East League: Flores, Mets fly to tie at top

New York Mets second baseman Wilmer Flores, all but unknown a week ago, has become a national folk hero this week, first for his public display of sadness when he thought the Mets traded him, then for beating the Washington Nationals almost by himself Friday night when it turned out the Mets didn't trade him. Flores pushed the Mets back into a tie on top of the East League.

Wilmer Flores must be happier than ever that he stayed with the New York Mets (slgckgc/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

First place in the East League is on the line this weekend in New York, where the Washington Nationals took a one-game lead over the New York Mets into three games at CitiField.

The Mets brought the East League back to a tie with a 2-1 win in 12 innings, punctuated by a walk-off homer for Wilmer Flores, the man who's tears filled television screens earlier this week after it had been thought he was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers in a deal that would have brought the Mets Carlos Gomez.

The television cameras caught Flores in tears Wednesday night as he stood on the field. The news had gotten around that he had been traded. In the seventh inning that night, with the Mets trailing, 7-3, Flores went to the plate and received a standing ovation from the Mets fans.

Flores entered Friday's game batting .249 with 10 homers, which doesn't make him even close to being the worst hitter the Mets send up there. But he became a sympathetic figure on the night when he really wasn't traded.

The deal fell through because, according to reports, the Mets were concerned about Gomez's health.

Subsequently, the Brewers traded Gomez to the Houston Astros and the Mets addressed their need for power hitting with a deal for outfielder Yoenis Cespedes from the Detroit Tigers.

So, Flores rose Friday night from sympathetic figure to hero, homering to win the game. Earlier, Flores made a highlight reel diving stop at second base in the top of the first inning, then he hit a two-out RBI single in the fourth inning.

Mets starting pitcher Matt Harvey went 7 1/3 innings and allowed one run, giving up five hits and striking out nine batters. Washington starter Gio Gonzalez fell to his nibbling ways, leaving with two out in the fifth despite having allowed only one run. At that point, Gonzalez had thrown 105 pitches.

The Mets victory stopped a trend during the last six weeks in which the Nationals gained 5½  games as they played a heavy schedule in the East League and the Mets played mostly outside the East. From July 18 until Friday, the Nats were 12-6 in the East, compared with 1-6 for the Mets.

Lester, trade loom large as A's straggle to playoffs

Tuesday's American League wildcard game is a beauty, with the Oakland Athletics sending Jon Lester against the Kansas City Royals and James Shields. Both arrived in controversial trades. The Shields deal already has worked out for the Royals, and Lester still has a chance to save his trade if he is the postseason pitcher that he always has been.

The Oakland Athletics acquired Jon Lester from the Boston Red Sox to get them through the postseason. Tuesday night in Kansas City, Lester has a chance to do it (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Generic 2.0 license).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The backdrop couldn't be more different for the Oakland Athletics and Kansas City Royals approaching their wildcard playoff game Tuesday night in Kansas City.

For the Royals, this playoff turn is their first in 30 years, since the real glory days, 1985 and its world championship. They are celebrating. The Royals have fought inch by inch to become a playoff team in the last couple of years, surviving to the last week last season and actually making a bid for the American League Central this year before settling in as the lead wildcard.

For the Athletics, an unimaginable nightmare continues. The Athletics lost 30 of their last 46 games, blowing a six-game lead in the AL West to the surging Angels, who won it going away. The Athletics, far from their days with the best record in the game, finished 10 games down to the Angels and fought to the final day to secure the final spot in the playoffs. So, the Athletics enter this game as a sinking ship. And their playoff history isn't glorious. The A's have been to the playoffs seven times in the 21st century, and won only one playoff series.

Many will tell you that the A's are where they are because of a certain trade they made on July 31. For the sake of Oakland general manager Billy Beane, we'll grant that saying so is a slight over-simplification, even though we never liked the trade for the Athletics. But it's not just a slight over-simplification. It's premature.

The Athletics are hanging this game on Jon Lester, who is in the cross hairs of a tortured narrative. Lester has done a fine job for the A's (2.35 ERA in 11 starts), and no one should blame him because the A's traded Yoenis Cespedes to get him in the deal that has taken a huge piece from the Athletics batting order. But it comes down to games like this for Lester, because games like this are why the A's got him. To some degree, Lester can ratify a very controversial trade for Billy Beane by coming through in this game.

And Lester is uniquely equipped to do it. He has pitched better against the Royals than against any other team in his career. The Royals are batting .196 with one homer against Lester in 353 plate appearances going back to 2006. Lester's record against the Royals is 9-3 with a 1.84 ERA in 13 starts (88 innings) with a WHIP of 1.068. The A's won only two of seven meetings with the Royals this year, and Lester pitched both of the wins, which went 8-3 and 11-3. They were the only games against the Royals in which the A's scored more than three runs. The Royals shut them out twice.

