaw is hitting more ground balls (44.5%) than fly balls (36.0%). Throughout most of his minor-league career, he was a fly-ball hitter. And yet the quality of his contact has improved as he has tried to hit balls into the infield turf.

“The air-out/ground-out thing is completely opposite of what it’s been for my career,” Shaw noted.

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This is the worst offensive season for pitchers on record. It’s close, and the season isn’t over, and Madison Bumgarner has spent a lot of time on the disabled list, but, league-wide, pitchers so far have combined for a wRC+ of -21. It’s never before been that low over a full season. It makes enough sense; pitchers are presently better than ever at pitching, and they’re less incentivized than ever to know how to hit. This is the age of specialization. Players who specialize in pitching can’t be expected to handle the bat.

Jon Lester has been a bad hitter, even relative to other pitchers. Over his career he’s batted more than 200 times, and his wRC+ is -40. You might remember that he opened his career 0-for-66, which no player had ever done. Lester is bad at hitting, among pitchers. Pitchers are bad at hitting, and worse than ever. Given an ordinary game, you’d expect that Jon Lester, the hitter, would go quietly o-fer. The Cubs wouldn’t even care that much.

Monday night, Lester stole a base. It was the first pitcher steal of the year. Lester also drew a walk. Lester also hit a double. In one game, Lester had a steal, a walk, and an extra-base hit. Here’s the entire table of pitcher-games meeting the same criteria since 1950:

Nine games. Technically, it has been less than a year since the last one, but then you get a spread of 17 years. Then you get a spread of 26 years. Consider this a decently-rated fun fact. Jon Lester, the hitter, kind of filled up the box score.

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Pretty much every contender in baseball is looking for a reliever or two right now. The changing strategies relating to playoff baseball mean you can never have too many quality bullpen arms, and as the Cubs showed last year, you can’t necessarily count on guys who were good in the regular season being able to still go in the postseason. Even teams with strong current bullpens are kicking the tires on available arms because you can’t be certain that what you have now will still be ready to pitch at an elite level in a few months.

Which is why the price for relievers is always pretty high this time of year. And while there aren’t many Aroldis Chapmans or Andrew Millers available right now — Zach Britton would qualify if he were definitely healthy, but the Orioles sticking with Brad Brach as their closer right now is a pretty big red flag — we’re going to see a lot of bullpen arms traded over the next two weeks. The Nationals already paid a real price to add Ryan Madson and Sean Doolittle to their beleaguered pen, and they probably aren’t done adding relievers.

With all this demand and a somewhat limited supply, it’s not easy to find a decent arm to help for the stretch run that doesn’t cost something a team really doesn’t want to give up. But I think there might be one reliever who could probably be had who might not cost a fortune and could really help a team this year and maybe in the future as well. If you’re bargain hunting for a reliever right now, I’ve got one name for you: Danny Barnes.

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