Kuzul

The clock ticking down to Major League Baseball’s August 1 trade deadline doesn’t have much time left on it. Meanwhile, plenty of teams still have holes to fill.

That makes it easy to predict that the next few days are going to be interesting. But for the sake of being thorough, let’s go more in depth.

Ahead is one last list of predictions for the MLB trade deadline. It’s not an especially long one, but it will cover the big bases: which players will and won’t move and which teams will and won’t be active. 

We’ll begin with the fates of two coveted relief pitchers. Step into the box when you’re ready.

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Cole Hamels never really came close to winning a Cy Young Award when he was in the National League. He placed in the voting four times, but never higher than fifth. The competition was just too good.

So, maybe being in the American League and part of a race with too much competition is just the ticket he needs.

Hamels is taking care of his own business in his first full season with the Texas Rangers. The 32-year-old left-hander entered his Thursday assignment against the Kansas City Royals with an 11-2 record and a 2.87 ERA. He then improved on both marks in a 3-2 win, pitching eight innings of two-run ball with six hits, a walk and a season-high 12 strikeouts.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, the highlights:

The Rangers have gotten a full season’s worth of starts from Hamels since acquiring him from the Philadelphia Phillies on deadline day last year. He’s gone 19-3 with a 3.15 ERA in 217 innings. This is otherwise known as pretty good ROI.

Meanwhile, Hamels is as good a bet as anyone to win the AL Cy Young if he keeps this up.

Records aren’t all the rage anymore, but he’ll draw a crowd if he stays on a pace for 20 wins. His 2.84 ERA, which is second only to Aaron Sanchez’s (2.72) among AL starters, will too. With 133.1 innings, Hamels is also in the top 10 of the AL in innings pitched.

If he’s sounding like a top Cy Young candidate, that’s because he is. This according to years of experience talking about such things, and also to ESPN.com’s Cy Young predictor. It’s tough to explain—the short version is that it’s a doohickey that runs on thingamajiggery—but it has Hamels marked as one of the top five contenders for the award.

If you’re looking for some kind of proclamation for Hamels as the man to beat, look elsewhere. This year’s AL Cy Young race has no such thing.

In fact, it’s hard to even call it a race. To borrow a line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it’s less a race and more an endurance contest: a battle between evenly matched contenders in which the last man standing will win.

The Cy Young predictor makes that clear, showing Hamels in a thick bundle of well-qualified AL starters that also includes Sanchez, Chris Tillman, Chris Sale, Danny Salazar and, surprisingly, Zach Britton.

The wins above replacement leaderboard, a necessary go-to when discussing any awards race, doesn’t clear things up. At Baseball-Reference.com, which keeps things simple with a WAR formula that focuses on runs allowed and innings pitched, the top of the leaderboard looked like this at the start of play Thursday:

That’s a large number of good pitchers packed into a not-large amount of space. Hamels is going to get a boost from his Thursday performance, but it won’t be enough to put him clearly ahead of the rest of the pack.

With two months of baseball left, there’s hardly a guarantee the AL Cy Young “race” will stay this closely bunched. But even if the number of contenders is cut in half by the end, the voters will still have a pickle on their hands. And to solve this particular pickle, they’d have to get nerdy.

And for now, that’s where Hamels’ case gets tricky.

Although his surface numbers are strong, David Schoenfield of ESPN.com is right in pointing out Hamels has weak peripherals. He’s only ninth in the American League in strikeout rate (8.9 per nine innings) and in the bottom seven of the league in walk rate (3.4 per nine innings). 

Hamels isn’t knocking down any doors with his quality of contact allowed either. According to Baseball Savant, he entered Thursday allowing an average of 87.8 miles per hour on batted balls. Solid, but not near the top of the leaderboard. He is also allowing 1.15 home runs per nine innings.

This could mean Hamels is getting lucky, and that in turn could mean a regression in the final two months of the season. That would more than likely knock him out of the AL Cy Young race.

Or, it could mean Hamels is outpacing his peripherals in invisible ways. That hasn’t been his style in the past, but it’s not fair to compare his past self to his current self. His past self was a fastball-changeup guy. Brooks Baseball can show his current self is something else:

Hamels is now a fastball-cutter pitcher who also shows a sinker, changeup and curveball. That’s an unpredictable pitcher, which is precisely what he strives to be.

“It’s a matter of figuring it out and trying not to be predictable,” he said of making adjustments to Eno Sarris of FanGraphs last month.

Hamels may be at his most unpredictable when he absolutely needs to be. Compared to when nobody is on, it helps that his strikeout rate, walk rate and exit velocity are all better when runners are on base:

Because few things explain Hamels’ success like the fact he’s stranding runners at the highest rate in the league, him keeping this up will be a crucial part of his chase for his first Cy Young.

The odds are he won’t be an easy choice for the award even if he pulls it off. There’s still likely to be a crowd of good candidates, some of whom will have better peripherals than him.

But any time a guy can get to the end of the season with a sparkling record, low ERA and high innings count, he has a shot. And for Hamels, this is probably the best shot at the award he’s had yet.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Including this one, the New York Yankees have been winners in each of the last 24 seasons. That’s meant 24 years of buying or staying the course at the trade deadline, as one does when one is a winner.

So go figure that doing the opposite before the August 1 deadline is exactly what the Yankees need now. This is a franchise in need of a turning point, and only by selling will it find it.

Brian Cashman, a key player in the Yankees front office since 1992 and general manager since 1998, took a step in that direction with the trade of fireballing closer Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs. After a quarter-century’s worth of deadline moves with only the short-term future in mind, this could be merely the first in a series of moves with the club’s long-term future in mind.