Lester has a 2.11 ERA in 11 starts and two relief appearances in the postseason. So, the A's have the right guy pitching in this game. One hopes. Because if Lester isn't the guy to pitch in this game, then this season will live in infamy for the Athletics. The Cespedes-for-Lester deal will go down as one of the biggest trading deadline blunders ever. Can the pitcher for whom Beane sacrificed so much offense do the job that he was brought in to do?

If Lester is the right guy, then he pitches the A's through Kansas City and then, all of a sudden, they're in a five-game series with the Angels, and you know the A's would relish that after how these last couple of months have gone. Lester can come back for Game 3 in that series, and there he would work in another critical moment. After what the Angels did to the A's last time they met, sweeping them four in Anaheim and blowing them right out of the division race ... these are games that the A's will want to play. And if the A's can get past the Angels, they will be lined up for two starts from Lester in the American League Championship Series.

The book is closed on Cespedes for this year. He has one more year on his contract with the Boston Red Sox, and he just drove in 100 runs for the first time. The Red Sox made out well, and they can take a crack at Lester on the free-agent market.

As far as the A's are concerned, the facts aren't all in. The trade certainly blew up on them down the back stretch as the A's continuously lost two out of every three games because they couldn't score. They're worse off for going in as a wildcard instead of the league's top seed. But all of that can be overcome with some pitching in the postseason. We still think the A's won't hit enough to go very far. But if Lester is everything that Beane traded for, then he will win some key games coming up and the A's could last for a while.

Some believe the Lester trade should somehow be compared with the deal that brought James Shields to the Royals, for whom he is the starting pitcher in this wildcard game. You can argue for their similarity, if you'd like, but the only similarity we see is that they are both trades. They are trades made by very different clubs for very different purposes.

Unlike the Athletics, who traded for Lester so they can make a big move in the playoffs, the Royals acquired Shields because they just needed someone to anchor their pitching rotation and help them contend for the playoffs. The Royals have never developed that guy and general manager Dayton Moore, entering the final year of his contract, paid big for Shields last spring.

Moore sent Wil Myers, Jake Odorizzi, Patrick Leonard and Mike Montgomery to the Tampa Bay Rays in December 2012 and brought back Shields, Wade Davis and Elliot Johnson. The Royals were pretty roundly panned for the trade. With only one winning season since 1993 as they made the trade, the Royals were finally getting it right with player development. It didn't seem sensible for the Royals to deal away promising players when they still appeared a couple of years from contending. Dealing a big piece of long-term future for a short-term future that wasn't promising, the trade smacked of desperation for a general manager in the last year of his contract.

But when we look at the Royals now, we can see how the pieces fit. The Royals have plenty of players, many of them quite talented, who can run out to the outfield, first base or designated hitter. They can't get Alex Gordon, Jerrod Dyson, Lorenzo Cain, Nori Aoki, Eric Hosmer, Billy Butler and Josh Willingham all into the same lineup. Two of those guys have to sit. We can't say the Royals are better off without Myers, who won the American League Rookie of the Year in 2013 with a 131 OPS-plus, but they aren't scrambling to fill his position, either.

The true gold in this trade is the pitcher Moore thought he was getting, because that's the pitcher who arrived. Shields has made that trade work for Moore by giving the Royals presence and credibility for their pitching staff. In two years with the Royals, Shields has taken 34 starts each time, throwing 228 2/3 and 227 innings for ERAs of 3.15 and 3.21.

If all the Royals got in the trade were Shields, it was worth making. The Royals could not have made this long climb to the playoffs without him. The club definitely improved around Shields, but if the Royals hadn't made that move for a No. 1 starter, they would be the Milwaukee Brewers, sitting at home.

Then the Royals made the trade even better for themselves by figuring out what to do with Davis. The Royals originally tried Davis as a starter, and it wasn't for him. The Rays had already reached that conclusion, which is why all 54 of his appearances for them in 2012 came from the bullpen, but the Royals had to see for themselves. They saw a guy who posted a 5.32 ERA and couldn't get past the third inning.

Now Davis is the eighth-inning hold guy, throwing an ERA of 1.00. With Kelvin Herrera throwing 100 miles per hour in the seventh, Davis tossing a 1.00 in the eighth and Greg Holland throwing 46 saves in the ninth, the Royals are well set on the days when Shields doesn't pitch eight or nine innings.

Whatever happens in the wildcard game, the Shields trade already is a success for the Royals. They finally made it to the postseason. For the A's, an old postseason hand who barely made it to the playoffs this time, their trade to bring in Lester hasn't been everything they would want. And it might not ever be. But it still can become good enough rather quickly.

