FanGraphs Baseball

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Those of us alive and aware today might end up being the last people on Earth to have seen the Dodgers lose a baseball game. Somehow, they’ve lost Clayton Kershaw and played even better, and they have a chance to set the all-time record for wins in a season. They’re playing so well it’s as if they don’t have a flaw, and while every team looks flawless during a winning streak, it’s obvious the Dodgers have officially become a juggernaut. They’ve been building toward this, and I don’t know when it’s going to stop.

Like any good dominant baseball team, the Dodgers have been excellent across the board. I’ll grant they look below-average by our baserunning metric, but the offense has been tremendous, and the defense has been strong. Turn to the pitching staff, and the Dodgers rank first by WAR. Look at things differently, and they still rank first by RA9-WAR. The Dodgers are more than just great — they could become an *all-time* great, which might feel more remarkable if the same couldn’t have just been said of the 2016 Cubs.

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In my previous articles in this series, I have looked at trends in free-agent spending over time, and specifically I have reviewed more recent data to see if market inefficiencies that I discovered in earlier work have disappeared over time. In this piece, I will review the findings on pitchers in my 2013 Hardball Times Annual article. In that piece, I discovered that teams tended to overvalue old-school statistics that did not translate to actual value. This included wins for starting pitchers and saves for relief pitchers. I also noticed that free-agent pitchers with strong peripheral statistics (e.g. those with good FIPs, usually) were often undercompensated, suggesting teams did not all realize the importance of peripheral statistics in projecting future performance. Much of this seems to have been corrected by the market over the years, although a handful of players have created some noise.
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Lots of trades happen in the run up to the non-waiver trade deadline. It can be hard to keep track of everything that’s gone down, so we’re here to help. Below you’ll find a rundown of all the #content that we’ve published in accordance with trades that have actually happened. They’re in chronological order as best as I can tell, and cover trades that were made earlier in the month too, because those are still important. We’ll start with the two prospect rankings from Chris and Eric, which were just published earlier today.

Prospect Rankings

• Ranking the Prospects Traded During Deadline Season, by Eric Longenhagen
• Projecting All of the Prospects Traded at the Deadline, by Chris Mitchell

Now on to the individual trades. Note that the date listed is the date the trade was consummated, not necessarily the date each article listed was published.

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In the table below, you’ll find a treasure trove of information pertaining to the prospects who changed hands this trade deadline. There were 67 of them in all. Since there was a flurry of early trade activity this year, I’m using a liberal definition of “trade deadline” that considers all trades since the July 13th Jose Quintana deal. For reference, I performed a similar exercise last year. Read the rest of this entry »

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Below is a ranking of the prospects traded this month, tiered by our Future Value scale. A reminder that there’s lots of room for argument as to how these players line up, especially within the same FV tier. If you need further explanation about FV, bang it here and here. Full writeups of the prospects are linked next to their names. If the player didn’t receive an entire post, I’ve got a brief scouting report included below. Enjoy.
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Several trades occurred while I was on vacation. I’m profiling the prospects involved in those deals in a belated nature. This post analyzes the prospects involved swap between the White Sox and Yankees, centered around the Yankees new bullpen weapons and prospect Blake Rutherford. A reminder of those involved.

Yankees get

• 3B Todd Frazier
• RHP Tommy Kahnle
• RHP David Robertson

White Sox get

• OF Blake Rutherford
• OF Tito Polo
• LHP Ian Clarkin
• RHP Tyler Clippard

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The Dodgers traded for Yu Darvish. Below are the projections for the prospects the Rangers received in exchange for Darvish’s services. 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.

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Willie Calhoun, 2B/LF/DH (Profile)

KATOH: 9.4 WAR (15th)

KATOH+: 8.9 WAR (24th)

Calhoun has hit a rock-solid .298/.357/.574 at Triple-A this season as a 22-year-old second baseman. His power numbers have been undoubtedly helped by the PCL and he doesn’t exactly look like a premium athlete. But still: Calhoun’s blend of contact and power makes him extremely exciting. His defense, however, is suspect. Clay Davenport’s metrics say his defense at second has improved this year, but going from unbelievably bad to merely really bad doesn’t do much to help Calhoun’s case. Calhoun is a prospect without a position for now, so a move to the American League makes a ton of sense. KATOH had Calhoun as the Dodgers’ second-best prospect, behind Alex Verdugo. Read the rest of this entry »

Again, Zach Britton found himself waiting for a phone call that never came.

Fellow left-handed reliever and fellow significant trade chip of a motivated seller, Brad Hand, is also staying put.

While the headlines Monday were tied to the top front-line starters traded, the Yankees adding Sonny Gray and the Dodgers beating the 4 p.m. eastern buzzer to land Yu Darvish, this was a reliever-heavy deadline period. This should be remembered as the trade deadline of The Reliever when more and more teams are focused on improving bullpens and attempting to build super relief corps. Read the rest of this entry »