But for the moment, that’s not a given.

A full-on fire sale seemed inevitable when the Yankees dropped their first two games after the All-Star break. But they’ve since won eight out of 11 to climb to within four games in the American League wild-card race.

“Anything can happen in baseball,” first baseman Mark Teixeira said Tuesday, per Andrew Marchand of ESPN.com. “A lot weirder things have happened. If we get hot, we can play with anybody, but we just need to keep grinding away.”

The bosses may be on Teixeira’s side. A recent report from ESPN.com’s Wallace Matthews claimed Cashman and the Yankees front office want to sell but that owner Hal Steinbrenner and the other suits aren’t yet ready to detach from the ol’ George Steinbrenner edict to win no matter what.

From the sound of things, they haven’t yet changed their minds.

“I have a green light to continue to do my job, which is to assess market values both coming and going and make recommendations, and [Hal will] tell me what he wants done,” Cashman said, per Marchand. “Then I’ll execute as told.”

The idea that the Yankees should still go for it is a defensible position. Chapman was aiding the Yankees bullpen with a 2.01 ERA and tons of strikeouts, sure, but he’s also a free agent-to-be who was superfluous next to Andrew Miller and Dellin Betances. Trading him didn’t fundamentally change the team, which is indeed still alive in the AL playoff picture.

But in reality, the Yankees are “still alive” like the Black Knight was still alive in his fight with King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

Entering Wednesday, Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs put the Yankees’ chances of making the playoffs around 10 percent and of winning the World Series at half a percent. Because a still-terrific bullpen is flanked by an offense with the AL’s lowest OPS and a starting pitching staff with the AL’s ninth-best ERA, it’s hard to say these figures underestimate the Yankees.

If they stay defiant and go for it, the Yankees won’t actually be abiding by the franchise’s proud history of chasing championships. They’ll only be sticking to the more recently established tradition of mediocrity. They’d be asking for a fourth straight season without a postseason victory.

Taking the alternate route wouldn’t be painless. The actual end may have already come, but the Yankees admitting defeat will certainly feel like the end of an era. You can already hear the takes about The Boss spinning in his grave.

What should not be forgotten, though, is that it was when the Yankees’ late owner was out of the way that the foundation for the club’s best years was built.

During Steinbrenner’s three-year ban from baseball from 1990 to 1993, a front office led by Cashman and Gene Michaels cultivated a core of young players that included Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. The rest, as they say…well, you know the rest.

The list of quality homegrown players the Yankees have developed since then is frighteningly short, consisting only of Robinson Cano, Brett Gardner, Betances and a few others. Rather than developing their own stars, the Yankees have spent the better part of the last two decades buying and trading for stars developed by other teams.

In fairness, this used to work. There’s no arguing with five World Series and seven AL pennants between 1996 and 2009. But in today’s MLB, this approach just doesn’t fly anymore.

As Rob Arthur showed at FiveThirtyEight, the notion that baseball’s star power is skewing younger is no mirage. And for good reasons. More young players have grown up playing baseball exclusively. And without performance-enhancing drugs, veterans just don’t age like they used to.

You can’t count on young players landing on the free-agent market, and an environment such as this one makes them tough to pry away in trades. That means the best way to build a winner is to be like the Kansas City Royals or Chicago Cubs and build one from the ground up. 

The Yankees aren’t totally unaware of this. Hal Steinbrenner made a point of wanting to rebuild the club’s farm system in a 2013 interview with Daniel Barbarisi of the Wall Street Journal. Credit is owed to him and Cashman for following through as much as they have since then.

Four Yankees prospects made it into Baseball America‘s latest top 100: shortstop Jorge Mateo (19), catcher Gary Sanchez (36), right fielder Aaron Judge (42) and right-hander James Kaprielian (99). They got shortstop Gleyber Torres, the No. 27 prospect, in the Chapman trade. The other two prospects in the deal, outfielders Billy McKinney and Rashad Crawford, have too much talent to be called mere throw-ins.

However, this is only a good start.

In the coming years, the Yankees need to worry about restocking a lineup with only two players (Didi Gregorius and Starlin Castro) under the age of 32 and a starting rotation that features only one guy (Masahiro Tanaka) controlled beyond 2017.

The upcoming free-agent markets aren’t going to help the Yankees do this. The next free-agent bonanza won’t come until the winter of 2018-2019, when guys like Bryce Harper and Jose Fernandez are due to headline maybe the most star-studded winter market in history.

The Yankees’ best play is to load up their farm system as best they can, graduate as many young players to the majors as possible within the next two years and then use their riches to add impact veteran talent to a team already loaded with young up-and-comers.

If the Chapman trade was one step in that direction, it’s now time for the others. Carlos Beltran, another free agent-to-be, should also go. Bolstered by two more years under contract, Miller’s trade value is too high for him to be deemed untouchable. Gardner, Michael Pineda, Nathan Eovaldi and Ivan Nova look like trade chips too. Guys like CC Sabathia, Brian McCann and Chase Headley may not be immovable.

Collectively, that’s a big pile of trade bait that could net the Yankees a big pile of prospects while also saving them a decent pile of cash. If that’s what they end up with, that’s how they’ll know they’re rebuilding the right way.

It would indeed feel like the end of an era. But what the Yankees must understand between now and August 1 is that this might be the start of an entirely new era that, in time, could be just as good as the old one.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Things were looking dicey for a while, but offense has come back to Major League Baseball. Almost everywhere you look, hitters are hitting again.