A's made the trades, Angels made the pitches

The Angels put together a huge four-game sweep of the Oakland Athletics at Angel Stadium during Labor Day weekend, increasing their lead in the American League West to five games. The Angels heroes were pitchers, none of whom arrived with any fanfare this season.

Angels pitcher Jered Weaver doesn't have his fastball, but he has guts and guile, which was enough to defeat the heralded Oakland Athletics acquisition, Jon Lester, in a key game during the past weekend (Keith Allison, (UC International crop)/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The Angels begin the rest of their life today after building a five-game lead in the American League West with a remarkable four-game sweep of the Oakland Athletics at Angel Stadium during Labor Day weekend.

And if it wasn't the Angels who made such bold and celebrated moves for pitching this summer, it was the Angels who received pitching when it really counted. Either that, or the A's didn’t receive hitting when it really counted. We'll say it's the first, but we don't rule out the second.

It has become tiring to labor over the grand error made by Oakland general manager Billy Beane when he traded his left fielder and the anchor of his batting order, Yoenis Cespedes, to the Boston Red Sox for left-hander Jon Lester, who he really didn’t need. But the weekend in Anaheim brought that error into the sharpest possible focus.

The series began with the only truly dramatic game in the bunch, a 4-3 Angels victory in 10 innings on Aug. 28. The A's entered the night one game down in the division and had their best pitcher, Sonny Gray, on the mound. But Gray came a bit unglued in the second inning. Josh Hamilton, Howie Kendrick and Erick Aybar began the inning with consecutive singles, the last of those driving in Hamilton for the game's first run. Then, Gray threw two wild pitches to place Kendrick on third and Aybar on second. A two-out single by Gordon Beckham drove in both runners and gave the Angels a 3-0 lead.

The Angels, countering with struggling left-hander C.J. Wilson, held that lead until the fifth, when the A's began hitting line drives. A leadoff single by Brandon Moss, followed by Geovany Soto's double, gave the A's their first run, then Coco Crisp hit a line-drive single to knock in Soto. In the sixth, the A's tied the game, 3-3, on solo homer by Josh Donaldson.

So, it became a battle of bullpens. And the Angels, who have been rebuilding their bullpen throughout the season, won. Five Angels relievers combined for 4 1/3 scoreless, hitless innings. The Angels won it in short order in the bottom of the tenth against Oakland reliever Ryan Cook. Albert Pujols led off with a walk and took third as he hustled out a single to center field by Hamilton. Kendrick hit a sacrifice fly to right field to drive in Pujols.

We witnessed that night the start of a remarkable occurrence  – the first four out of 29 consecutive scoreless innings by the Athletics, the AL's top scoring team, against an Angels rotation that is aged, unheralded, under-manned – everything but a sure thing. 

The second game, played on Aug. 29, was the definitive game. Not quite as improbable as the third game, perhaps, but what the second game said is in the standings today. The A's sent Lester, the guy for whom they spent heavily to win just this game, against Angels right-hander Jered Weaver, who is doing it all now with guts and guile. It was barely a fair fight.

The A's didn't reach base until Donaldson hit a double with two out in the fourth. They didn't get another hit until Sam Fuld's single with one out in the sixth. By then, the Angels had all the runs they needed, those coming on Chris Inannetta's two-run homer with no one out in the fifth after Aybar led off against Lester with a single. 

When the Angels batted in the bottom of the sixth, we could see the A's come apart at the seams. Watching the wheels come off of a baseball team is never a pretty sight, but the A's flailed all the way through August and it was just a matter of time. That time came with two out and nobody on, when Donaldson, the A's best player, made a fielding error allowing Kendrick to reach. Next, Eric Sogard, playing out of position at shortstop, made a throwing error, moving Kendrick to third and allowing the hitter, David Freese, to reach second base. Aybar then dropped a bunt in front of Lester and reached first base to load the bases. Flustered, Lester walked Iannetta for force in a run and give the Angels a 3-0 lead.

Pujols homered to make it 4-0 after seven innings, at which point Weaver departed, having allowed only three hits. Joe Smith and Huston Street finished out a 4-0 win the the Angels, giving them a robust three-game lead.

The importance of that game for the Angels can hardly be over-stated. They went to the third game of the series now assured that they would end the series with the division lead, even though their pitching plan for the third game – "the Garrett Richards start" that they will forever be trying to fill – was not one to inspire great confidence. That plan was Cory Rasmus, a reliever not even approximately stretched out for a start. The A's would go with Jeff Samardzija, famously acquired from the Chicago Cubs this summer.

No one could have or should have predicted that the team pitching Rasmus would beat the team pitching Samardzija. But the team pitching Samardzija doesn't have any hitters now. Missing Cespedes is some of it, but not all. The A's three-headed catcher (Derek Norris, John Jaso and Steven Vogt) has hit a bit over its head. Donaldson still has decent numbers for the season (.259/.348/.471/.819), but he hasn't been a force since May 30, which ended with him at .285/.379/.561/.940. 

