When the top 100 prospects in the game were ranked by Baseball America during the summer of 2010, Brett Lawrie was 26 spots ahead of Mike Trout. Both received a large cup of coffee in the majors during 2011 – Lawrie produced 2.6 WAR in just 46 games, while Trout put up 0.7 WAR in 40 – and there was a lot of optimism that we were witnessing two stars in the making: these were the athletic, ultra-talented position players of the future for two franchises.

Four years have passed since those brief debuts, and we know the history of both players has been quite different: Trout has produced a stunning 37.8 WAR, establishing himself as a perennial candidate for best player in baseball, while Lawrie has produced 6.2 WAR in a series of injury-interrupted, slightly above average seasons.

Being compared to Trout is unfair for basically every player in the game, but the point is this: early success doesn’t always mean continued success, mostly because baseball is about how well you adjust, not necessarily how much raw talent you have. A lot can change in the course of four seasons, especially when we’re trying to evaluate young players.

Because of the content of the four years since his debut, we view Lawrie through a certain lens: he was a top prospect, but he’s not a top major-leaguer. He’s had his chance, the thinking goes, and this is what he’s done with it. Major-league baseball is a boiling hot cauldron into which young men are thrown, and they either develop sufficiently thick skin to handle the heat or they don’t. It’s been over four seasons, and this is who he is.

Something complicates that viewpoint, however, and it’s that Lawrie will have just turned 26 when Opening Day rolls around in 2016. It might seem like he’s been around a long time, but he’s still young, and youthful players who were once top prospects are given a longer leash to figure things out. Now, after two separate opportunities to put everything together, Lawrie is headed from Oakland to the south side of Chicago in return for two relief pitchers, Zack Erwin and J.B. Wendelken.

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12:03

Eno Sarris:

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It wouldn’t be fair to say the ALDS game against the Royals was representative of the Astros’ bullpen, because that would be mean and wrong, but there was a definite lingering sense of unreliability. The Astros bullpen finished among the very best in WAR, but it was in the bottom half by WPA, and feelings mirror WPA better than anything else. Nor is this exactly a new problem — the last five years combined, the Astros bullpen is last in baseball by WPA at -22. The Mets are second-worst at -9. The bullpen hasn’t been a real strength for some time, and now the Astros’ bullpen actually matters. They’re no longer positioned to just see what sticks.

What’s the quickest way to upgrade a bullpen? Add one of the league’s true elite relievers. If he’s young and cost-controlled, all the better. Jeff Luhnow has talked a few times about wanting to diversify his group of relievers, bringing in someone overpowering. Enter Ken Giles. The Astros were circling around Giles for seemingly weeks, and now he’s about to be theirs, coming from the Phillies in exchange for Vincent Velasquez, Derek Fisher, Brett Oberholtzer, and Thomas Eshelman. In large part, it comes down to Giles and Velasquez. Giles is the proven power arm, with years of control. Velasquez is the unproven power arm, with real potential to start.

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Thirteen months ago, Houston scouting director Mike Elias described Derek Fisher as “A big kid who can run and has a good swing with some power.” Last night, the Astros sent the 37th-overall pick of the 2014 draft to the Philadelphia Phillies as part of the deal for closer Ken Giles.

Fisher — a 22-year-old left-handed-hitting outfielder out of the University of Virginia — possesses power and speed. Splitting this season between low-A Quad Cities and high-A Lancaster, he went deep 22 times and swiped 31 bags in 38 attempts. His slash line was a solid .275/.364/.483. Punch outs were an issue, as he fanned 132 times.

Fisher, who finished his first full professional season with the Glendale Desert Dogs, talked about his toolsy-yet-unpolished game near the conclusion of the Arizona Fall League season. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, the Diamondbacks acquired Shelby Miller to upgrade their rotation. The cost of the acquisition, however, led most people — myself included — to conclude that not only did the team pay an exorbitant cost relative to pursuing other options on the market, but that it’s not even clear that the team improved on the field for 2016, given the loss of a quality Major League outfielder in the deal. As has been the case with several other recent moves Arizona has made of late, the reaction to the deal has been extremely negative. But has it been too one-sided and over the top?

Any time the public reaction is this slanted in one direction, it’s reasonable to ask what we we may be missing. We don’t have to ascribe to the idea of perfectly rational actors in every front office to accept the fact that teams have more and better information than we do, and when there’s a big disconnect between what we see and what they see, we should at least consider the possibility that they know more than we do. And when we look back at the recent history of unpopular transactions, there’s a decent amount of evidence that the magnitude of the criticism looks a bit silly in retrospect.

The most obvious comparison to this kind of prospect-for-pitcher trade backlash is the James Shields trade; in the aftermath of that deal, my post about the trade began “Royals Mortgage Future to Be Mediocre in 2013.” And while the Royals did indeed fail to reach the postseason in their first year with Shields, he helped them make a World Series run in 2014, and then they managed to win the whole thing this year, capping off a strong three year run that has revitalized baseball in Kansas City. With the benefit of hindsight, I certainly could have been a bit more nuanced with my opinion on that trade.

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The 2015-16 offseason has been heralded as a historic one in terms of the volume of starting pitching projected to be available on the free market. There’s star-level talent (some of it already signed), in the persons of Zack Greinke, David Price and Johnny Cueto, as well as a bevy of mid-range targets certain to pull down three or more guaranteed years at a minimum of $10-12 million per season. The first big deals are in the books, and the prices in terms of dollars and years have been higher than the already elevated expectations.

What is the track record of both huge and mid-sized investments in starting pitching, and what does it portend for the clubs who have already made a splash in this year’s market? Does landing the big fish really mean you’ve “won” the offseason? Or might the clubs that either didn’t buy a lottery ticket — or held on to their own, suddenly more valuable tickets — come out ahead?

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All along, it seemed like the Mets were the clear frontrunner for Ben Zobrist. The Nationals and the Giants hung around in the periphery, but the Mets were among the earliest suitors, were perhaps most vocal suitor, and the fit made plenty of sense. It came down to the wire, enough for Mets fans to truly get their hopes up, but seemingly at the last minute the Cubs swooped in and made Zobrist their own. Turns out the Cubs had been in on Zobrist all along, but the public didn’t know that, and to New York fans, missing out on Zobrist must have felt like a crushing blow. Zobrist is the kind of player that any team would like to have.

One day after missing out on Zobrist, though, the Mets did what they perceived to be the next-best thing. They acquired Neil Walker from Pittsburgh in exchange for left-handed starter Jon Niese. Niese is set to earn a little over $9 million this season, with a pair of similarly-priced club options in the following two seasons. Walker is in his final year of arbitration, projected for $10.7 million by MLBTradeRumors, and for those reasons, Walker’s been an offseason trade candidate from the start. The Mets could’ve used a second baseman, having lost Daniel Murphy, and having something of a surplus of starting pitching. The Pirates needed starting pitching, having lost A.J. Burnett and J.A. Happ, and having something of a surplus of infielders. This is what the offseason is for.

Yet, in reading reactions to the trade, I couldn’t help but notice that it seemed the consensus was that Walker was a somewhat disappointing fallback plan to Zobrist. A lesser option, or a little brother, or a poor man’s Zobrist. They’re both switch-hitters, and they’ve both been around for a while, and they both play second base, and they were both targeted by the Mets, and they’ve both experienced success (even if Zobrist’s peak has been higher than Walker’s) and so the comparison isn’t surprising.

But I think to categorize Walker as anything less than Zobrist’s equal, at this stage in their careers, would be unfair to Walker. Regard their performance over the last three seasons, with Zobrist’s defensive numbers only coming from his time spent at second base:
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