But why the “almost,” you ask? Because behind the plate is a place, and it’s where hitters are still in a rut.

It’s easy to miss that in light of how much offense has come roaring back in 2015 and 2016. The league followed a .700 OPS in 2014, its lowest since 1989, with a .721 OPS in 2015. In 2016, the league’s OPS is up to .739, its highest since 2009.

But catchers aren’t pulling their weight. Excluding pitchers and including designated hitters, it’s the only offensive position that’s not managing an OPS safely above .700:

The good news, such as it is, is that the .694 OPS catchers have in 2016 is actually an improvement over their .682 mark from 2015. But this is still slated to be the fourth straight season in which the catcher OPS finishes below .700. They regularly topped a .700 OPS between 1993 and 2012, so that’s not good.

Also, that .694 OPS isn’t actually an improvement when put into proper context using weighted runs created plus (wRC+). It’s a metric that puts offensive production on a scale where league average is denoted by an even 100 and anything lower than that is below average. As far as it’s concerned, the progression for catcher offense since 2011 looks like this:

• 2011: 92
• 2012: 95
• 2013: 92
• 2014: 93
• 2015: 85
• 2016: 84

It’s nothing new for catchers to lag behind league average on offense, but they’re now lagging way behind. The struggle was superficial. Now it’s real.

One problem is the old guard of good-hitting catchers isn’t there anymore. Yadier Molina, Matt Wieters, Russell Martin, Carlos Ruiz, Miguel Montero and Yan Gomes are still catching, but no longer hitting. Mike Napoli, Joe Mauer and Carlos Santana are still hitting, but no longer catching.

This was bound to happen eventually. Good-hitting catchers are easy to appreciate in their time, but their time doesn’t last that long. Simply playing the position beats the hell out of them. That might have been a badge of honor for catchers in the past. But now it’s something to be realistic about.

Pittsburgh Pirates first baseman John Jaso, a former catcher, explained to Fernando Perez of Vice Sports: 

Catching isn’t for everyone, it’s a lot to ask of a player. If I was a GM and I had a catcher who had a chance to be a really great hitter, I’d make him change positions. Why put those miles on his body? What are the chances you’ll get a catcher who’ll be Yadier Molina behind the plate and also hit like Yadi?

Regardless, the fading of the old guard puts baseball in a position to welcome a new guard of good-hitting catchers. The problem is that’s just not happening. 

Buster Posey, Jonathan Lucroy and Brian McCann are still getting it done, and Wilson Ramos, Salvador Perez and Stephen Vogt are having nice seasons as well. But none of them are young up-and-comers, which is something the league badly needs at catcher.

Here’s a look at how many catcher plate appearances have gone to catchers ages 25 and younger, and how they’ve done relative to their peers: 

Between 2011 and 2014, young catchers accounted for a decent amount of the plate appearances for all catchers, and were generally capable of keeping up. But now young catchers are scarce and unproductive to boot.

This is in contrast to what’s going on everywhere else, as young hitters are outproducing older hitters in 2016. But at catcher, 25-year-old Miami Marlins backstop J.T. Realmuto is the only young everyday player who’s hit well while catching exclusively.

It’s a situation that makes it look like the flow of good-hitting catchers from the minors to the majors got squeezed somewhere along the line. And that may not be a mirage.

Consider what happened in 2010, for example. That was the year Posey arrived and began carving out his reputation as the game’s best catcher, but it was also the year the Washington Nationals got Bryce Harper out of the crouch immediately after drafting him No. 1 overall. Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo cited the Jaso defense.

“We’re going to take the rigor and the pressures of learning the position, the difficult position of catcher, away from him,” Rizzo said, per the Associated Press (h/t ESPN.com), “and really let him concentrate on the offensive part of the game and let his athleticism take over as an outfielder.”

That kind of attitude is one thing barring the position from getting good young hitters. Beyond that, there’s also a different emphasis on what kind of defense is needed to keep a good hitter in the crouch.

Take Willson Contreras, for example. Chicago Cubs skipper Joe Maddon told Mark Gonzales of the Chicago Tribune that Contreras is still a part of the team’s plans at catcher, but he’s played a lot of left field and some first base. And it’s no surprise that he has.

Contreras is a fine hitter with a lethal arm, which might have made keeping him at catcher a no-brainer in years past. But as Dave Cameron covered at FanGraphs in 2014, today’s emphasis on strike framing is coinciding with a steady decline in caught-stealing rate. That suggests teams would rather have a good receiver than a good thrower behind the plate.

It so happens that poor receiving has been a knock on Contreras. It’s also one of the knocks on Kyle Schwarber, who the Cubs also moved off catcher after promoting him to the majors. Same goes for Blake Swihart, whose future with the Boston Red Sox may be in the outfield.

Similar futures may await some of the top catching prospects in the minors. Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds farm hands Reese McGuire and Tyler Stephenson, respectively, are regarded as well-rounded catchers. But for Gary Sanchez (New York Yankees), Jorge Alfaro (Philadelphia Phillies), Max Pentecost (Toronto Blue Jays) and Jacob Nottingham (Milwaukee Brewers), defensive questions may one day lead their parent teams to move their quality bats out from behind home.

Things might be different if teams needed to worry about getting as many quality bats into their lineups as possible, as was the case while offense was getting harder to find between 2010 and 2014. But for reasons discussed above, it’s not anymore. With offense back up elsewhere, teams can afford to treat the catcher spot like what it is: the sport’s most important defensive position.