Then there's Crisp, the key and unsung player of the A's surge in 2012 and their continued excellence in 2013. The A's committed themselves to Crisp as their leadoff hitter and center fielder on June 14, 2012, putting Cespedes in left field. Crisp was batting .172 with a .466 OPS. The A's were 28-35. From that point forward, Crisp batted .296 with a .857 OPS. The A's went 66-33, charging from five games back with 10 days left in the season to overtake the Texas Rangers for the AL West title.

The 2013 season was more of the same. The A's spent the entire season either in front or very close to it and easily won the division by five games. Crisp, the leadoff center fielder, had a solid year, if not great, tacking up a 4.3 WAR. He led the club with 93 runs scored and gave the club a solid all-around presence.

Beane has mentioned, correctly, that the A's already were struggling offensively when they traded Cespedes at this year's non-waiver trading deadline, which further mystifies the Cespedes trade. But there's no mystery that the A's decline offensively can be indexed some bit to Crisp. From July 5 to today, Crisp is batting .183 with a .559 OPS. The A's actually peaked offensively on June 4 (.253/.340/.421/.761). From that point to now, they are .244/.311/.372/.683.

Perhaps, then, it's not such a huge surprise that eight Angels pitchers, led by a three-inning start by Rasmus, shut the A's out on three hits to beat Samardzija, 2-0. The A's mounted one threat, that against lefty reliever Michael Roth, in the fourth. A walk, a single and an intentional walk loaded the bass, then Athletics manager Bob Melvin pinch-hit right-handed Jonny Gomes for left-handed Josh Reddick and Angels manager Mike Scioscia brought in right-handed Yoslan Herrera for Roth. Herrera induced a ground ball on which Kendrick at second base made an outstanding play for a double play to end the inning.

And with Reddick out of the game, the Athletics were without a left-handed stick who might have punished the ensuing parade of right-handed Angels relievers. The Angels walked out of the game with a 2-0 win no one could have predicted or expected, as well as a four-game lead.

The final game, on Aug. 31, was icing on the cake, an easy 8-1 Angels win behind rookie right-hander Matt Shoemaker, this season's surprise sensation, who improved his marks to 14-4 and a 3.14 ERA with seven innings of five-hit, shutout pitching. The Angels sacked Athletics left-hander Scott Kazmir with six runs in the second inning. The A's finally scored in the eighth. Angels, 8-1.

With only three games left between the Angels and the A's (Sept. 22-24 in Oakland), the Angels now still have a two-game cushion even if the A's win all three, which means the A's still have to be two games better than the Angels against everyone else just to force a one-game playoff for the division title. None of that seems likely to happen, especially after the Angels exploded and the A's imploded during these last four games in Anaheim.

Angels lose Richards, but not division

The Angels apparently will have to compete for the rest of this season without pitching ace Garrett Richards, who went down with a ghastly knee injury Wednesday night in Boston. But they are all but assured of going to the playoffs. And their team to beat in the American League West, the Oakland Athletics, aren't the team they were a month ago.

Angels manager Mike Scioscia will have some juggling to do with his pitching staff for the rest of this season (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Did the Angels lose the American League West Wednesday night?

Well, they won their game Wednesday night, 8-3, on the road against the Boston Red Sox, which increased their division lead over the Oakland Athletics to 1 1/2 games, their largest lead of the season.

They also lost their best pitcher.

The moment Angels right-hander Garrett Richards fell to the ground on his way to first base as he attempted to cover the back end of a double play in the second inning, this club's aspirations appeared to go dark. Richards laid out on the ground clutching his left knee. An object of skeleton that should have been inside his body appeared to protrude outside of his uniform. The club's training staff had to roll him over to get him onto a stretcher, then the stretcher had to be loaded onto a vehicle. 

The Angels already trailed, 2-0, in the bottom of the second inning at Fenway Park against the Red Sox, the last-place club in the American League East. Into the game came Cory Rasmus as the new pitcher. 

And the wheels began to spin. How in the world can the Angels make it through a season-ending injury to their ace pitcher, the hardest throwing right-handed of any starting pitcher in Major League Baseball?

But the Angels have not disappointed us this year, and there's so much to like about this club that it's hard to lose confidence. Even in the midst of that disaster, the Angels came back with a five-run fifth inning to take a 6-3 lead. Rasmus survived 2 1/3 innings without further damage, then Mike Morin tossed a shutout inning, then Fernando Salas, then Kevin Jepsen, then Joe Smith, then Huston Street. And the Angels kept their season moving. 

