The Royals are apparently listening to offers for Wade Davis. The Royals would be stupid if they didn’t listen to offers for Wade Davis. Any team would be stupid if it didn’t listen to offers for anyone. Listening comes at basically zero cost! There seems to be a real chance here, though, a chance of something happening. The Royals haven’t been very good, and while Davis has another year of control, you know where the reliever market is. If nothing else, you have to find out. You have to see what a guy like Davis could pull.

Davis could represent a proven, dominant addition. There’s no questioning his track record, and he was fantastic in last year’s playoffs. Davis is right there in the argument for the best reliever in the game, and relievers are being valued more highly than ever. It’s easy to see why Davis could command a huge trade return. It’s also easy to see how he could bust. These negotiations might well be complicated, because Davis looks like one massive gamble.

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Over the last few weeks we have taken a position-by-position look at granular ball-in-play data for both hitters and pitchers, assessing their respective contact quality/management ability. Next up: a macro-type evaluation of overall team performance in those areas.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a division-by-division look at each team’s granular data through the All-Star break, ultimately comparing their actual won-lost records to projected ones based on exit speed/angle of every ball in play hit and allowed by each club. About 90 games’ worth of balls in play is a fairly substantial sample size, one that enables us to make fairly educated guesses about the true talent level of each team. Today, we’ll focus on a brief overview of general BIP data estimating the overall hitting, pitching and defensive abilities of all 30 clubs; we’ll drill deeper into the data in the subsequent divisional articles.

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At 49-51, 8 1/2 games out of first place, the Royals sound like they realize they’re probably not contenders this year, and with a few days to go before the trade deadline, they’re now listening to offers for their best trade chips. Given the price of relievers these days, Wade Davis is pretty clearly their most valuable asset, and the Royals could expect to get back a significant haul for him, given that he’s also under contract for 2017.

But according to Jeff Passan, the team might be looking to use Davis to do something besides add young talent to the organization.

Sources: Royals trying to package Ian Kennedy in a potential Wade Davis deal. Dodgers a strong match. Covet Davis and can take on Kennedy $.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 28, 2016

So that’s an interesting idea. By tying Kennedy to Davis, the price in talent would come down, which would likely make a deal more appealing to a team like LA — we’ve seen the Dodgers take on plenty of dead-money deals in order to acquire or retain prospects in previous trades — and would give the Royals the flexibility to reallocate Kennedy’s money to other free agents this winter, which would allow them to essentially make a trade for 2017 assets instead of prospects who might not be able to help before the rest of their core players hit free agency.

On the surface, the idea makes some sense, but it also brings up a question; how much negative value does Kennedy have at this point? How much of a discount on the talent portion of the trade would the Royals have to give in order to free themselves from the rest of Kennedy’s deal? Let’s do the math.

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This is simply the nature of the current starting-pitcher market. There’s no Cole Hamels, there’s no David Price. There’s a Chris Archer and a Sonny Gray and a Julio Teheran, but odds are they all stay put. So you move on to your Andrew Cashners and your Drew Pomeranzes and you look for reasons to get excited. You don’t force reasons to get excited — some guys just aren’t that exciting — but if they’re there, you pay attention.

It’s understandable to not find Jeremy Hellickson too exciting. Over the course of his career, he’s been about the definition of average. Oh, Hellickson once was exciting. As a minor leaguer in 2011, he was ranked as the No. 18 prospect in the sport by Baseball America, and after making a brief but impressive debut that year, was bumped up to No. 6 on the following year’s iteration. In 2011, he was arguably the most hyped pitching prospect in baseball, sandwiched between Teheran and Aroldis Chapman, and then he started off his career with 400 innings of a 3.00 ERA.

But then, there were the ugly peripherals that had always loomed, followed by the heavy hand of regression, and then the elbow surgery, and Hellickson became a forgotten name as quickly as he’d become an intriguing one.

Except now it’s 2016, and the Philadelphia Phillies are reportedly asking for a team’s top-five prospect in order to obtain Hellickson; otherwise, they’re comfortable extending to him what could be a $16.7 million qualifying offer. Which, of course that’s what the Phillies are asking — no harm in talking up your own guy. The question is: how crazy is it, really? Or, more specifically, how interesting is Hellickson, really?

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
St. Louis at Miami | 19:10 ET
Wacha (115.1 IP, 97 xFIP-) vs. Fernandez (120.2 IP, 56 xFIP-)
Probably an irresponsible way to evaluate a pitcher is to cite his WAR per games started. The author cites it here, however, as an attempt to answer a question poorly. The question: at what point is someone likely to tie and/or pass the injured Clayton Kershaw on the WAR pitching leaderboard. The answer: probably mid-August.

First, regard:

Those are the top-five qualified pitchers this year by WAR per game started. As noted, only the data from starts has been considered. Although, it doesn’t really matter: this is basically identical to the top-five pitchers by WAR without any additional criteria. It appears here, however, to provide a sense of how many more starts a pitcher might need — how many Jose Fernandez, in particular, might need — to catch Kershaw.

Fortunately, the math is pretty simple. Fernandez sits roughly a win behind Kershaw and produces roughly a quarter win per start. So, “four starts” would appear to be the answer. Accounting for today’s start and assuming that Fernandez appears for Miami every fifth day, he’s likely to have tied Kershaw following his start against the White Sox on Friday, August 12th. If Miami preserves a five-man rotation through a couple days off, Fernandez is still likely to appear in that White Sox series, just a day or two later.

Reason, is what has been exhibited here. But reason in the most frightening quantity.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: St. Louis Radio.

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Kyle Gibson starts tonight against Baltimore. He pitched his best game of the season on Friday. The Minnesota Twins right-hander gave up a home run to the first batter he faced, but that was the lone blemish in a 2-1 win. Matching up against the Red Sox at Fenway Park, Gibson fanned six and allowed just three base-runners over eight innings of work.

He mixed his pitches proficiently. Per Brooks Baseball, the 29-year-old sinker-baller threw 37 two-seamers, 24 sliders, 18 changeups, nine curveballs and eight four-seamers. His sequencing induced a 38.8% swing rate on pitches outside the zone (O-Swing%) against one of baseball’s most patient lineups.

Gibson, who is suffering through a subpar year, discussed the game and his overall pitch usage the following day.

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Gibson on his July 22 outing: “The homer to [Mookie] Betts was on a four-seamer. There are times I’ll throw a first-pitch four-seamer to righties, but it’s usually all sinkers. Most of the four-seamers I throw are in to lefties and I haven’t been beaten too many times on that. One that comes to mind is a Jackie Bradley home run in our ballpark [on June 11]. It’s a pitch I’m normally trying to elevate and throw for effect.

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An afternoon trade went down between the Rangers and the Braves. One very much legitimate way of thinking about it: Lucas Harrell isn’t very good, but the back of the Rangers’ rotation lately has been terrible, and this just goes to show how the market for any half-decent starting pitcher right now is inflated. While Travis Demeritte isn’t a top-10 prospect or anything, he is a former first-rounder having a breakthrough season in High-A. Not a lot of available 21-year-olds with that sort of power. Good get for the Braves, considering they just added Harrell for practically nothing a couple months ago.

Another very much legitimate way of thinking about it: The Rangers didn’t want to pay the high price for an established relief arm, so they found an alternative route, landing in Dario Alvarez a potential front-line lefty bullpen weapon. Harrell gets attention as the starter with experience, and Demeritte gets attention as the prospect stepping forward, but Alvarez might be a hell of a pitcher, considering you might not have ever heard of him.

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