What’s happening now looks like a perfect storm of circumstances conspiring to kill catcher production. But don’t assume the storm will last forever.

Although the shift in what teams are looking for behind the plate seems like a bad thing for catcher offense right now, the Cameron article referenced above actually highlighted it as a good thing. The new demands could be just as likely to attract good bats to catcher as they are to drive them away. We need more time to pass before we can tell one way or the other.

Besides, virtually nothing in baseball is permanent. It was just last year that shortstop seemed to be a dying offensive position. Now shortstops are having their best offensive season in a century.

So, just wait. Catcher offense is dead, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

As if trading Chris Sale wasn’t going to be complicated enough for the Chicago White Sox, then he had to go and carve up some jerseys.

If that second part lost you, boy do you have a story to get caught up on.

After Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported Thursday that the White Sox were prepared to sell at the August 1 trade deadline, the talk around Sale earlier on Saturday concerned whether he would be dealt. When the White Sox then scratched their ace left-hander from his start against the Detroit Tigers, MLBTradeRumors.com presumably started having some pretty good traffic.

But then, White Sox general manager Rick Hahn said in a statement that Sale had actually been sent home due to a “clubhouse incident before the game.” A few vague reports later, Tommy Stokke of FanRag Sports provided the gory details:

Yup. This is a thing that actually happened.

And thanks to Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, we have a clear-ish picture of why. A source told him Sale’s initial protest was over the jerseys—of which the White Sox had earlier tweeted a picture—being “uncomfortable.” When the White Sox wouldn’t relent, Sale let his frustration over his perception that “PR and jersey sales were more important than winning” guide his actions.

This is not the first time Sale has lashed out at his superiors. Although Rosenthal says he was not involved in this incident, you’ll recall Sale had an angry exchange with White Sox Vice President Kenny Williams over the Adam LaRoche fiasco that unfolded in spring training.

Sale’s 14-3 record, 3.18 ERA, 4.45 strikeout-to-walk ratio and recent All-Star start are just a few things that confirm the 27-year-old is still a very good pitcher. But in the last 24 hours, we’ve learned he’s also a piece of trade bait who’s less than pleased with the way things are going in Chicago.

It’s hard to blame Sale for that. The White Sox entered Saturday at 46-50, putting them in line for a fourth straight losing season. But it’s easy to blame him for creating this latest controversy. Instead of sucking it up and taking the high road, he played the part of a problem child crying over spilled milk.

By all accounts, this had nothing to do with the trade rumors. But now we wait to see if said trade rumors will be affected by it.

The early indication is there’s no change on Chicago’s end. Rob Bradford of WEEI.com’s latest report says the White Sox are no more willing to trade Sale than they were before. If that’s true, it tells us the White Sox understand what they should be doing: carrying on as if nothing’s happened and seeing what’s what.

On the trade market, that means continuing to peddle Sale at an enormous price. A report from Jon Heyman of FanRag Sports put it at “five top prospects.” That’s the kind of asking price that makes it loud and clear that suitors have to come to the White Sox, because the White Sox don’t have to go to them.

“I would expect them to ask for the moon,” a rival general manager told Heyman. “I think they have no interest in moving him unless it’s a no-brainer deal.”

But the question now is whether any of Sale’s biggest suitors—i.e. the Texas Rangers, Boston Red Sox or Los Angeles Dodgers—are any more willing to meet that price after Saturday’s events. As Stokke suggested in a radio interview (via Adam Kaufman), the answer may be no:

This could actually be true. The White Sox can act like Sale doesn’t want out, but potential trade partners can just as easily act like he does and try to call the White Sox’s bluff. That creates two possible scenarios.

Scenario No. 1: There is no bluff to call.

Despite the bad blood between Sale and his employers, the fact remains he’s an ace pitcher. Not only that, but he’s also still an affordable ace pitcher. The contract extension he signed in 2013 is only paying him $9.15 million this year, with just $39.5 million more on the way if his options for 2018 and 2019 are picked up. That’s a small price to pay for a guy who’s been a top-five pitcher since 2012.

So unless Hahn, Williams or White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf is feeling petty over Saturday’s drama, nobody in a position to make a call on Sale is going to stand up and say, “He has to go.” That would be easy if he was some scrub threatening to drag down a winning team, but he’s a star who can only buoy a team that’s already bad.

Scenario No. 2: There is a bluff to call. Or at least just enough of one to get the White Sox to relent.

It would be one thing if Sale had done something bad enough to shave more than just a prospect (“maybe”) off his trade value, but he didn’t. And although four top prospects isn’t the same as five top prospects, the downgrade is only from “really strong offer” to a plain ol’ “strong offer.”

If 2016 was just one bad year on a timeline with a bright future, rejecting it would be the obvious choice for the White Sox. But in their case, 2016 is the latest in a string of down years, and their farm system doesn’t offer much hope of a turnaround. Baseball America had Chicago’s system ranked at No. 23 in the spring, and now it’s without shortstop Tim Anderson and right-hander Carson Fulmer.

And even if the White Sox don’t want to get rid of Sale, they could at least be open to it. If the bad blood subsides, there will cease to be questions about his trade value. But if it doesn’t, the questions could persist or multiply. So, perhaps they’ll make a blockbuster deal now that they might not be able to make later.

Which will it be in coming days? That puts us in best-guess territory, so here’s mine: Sale ends up staying in Chicago.

The odds of a trade were probably low to begin with. There are only a handful of teams that can afford to pay the White Sox’s price, and his talent and contract gave them two reasons not to budge. Although it makes for good headline material, the White Sox shouldn’t let what happened Saturday overrule either of those motivations.