The Oakland Athletics lost earlier in the day in their own park, 8-4, to the New York Mets. The Athletics are reeling. From the day their general manager, Billy Beane, made the deal that brought him so much praise – the deal that tore the heart out of their everyday lineup in exchange for left-hander Jon Lester from the Red Sox – they are 8-11. 

With Yoenis Cespedes departed for Boston in the trade, the Oakland batting order slashed .224/.299/.344/.643 from Aug. 1-17. Before that trade, the A's slashed .253/.329/.405/.733. The American League this year is slashing .254/.318/.393/.711. With that deal, the A's went from being a much better than average offensive club to being a much worse that average offensive club.

It isn't that Cespedes was enjoying such an awesome season, but he wasn't bad, running a 115 OPS-plus with the A's. Since the deal, his OPS-plus with the Red Sox is only 80. But the man who came back to Oakland in the deal to replace Cespedes as the A's left fielder, Jonny Gomes, is OPS-plussing only 60 for the Athletics. 

Beane really disrupted his club's balance offensively. Before the deal, the Athletics ran out lineups with up to five guys who could hit, meaning four guys who couldn't. With Cespedes gone, they never have more than four players in their lineup who can hit, and sometimes they have even fewer. 

But the Angels now have fewer pitchers, and this is a club that seems to have fewer pitchers every day. They've already lost lefty starter Tyler Skaggs for the season, and they're still waiting for lefty reliever Joe Thatcher to come back from the disabled list. 

But no loss hurts like losing Garrett Richards, who entered Wednesday's game with a 13-4 record and a 2.53 ERA. And as Wednesday night ended, there was no indication of what they can expect from Richards. The club announced during the game that Richards suffered a left patellar injury. The patella is the kneecap.

"It's a significant injury," Angels manager Mike Scioscia repeatedly told reporters after the game.

The big question, of course: How significant? Can Richards be back in time for the postseason? 

No one knows.

But there's a lot else no one knows, which is why we can't answer the question with which we began, the question of whether or not the Angels lost the AL West simply because they lost their ace pitcher. 

The one source of help on which the Angels can not depend is a trade that would depend upon some pitcher clearing waivers. Because the Angels, at 75-50, have the best record in the Major Leagues, they are last in turn on the waiver wire. Any club that wants to stop the Angels from acquiring a pitcher can simply stake a claim on that pitcher. Reports tell us that Texas Rangers right-hander Yu Darvish and New York Mets left-hander Jon Niese have cleared waivers, but those would be hard deals to make.

In the minors, the Angels have little to trust. Their only pitcher at Triple-A Salt Lake who even conceivably belongs in a poor big league rotation is lefty Wade LeBlanc, who couldn't last more than one inning for the pitching-starved New York Yankees after they took him from the Angels on waivers in June. The Yankees released LeBlanc and the Angels signed him two days later. They might be glad now that they did.

At Double-A Arkansas, the Angels have 24-year-old lefty Michael Roth, who is 10-6 with a 2.82 ERA. Chances are, he gets the start the next time Richards' turn comes up.

Three more items to consider:

First, we don't know that Richards would have been the same pitcher down the stretch that he'd been approaching the stretch. He had never, in any professional season, thrown 160 innings. When he went down Wednesday night, Richards was on 169 1/3 innings. The Angels never had any guarantee of how well Richards would pitch in September with all those added innings on his arm, though they would much rather have found out. Either way, it was unknown how Richards would respond to the added innings, and we can't assume that the pitcher they've lost is the pitcher we've seen all season.

Second, the Angels almost certainly are in the playoffs, already. With 37 games left in their season, they are 7 1/2 games ahead of the AL's sixth-place team, the Seattle Mariners. If the Angels (75-50) go 18-19 the rest of the way, the Mariners (68-58) would have to go 26-10 and the fifth-place Detroit Tigers (68-56) would have to go 26-12 the rest of the way to knock the Orange County club out of the postseason. We have little hope, after watching Richards go down, that he will pitch any time before next spring, but the Angels do have that much cushion, just in case there is enough time to bring him back for the playoffs. 

Third, Athletics aren't 10-feet tall anymore. They were 59-36 at the All-Star break, a .621 winning percentage, which projects to 101 wins over a full season. Since the All-Star break, they are 15-16. For the remainder of the season, there is no scheduling advantage, to speak of, either way. The Angels and the A's have 10 games left against each other, starting this weekend with three in Oakland. The Angels have seven games left against Seattle, and the A's have six. Every other remaining opponent for the Angels and A's this season has a losing record, except for this: The Angels have one game against the Cleveland Indians (64-61) and three against the Miami Marlins (63-63).

Thus, the Angels didn't lose their division Wednesday night. They did lose their best pitcher. And they still have enough to win their division without him. Which doesn't mean they will.

Editor's note: All numbers in this piece are from Baseball-Reference.com.

Is the extra pitcher worth it?

Like the Oakland Athletics, the Detroit Tigers added a premium pitcher to a deep rotation at the non-waiver trading deadline and took a player out of their daily lineup to do it. Again, the questions about the Athletics' deal apply to the Tigers, even if Austin Jackson isn't as big of a loss as Yoenis Cespedes.

The Detroit Tigers made a deep starting rotation deeper by acquiring David Price from the Tampa Bay Rays. Is it worthwhile to deepen a deep starting rotation for the postseason (Keith Allison [original], UCinternational [crop]/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)?


By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The non-waiver trading deadline passed last week with quite a lot of smoke. Where there's smoke, there ought to be fire, but it remains to be seen if any of these deals will wind up so hot.

We've already discussed the deadline deal between the Oakland Athletics and the Boston Red Sox, in which left-handed pitcher Jon Lester and left fielder Yoenis Cespedes switched coasts. We don't believe it will add up as a plus for the Athletics, who added the pitcher at the expense of the mid-lineup hitter.

Another deal in much the same spirit occurred between three clubs – the Detroit Tigers, the Tampa Bay Rays and the Seattle Mariners. At the All-Star break, the Rays were nine games down in a division without a great club, which led us to believe the Rays would ride it out and take a crack at winning. But Thursday's three-wheeled deal perhaps was more than the Rays could refuse. They gave up left-hander David Price, their top pitcher, who wound up with the Detroit Tigers. The Rays brought in middle infielder Nick Franklin from the Mariners, while lefty Drew Smyly and 18-year-old Class A shortstop Willy Adames came in from Detroit. The Mariners bagged center fielder Austin Jackson from the Tigers to complete the trade.

Again, we scratch our heads. This time, it's about the Tigers, though not so much as we scratched them over Oakland's acquisition of Lester. The Tigers wound up giving quite a lot for Price – a good starting pitcher, their center fielder and a good prospect. But the Tigers already had depth in their starting rotation, more than any other club in the American League, including Oakland, and it is puzzling that they would pay the price they paid to add depth to a deep rotation when the postseason specifically doesn't reward depth in the starting rotation. The Tigers already had Justin Verlander (9-9, 4.79, 0.4 WAR), Max Scherzer (13-3, 3.27, 4.2), Rick Porcello (12-5, 3.24, 3.7) and Anibal Sanchez (7-5, 3.57, 2.4), along with Smyly (6-9, 3.93, 1.8). They have replaced Smyly with Price (11-8, 3.11, 2.7) at the immediate cost of Jackson (.730 OPS, 1.8 WAR).

A fourth consecutive American League Central title for the Tigers is all but a fait accompli. They entered Monday's games with a five-game lead on the Kansas City Royals and no one seriously believes the second-place club here can mount a challenge unless the Tigers were to entirely collapse. In any case, the Tigers are too far along to be selling out for division championships. They're trying to make that step they haven't made since 1984. They're trying to win the World Series.

So, this trade, for the Tigers, is about the playoffs. And the same kind of analysis that we applied to the Athletics applies to the Tigers. We can figure now that the front three pitchers for the Tigers during the postseason will be Price, Verlander and Scherzer. The fourth man will be Porcello. In that case, Sanchez becomes a non-entity during the postseason.

Again, we raise the question: Is it worth it for the Tigers to add Price to their postseason rotation if it means 1) Fewer starts for a fine pitcher in Porcello; 2) No starts for a fine pitcher in Sanchez, and; 3) Jackson has to be replaced in the every day lineup by someone who isn't as good?

Price is a terrific pitcher. No one can or should dispute that. The question isn't whether Price is worth having, but whether he's worth having for a club that already had enough good starters already, and whether it's worth Price to take starts away from, for example, Porcello or Sanchez. And the Tigers also have deprived themselves of a decent center fielder whose offense and defense will not be easily replaced.

We've been rather hammering on this lately. We argued on July 31 that the Dodgers should not make this sort of trade, we argued on Aug. 1 that the Athletics should not have made that sort of trade, and we argue here, today, that the Tigers should not have made this sort of trade.

We have here two instances of the wrong kind of club making the wrong kind of trade. To credit Oakland general manager Billy Beane and Detroit general manager David Dombrowski, at least they traded for top quality pitchers, unlike so many general managers we've seen at trade deadline. The criticism here is that both clubs already had enough quality and depth in their rotations to prosper in the postseason, so they ended up paying heavily for entities they do not need, and to the detriment of their offensive and defensive platoons.

The good news for the Tigers is that Price is under contract for 2015, so, unlike Oakland's deal for Lester, this one isn't a rental. The Tigers have Price in 2015, and they can build their 2015 club with that in mind.

As always, baseball is unpredictable. Among the game's pleasures is that it invites us to make predictions about the future, then, in time, tells us if our predictions are on target.