But if nothing else, there’s no denying this whole situation is weirder than it was before. Maybe it wasn’t his intent, but Sale effectively voiced his say in his trade value when he cut up those jerseys. As a result, talks between the White Sox and his suitors are going to have a different tenor.

That shouldn’t matter…but we’ll see.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Better buckle up. Major League Baseball’s August 1 trade deadline is fast approaching, and the market appears to be flooded with buyers.

Let’s take that as our cue to get into how every team can make out well.

Ahead are blueprints for what it would take for the 18 contenders (defined here as any team at or above .500 at the start of play Thursday) to earn “A” grades for the 2016 trade deadline. This involves taking a look at each team’s biggest needs and available assets and determining how (or in one case, if) it should use the latter to fill the former.

To clarify, this is not a road map for all trade-deadline activity. These are individual assessments for each team, so one player can be a fit for multiple teams. And we’re not going to let our imaginations run too wild. We’ll stick to realistic targets and only consider realistic trades. It would be cool to see the Baltimore Orioles trade for Jose Fernandez, but that’s not happening.

The contenders are ordered from worst record to best record. This is where the fun begins.

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Big Papi’s been places. And done things. All-Star Games. Home Run Derbies. World Series. You name it.

But about four months into David Ortiz‘s final major league season, it’s getting hard to ignore the possibility of him doing something he’s never done before: win the Most Valuable Player award.

By my reckoning, this is the only Ortiz-related topic we have yet to cover this season. But there’s a good reason we’ve spilled so much ink on his account. The best time to stop covering the Boston Red Sox‘s longtime designated hitter would be when he stops knocking the crud out of the ball.

He keeps refusing to do that.

Ortiz sure knocked the crud out of the ball when he took Jake Peavy for a ride for his 23rd homer of 2016 Tuesday night. And in Thursday’s 13-2 win over the Minnesota Twins, he did it again with No. 24:

That might not have even been the most impressive home run Ortiz hit Thursday. He also launched a dinger in batting practice that got stuck in Fenway Park’s Pesky Pole. Not so pesky now, are you, pole?

Impressiveness notwithstanding, that long ball was the 40-year-old’s third hit of the night. It raised his slash line to .330/.423/.673 and his OPS to 1.096. By that last number, he’s having the best campaign ever for a 40-year-old. Likewise, this is the best a hitter has ever done in his final season.

“We’re watching history right in front of us nightly,” Red Sox manager John Farrell said after Thursday’s win, per Peter Abraham of the Boston Globe.

There’s no doubt about it. Nor is there any doubt that Ortiz’s final season will be remembered for a long time no matter what happens at the end of it.

We may be inclined to remember it for even longer, though, if he’s given the American League MVP for his troubles. In Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News, at least one person is already leaning that way:

Maybe this isn’t a “hands down” conversation, but it’s definitely a conversation. Jason Mastrodonato of the Boston Herald was also pondering the Ortiz-for-MVP question Thursday night. The bookmakers have been pondering it for longer. According to Bill Reiter of CBS Sports, Ortiz entered the second half with 6-to-1 odds of winning the AL MVP.

The closest Ortiz has come to winning the MVP was a second-place finish in 2005. If nothing else, working in his favor is his 2016 is better than that season. The 1.096 OPS he’s rocking is the highest of his career, topping his previous career high of 1.066 in 2007.

And it’s not just his past performances that look inferior next to his current one. All other 2016 hitter performances do too. As of this writing, the league OPS race isn’t close:

1. David Ortiz: 1.096
2. Josh Donaldson: 1.020

Yes, Ortiz has the advantage of playing half his games at Fenway Park. But adjusted offensive metrics like OPS+ and wRC+ show that doesn’t matter. Even after all things are accounted for, Ortiz is still the best hitter in baseball in both categories.

Offensive production isn’t everything, but it still carries the most weight when it comes to the MVP voting. That’s how Miguel Cabrera beat Mike Trout in 2012 and 2013, and arguably (if you look at the RBI counts) how Donaldson beat Trout last year.

It also helps to play for a winning team. With his Red Sox now the second-best club in the American League behind the Cleveland Indians, Ortiz is doing that, too. And although dominating to this degree at the age of 40 and in his final season doesn’t necessarily make him more “valuable” than the AL’s other top players, it’s a narrative that could help his cause.

But lest anyone think Ortiz’s case for the AL MVP is ironclad, well, it’s not.

Perhaps his biggest problem is the team he plays on might be too good. It always helps a hitter’s cause if it looks like he’s carrying a lineup on his shoulders. It’s hard to make the case Ortiz is doing that. The Red Sox have baseball’s most productive offense by a significant margin. It would be worse without Ortiz, sure, but not outright bad.

And in this case, the “he’s not even the most valuable player on his own team” card is there to be played.

Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts and Jackie Bradley Jr. are also in that discussion. None has been as offensively dominant as Ortiz, but each has been excellent while also contributing on the basepaths and on defense. Ortiz is on the opposite end of “elite” with his baserunning and has yet to play a single inning in the field. He’s been a designated hitter all the way in 2016.

And if anyone’s going to take all-around contributions into account with Betts, Bogaerts or Bradley, they’re obviously going to do it with the other horses in the AL MVP race. Wins above replacement points the arrow at Trout and Donaldson, per Baseball-Reference.com, with Houston‘s Jose Altuve standing close by.