In the weeks leading to the trade deadline, for example, it required absolutely no ingenuity to find commentaries bemoaning that expanded playoffs and recent changes to draft compensation rules were killing this non-waiver trading period. In July, it turned out, five players were traded right as or after they were named All-Stars in their leagues – Cespedes, Price, Lester, Jeff Samardzija (from the Chicago Cubs to Oakland) and Huston Street (from the San Diego Padres to the Angels).

Lots of interesting changes here. We're predicting that the Angels will emerge from the clearing smoke better than anyone involved in an All-Star trade, that the Tigers didn't help themselves and that the Athletics hurt themselves. Perhaps the next few months will prove us wrong. Or not.

By default, Angels win AL West trade deadline

The Oakland Athletics over-reached at the trade deadline by dealing Yoenis Cespedes to the Boston Red Sox for Jon Lester. To marginally improve their pitching rotation, the A's tore a huge piece out of their offensive and defensive teams. The Angels, who made less spectacular moves to address a real need, stand to benefit.

Yoenis Cespedes on Jackie Robinson Day in 2012. With Thursday's deadline trade, Cespedes now is subtracted from the Oakland Athletics batting order (hj_west [original], UCinternational [crop]/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

It's certainly an odd state of discourse when the team with the best record in baseball trades its best player and the move is widely praised as a sign that said team is "all in" for a bid to win the World Series.

This journal holds a contrary opinion of Thursday's biggest deadline trade, in which the Oakland Athletics sent left fielder Yoenis Cespedes and a 2015 Competitive Balance Draft pick to the Boston Red Sox for left-hander Jon Lester and left fielder Jonny Gomes. We believe the happiest people in baseball right now, perhaps even the winners of the mid-summer trading season, are the squires of Anaheim, who not only hauled nicely by themselves, but watched their upstate rivals actually make themselves less potent.

The Los Angeles Angels now are two games behind the Athletics in the American League West, but these are the two clubs with the best records in the Major Leagues, and their race to determine which will open the playoffs in a best-of-five series and which will enter a one-game wildcard game stands to be the hottest of the next two months.

To this day, Oakland general manager Billy Beane hasn't won the World Championship any more times than anyone else in the world, and we suspect it will remain that way when all the shouting ends in October. There's no question that Lester, now 10-7 with a 2.52 ERA, makes the front of the Oakland pitching rotation stronger. The Athletics also augmented their rotation, though not really all that much, with their trade earlier in July to bring in pitchers Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel for Dan Straily and minor leaguers Billy McKinney and Addison Russell.

Looking at the Oakland rotation now, we might set it up with Lester (3.0 WAR in 2014) in front, followed by Sonny Gray (3.0), Scott Kazmir (3.3), Samardzija (2.2 with the Cubs and 0.5 with the A's) and Jesse Chavez (1.1), which leaves out Hammel (3.3 with the Cubs and -0.9 with the A's). That's if they maximally use all the pitchers who they have picked up in their July trades. Just looking at WAR values, they're better off going through the regular season than when they began 2014 with a rotation of Gray, Kazmir, Jesse Chavez (1.1), Straily (-0.2) and Tommy Milone (0.8). Basically, two wins better over two-thirds of a regular season, and another win better if that holds in the final third.

During the postseason, though, when rotation depth isn't such an advantage, it's a different story. For a club trying to win in the postseason, power pitching is indispensable. Rotation depth is not. Indeed, rotation depth is little if any advantage. That's why we did not advocate that the Dodgers trade prospects just so they could have a stronger No. 4 or No. 5 starter. It just doesn't help. Your club really needs three strong starters. Your No. 4 probably gets one start in a seven-game series. Your No. 5 doesn't appear at all. And, should the management decide to use Nos. 4 and 5 more than that in the postseason, then it is taking starts away from the front three, which is utterly self-defeating.

So, the A's stand to front their postseason rotation with Lester, Gray and Kazmir, their best three guys. Where does Samardzija fit in? Two starts, maybe three, even if the A's last deep into the World Series? And now Chavez, who has been quite good, falls out of the postseason mix. To what end?

It appears that by adding Lester and subtracting Cespedes (3.0 WAR in 2014), the Athletics have made themselves better on one of every five days during the regular season (and one of every three or four days during the postseason), but subtracting that impact hitter and impact defender in left field has made them worse on the other days. It simply isn't obvious that removing Cespedes from the lineup so Lester can pitch instead of Chavez makes the Athletics better equipped to survive in the postseason.

The Athletics already had the second-best ERA (3.19) and the second-best ERA-plus (119) in the American League. The Athletics are good at everything. They lead the AL by scoring 5.0 runs per game and their OPS-plus of 107 is fourth in the AL. It appears though, that the A's have made their pitching marginally better while really taking a huge piece from their offensive and defensive teams.