WAR won’t swing the AL MVP vote one way or another all on its own, but it’s safe to say it has some influence in the year 2016. It’s been part of the discussion since Trout v. Cabrera in 2012, and it’s helped create some unlikely MVP candidates in the years since. As Joe Posnanski highlighted on his website, Alex Gordon was one in 2014.

If the all-around excellence of the Red Sox’s lineup doesn’t get Ortiz, his one-dimensionality could. And if that doesn’t, there may be a voter or two who still hasn’t forgiven him for his positive performance-enhancing drug test from 13 years ago.

All this is enough to qualify his MVP case as an uphill battle.

Even still, this may be the best chance Ortiz has ever had at the award. He may not be the league’s best player, but this is the first time he’s been the league’s best hitter. And it’s all in service of not only a really good Red Sox team, but a really cool story as well.

Besides which, there is that nagging suspicion that it’s just not a good idea to doubt Big Papi.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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If you’re already a baseball fan, you’ve long since learned to live with how the sport takes its time. Any given baseball game is a slow burn, and there’s a certain charm to that.

However, it’s doubtful anybody is clambering for games to become even slower burns. Major League Baseball certainly isn’t, which is why it should be afraid of one of the ideas in the air right now.

With the league’s collective bargaining agreement set to expire on December 1, among the topics of discussion between MLB and the MLB Players Association is how to make the season—162 games in 183 days—less of a grind for the players. According to David Lennon of Newsday, shortening the season is one idea. As Jorge L. Ortiz of USA Today reported, others are working more off days into the season or expanding rosters to include more than 25 players.

One senses the union prefers either of the first two ideas. But per ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark, it seems union chief Tony Clark would settle for the third:

Here’s the thing, though: Whereas arranging for fewer games or more off days are merely imperfect ideas, expanding rosters is more like a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

That might be a no-brainer as far as the owners are concerned. Bigger rosters mean more paychecks to sign. In a sport where the average salary is nearly $4.4 million, per the Associated Press, that’s an expensive proposition.

For the union, more players getting paid is obviously a good thing. Plus, there is something to the notion that bigger rosters would lessen the grind. That would make it easier for everyday players to find rest and for managers to require pitchers to throw fewer pitches. Hypothetically, players would be healthier and fresher throughout the season, and thus, the product would be better.

But in reality, the product would be just as likely to get worse. The games themselves might be better played, but they’d also be really, really long.

Baseball games are long enough as is, and they’re trending in the wrong direction to boot.

The progress that initially emerged after MLB implemented new pace-of-play rules for the 2015 season has been halted. As the AP noted (via Mike Axisa of CBS Sports), the average game time increased from two hours and 53 minutes in the first half of the 2015 season to three hours in the second half. According to Anthony Castrovince of MLB.com, the average game time in the first half of 2016 was three hours and 13 minutes.

“Pace of play for me is like dandelions in your front lawn,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said prior to the All-Star Game, per Castrovince. “I just can’t get rid of it.”

One reason for this has nothing to do with roster size: the time in between pitches. According to PITCHf/x data, it dropped from 23.0 seconds in 2014 to 22.1 seconds in 2015. This year, it’s back up to 22.6. 

An issue that larger rosters would worsen, however, is bullpen strategy. Managers have been asking more and more of their bullpens in recent years, and bullpen usage is spiking big-time in 2016:

This is partially due to the return of high-powered offenses. Beginning in 2010, starting pitchers enjoyed a nice six-year window in which they had their way with hitters. But this year, they’re issuing more walks and surrendering a lot more home runs.

This is also a continuation of a more overarching trend. We know—courtesy of Jonah Keri and Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight—that modern bullpens are using more relievers to handle more innings. This is an era of bullpen specialization, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Even if rosters were only expanded from 25 to, say, 27 or 28 players, most managers would likely use the extra two or three roster spots on relief pitchers. The result would be something akin to games in September, when expanded rosters lead to bigger bullpens. Those lead to more pitching changes, which lead to longer games.

AJ Cassavell broke down the gory details at Sports on Earth last year: “From March to August of last season, only 2 percent of games saw a team use at least eight pitchers. In September, that number skyrocketed to 7 percent. As a result, the chances of a game hitting the three-hour mark also went up by about 5 percent.”

A manager could just as easily expand his bench rather than his bullpen, but that wouldn’t necessarily make things easier. It may not take as long to introduce a pinch hitter as it does a new pitcher, but what about the new pitcher to face the pinch hitter?

Of course, it’s not a given any of this would alienate baseball’s most committed fans. Although it’s unlikely many of them actually want slower games, hardcore fans could probably live with them if the trade-off was healthier, fresher players playing in more intricate games.

Casual fans would presumably be less enthused, though. Worse, longer games would strike a blow to MLB’s ongoing effort to reel in younger fans. Baseball’s audience skews old, as Mark Fisher of the Washington Post noted last April, and Manfred sees fixing that and hurrying things up as being joined at the hip.

“The issue of attracting a younger audience and a pace of game is related,” he told reporters last year.

It might not be a stone-cold given that pace of play is the key to attracting younger fans. But since baseball is having trouble hooking them with longer and more plodding games, it’s not a good idea to make games even longer and more plodding.

This is not to suggest players should just suck it up and deal with the grind as is.

Anybody can make a quip about them being paid good money to do so, but no amount of money is going to soften the punishment of playing 162 games in 183 days. Especially not in this day and age. It was hard for players to get through the season when they could take all of the performance-enhancing drugs they wanted. At a time when they can no longer do that, it’s even harder.

But the idea should be to lessen the grind without making the overall product less appealing. Adding more off days would be an OK way to do that. Shortening the season would be a downright good way to do that. It would allow players to stay fresh, and there wouldn’t be the same early- and late-season weather concerns associated with the idea for more off days.

Either is a tough sell for the players. But since they still have four months to make their pitch, nothing should be ruled out.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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Evan Longoria signed an extension with the Tampa Bay Rays as soon as he arrived in the majors in 2008. And then another in 2012. Clearly, both sides want this partnership to continue for the long haul.

But it’s time for Longo to go.

This leads us to a trade “rumor” that seemed to come out of nowhere. Jon Paul Morosi of MLB.com reported Monday that the Rays have opened up trade discussions with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Their big boss is Andrew Friedman, who used to run things in Tampa Bay. He’s now the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations. 

Morosi put one and one together and wondered aloud: “The next question then is the precise nature of those talks between the Dodgers and Rays—and if Evan Longoria, Tampa Bay’s three-time All-Star third baseman, is part of them.”

There are quotes around the word rumor up above because it isn’t so much a trade rumor as it is a trade thought. And indications are it’s not going to lead to anything. Morosi wrote there’s a “low probability” of Longo ending up in Los Angeles before the Aug. 1 non-waiver trade deadline. Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times echoed that. So did Chris Cotillo of SB Nation.

It would indeed be hard for the Rays to say goodbye to Longoria. The 30-year-old has been a great player for them for years and is playing the part once again in 2016. He entered Tuesday’s 10-1 win over the Colorado Rockies with an .881 OPS and 21 homers. He added No. 22 in spectacular fashion:

Beyond still being productive, Longoria is also relatively affordable. The second contract extension he signed in 2012 doesn’t actually begin until next year, but it only guarantees him $99 million over six years. If he were a free agent this winter, he’d probably find at least that on the open market.

The Rays also have some time before the prospect of trading Longoria gets complicated. He doesn’t gain 10-and-5 rights and the power to veto any trade until April 2018. That gives them this winter and all of next year to trade him if they so desire. 

Just because time isn’t a factor, however, doesn’t mean the timing isn’t right.

No matter which way you look at it, the Rays are not in a good place. Their 36-57 record puts them in last place by plenty in the AL East and also all but guarantees their third straight losing season. After four playoff trips in six years between 2008 and 2013, they’re back to being an afterthought.

And they’re not in a good position to pull out of this tailspin anytime soon. 

The Rays aren’t going to buy their way out of their troubles. Topkin heard from Rays owner Stuart Sternberg last December that the Rays are still “a few years” away from a rich new TV deal. If winning couldn’t get the locals to show up to Tropicana Field, losing sure as heck won’t.

As Dan Szymborski wrote in ESPN.com’s MLB future power rankings, this makes the Rays dependent on a farm system that’s presently not strong enough for the task of rebuilding the club. Baseball America ranked it at No. 13 coming into the year and put just three Rays prospects in its midseason top 100.

Ideally, a Longoria trade would allow the Rays to address both problems: prospects for their farm system and a whole bunch of payroll flexibility to one day lock them up.

In a vacuum, a fair trade arguably involves a contender taking on the remainder of Longoria’s contract and nothing else. Although $99 million doesn’t sound like too much money, it’s a figure he’s unlikely to outperform. He is on the wrong side of 30, you know.

But on this summer’s market, it’s easy to imagine a needy contender being willing to sweeten the deal. The Dodgers aren’t the only club that could use a third base upgrade. Also on that list is their biggest rival, the San Francisco Giants, as well as the Cleveland Indians and New York Mets.

Of course, what will be a weak free-agent market could allow the Rays to find just as sweet a deal for Longoria this winter. Morosi seemed to recognize that, writing “the discussion of Longoria will be more worthwhile in November.”

What the Rays have no guarantee of, however, is if Longoria will look as appealing this winter as he does right now.

Yes, he’s having a great season. But it’s coming on the heels of two just OK seasons in 2014 and 2015. He only posted a .744 OPS and clubbed 43 homers. Though his turnaround this season has occurred mainly in the power department, Neil Weinberg of FanGraphs broke down how Longo has had to sacrifice contact and use of the whole field to make it happen.

If pitchers adjust, his success with that approach could be short-lived. Or, a regression in the final two months of the season could come from natural causes. At 30 and with quite a few miles on his body, an injury or a slump wrecking Longo’s season wouldn’t be shocking.

The whole situation is reminiscent of the one the Rockies were in with Troy Tulowitzki last season. The Rockies had been adamant about keeping him in the past, and Tulowitzki himself definitely didn’t want to be traded, as he indicated in an interview with Bob Nightengale of USA Today back in February. But the timing was right, so there he went.

The Rockies saved some money in that deal and also got a pretty good prospect in right-hander Jeff Hoffman. Had they not made it, well, look at Tulowitzki now. He’s had his moments with the Toronto Blue Jays, but he has mostly battled bad health and up-and-down production. If these problems had occurred in Colorado instead, the Rockies might be stuck with him.

Trading Longo would be no more pleasant for the Rays than trading Tulo was for the Rockies. But with his value high and their present and future looking grim, now’s the time to make that call.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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Let’s hear it for Michael Fulmer. The Detroit Tigers rookie right-hander entered 2016 with relatively little hype but is now charging toward the American League Rookie of the Year award with a 2.13 ERA in 14 starts.

It hasn’t been a smooth ride for his fellow rookie pitchers, however. And the more hyped they are, the worse it’s been.

The 2016 season has been a rough one for all pitchers, mind you. Following a six-year run of dominance between 2010 and 2015, the league’s pitchers are struggling to the tune of a 4.20 ERA this year. That’s up from 3.96 last year and way up from 3.74 in 2014.

But rookie pitchers have had it especially bad. They’re rocking a 4.58 ERA, easily the worst for rookie pitchers since the whole pitching-is-king thing began in 2010.

Part of this is due to a fact of life with any rookie pitcher class: There are always going to be no-names who fail to become known names. This year, the list includes the Luis Perdomos, Mike Wrights and and Dillon Overtons of the world.

What’s more surprising is how much the supposed known names have struggled.

This year was supposed to be a good one for rookie arms. Baseball America‘s preseason top 100 prospects featured 13 pitchers in the top 35. The majority of them figured to pitch in the majors sooner rather than later.

Sure enough, there are eight who have to this point. One of them is New York Mets left-hander Steven Matz, who has made good on a promising 2015 debut with a 3.38 ERA in 16 outings.

It’s been a different story for the other seven:

Disclaimer No. 1: This is a mixed bag of sample sizes. Disclaimer No. 2: None of them are big.

Nonetheless, it’s safe to say none of these guys have hit the ground running. That 5.77 ERA makes the 4.58 ERA posted by all rookies look like a welcome sight. And in the case of Blake Snell and Robert Stephenson, solid ERAs aren’t backed up by good peripherals.

It’s not a stuff problem. The group’s collective average of strikeouts per nine innings pitched easily tops the MLB average of 8.1. Furthermore, the average fastball velocity here is 93.1 mph, higher than the MLB average of 92.2.

This shouldn’t be surprising. It usually is the pitching prospects with the best stuff who get the best rankings. Refer back to the individual grades for these guys’ pitches in the Baseball America rankings, and you’ll see quite a few marks toward the top of the 20-80 scouting scale.

But all it takes to have good stuff is a good arm. It’s a lot harder to master control. To wit, only one of these seven has done better than the league average of 3.1 walks per nine innings. And collectively, that 4.6 BB/9 rate is what they call “no bueno.”

This is most disappointing for Julio Urias, Jose Berrios and Cody Reed, who came billed as having good stuff and good control. In each case, their minor league walk rates were there to back that up.

However, it’s not just in the majors that Berrios has struggled with his control. He’s following up a 1.7 BB/9 at Triple-A last year with a 3.2 BB/9 at Triple-A in 2016. Lucas Giolito’s control has also taken a turn for the worse. Snell, Stephenson and Tyler Glasnow, meanwhile, are staying true to track records of substandard control.

As such, five of this not-so-magnificent seven arguably weren’t ready to pitch in the majors yet. If nothing else, that’s a reminder that deciding when young pitchers are ready is a total crapshoot.

“Young pitchers, you have to suck it up and get through it and hope they all mesh at the same time,” Baltimore Orioles skipper Buck Showalter told Tim Britton for Baseball Prospectus. “Some of them don’t. Nobody’s that good to say, ‘This is exactly what this guy is going to be’ and try to smugly act like it. Evaluation is an educated guess, is what it is.”

Making matters worse is that this is a bad year to try to get away with subpar control. The league’s walk rate of 3.1 per nine innings is up from 2.9 in each of the last two years, and that’s not an accident.

Courtesy of Baseball Savant, we can see umpires are remaining consistent with strike calls in the zone (Z-Strike%) but that they’re being less generous with calls outside the strike zone (O-Strike%):

Umpires started getting less generous outside the zone in 2015 and have doubled down in 2016. That may or may not have something to do with pressure from on high.

Either way, the message is clear: If you want strikes, you have to hit the strike zone. By and large, the not-so-magnificent seven aren’t doing that. While the rest of the league is hitting the zone 45.5 percent of the time, they’re at only 43.1 percent. They’re proving they still need the control to match their stuff.

Also making matters worse is that hitters are no longer intimidated by good stuff. Despite the fact that strikeouts are up, home runs are also up. Way up. The league is averaging 1.15 home runs per game, making 2016 the second dinger-iest season in history after 2000.

Urias and Snell notwithstanding, home runs have been a huge problem for the rookie seven. One cause is their reliance on fastballs, which is a dangerous proposition this year. The league is throwing 56 percent fastballs and giving up a .458 slugging percentage on them, up from .441 last year. For our seven, it’s 59 percent and a .551 slugging percentage.

If you’re into conspiracy theories, the ball may also be different from what these guys are used to in the minors. Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred doesn’t want anyone believing there are juiced balls in play in the majors, but at least one smart person believes something’s up.

Here’s what Hardball Times analyst Jon Roegele wrote to Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports in May: “I couldn’t find anything to describe that amount of HR/offensive change, as far as weather, strike zone, where pitchers were pitching, etc. I suspected that they changed something with the balls after the All-Star break last year as nothing else in the data could explain it.”

If it is in fact true that the balls are juiced, I only have one thing to say: Boom, nailed it.

Whatever the case, the pitching environment in 2016 is starkly different from what it was a couple of years ago. As recently as 2014, the strike zone was big and hitters weren’t so powerful. But now, the strike zone is small and hitters are very powerful.

This is creating a challenging situation for all pitchers. It makes sense that it would create an even more challenging situation for rookie pitchers, and an especially challenging situation for rookie pitchers whose talent is impressive but still on the raw side.

Nobody should be giving up on Urias, Giolito, Snell, Glasnow, Berrios, Stephenson or Reed. All they’ve made is a bad first impression. Nobody’s here to say that will last forever.

Rather, let’s look on the bright side: From here, the only way to go is up.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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