The Athletics, without Cespedes, really don't have that many bats. Their other hitters who have been to the plate 150 or more times and are with or ahead of the league (100 OPS-plus or better) are Brandon Moss (135), Josh Donaldson (123), Coco Crisp (123), Derek Norris (148), John Jaso (132) and Stephen Vogt (155). But those last three are all catchers, which means that, on their best days, the A's will have four guys in the lineup who hit and five who don't. Taking Cespedes out of that batting order is going to hurt.

And that's to say nothing of the depletion of player value through the organization. Cespedes is under contract for 2015, but Lester is not, Samardjzia is eligible for arbitration in 2015, and Hammel probably isn't much worth worrying about either way. The A's also traded away McKinney and Russell, 19- and 20-year-old kids prospering at high-A and AA ball, where they are well under-aged, along with a nice draft pick. 

It just looks dicey from here. Of course, pitching is the most important aspect of any baseball team. The defense has the ball in baseball, and if the pitcher can put it where he wants it, the other club won't score. But trading that draft pick and a middle-of-the-order producer like Cespedes, a game-changing player, for two months of the difference between pitching Lester or Chavez -- it's a stretch.

The Angels were quite active during the trading season, as well. But they gave up nothing that they will miss to address a true weakness on their club, their bullpen. They have added Joe Thatcher, Jason Grilli and Huston Street -- basically rebuilt their entire bullpen -- for players who they don't stand to miss now or in the future. Thatcher gives them a hard-throwing lefty they needed, Street gives them an accomplished closer they needed, and Grilli, who also is an accomplished closer, gives them a nice option to go with Joe Smith in the eighth inning. The Angels never seemed to be sold on Ernesto Frieri as their closer, so they dealt him to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Grilli. They gave up nothing about which to be jittery for Thatcher. To get Street, they had to part with minor-league second baseman Taylor Lindsey, but they have a good minor-league second baseman behind him in Alex Yarbrough.

In total, during the trading season, the Athletics picked up more major league talent, but they also gave up a lot more major league talent. The Angels made themselves better in a way that they really needed without giving up anything. The A's made themselves marginally better in ways that weren't really necessary, and they tore the heart out of their everyday lineup while putting a fair dent in their prospect pipeline.

It says here that the Angels won the trading deadline in this division simply because the Athletics over-reached, as contenders often do at the trading deadline. The next two month will test some of that claim. But the real test will come a month later.

Tigers hitters disappear, and so might their playoffs

The Detroit Tigers entered their American League Division Series against the Oakland Athletics with one of the game's most crushing lineups. But the Tigers hitters instead are being crushed by Oakland pitchers. Following another day of goose eggs on the scoreboard, the Tigers face elimination Tuesday.

Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland is under some heat for his use of pitchers against the Oakland Athletics. But his hitters aren't helping him (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

Top of the first inning, Game 1 of the American League Division Series (ALDS) between the Detroit Tigers and the Oakland Athletics in Oakland, and five of the first six Tigers reach base, resulting in a 3-0 lead.

In 26 innings of at-bats since then, the Tigers have matched that. Three runs, all of them in the same inning. They lost Game 2, 1-0, then took it home to Comerica Park Monday and lost, 6-3. Now, the Tigers are down, 2-1, in the ALDS, and this team that advanced to the league finals in 2011 and the World Series in 2012, then won the American League Central division title without serious challenge in 2013, this team with the best pedigree of any AL playoff team in the last three years, this team suddenly faces elimination on its home field Tuesday.

Key Tigers hitters have disappeared. Since that first inning of the series, Tigers leadoff hitter Austin Jackson is zero-for-10. Miguel Cabrera, the likely AL MVP, is one-for-11. The designated hitter, Victor Martinez, is one-for-11.

Detroit's poor offense is making everyone look bad. For example, Tigers manager Jim Leyland is under a bit of scrutiny for choosing Al Alburquerque to begin the ninth inning of Game 2. Alburquerque gave up a run before any Oakland hitter made a ninth-inning out, which was enough to give the A's a 1-0 win.

Commentators are wondering why Leyland didn't use his closer, Joaquin Benoit. Of course, the book tells you why he didn't. In a tie game at home going to the ninth inning, the closer is in there, no question. If the closer throws a shutout ninth and the hitters score in the bottom of the inning, the game is won and the closer worked only the one inning.

In a tie game on the road going to the ninth, the calculation is different. Even if the closer throws a zero in the bottom of the ninth, the hitters have to score in the tenth and you still need a pitcher for the bottom of that extra inning, but the closer typically isn't geared to get six outs. Thus, the closer doesn't enter a game on the road unless his team has the lead.

But the Tigers didn't score at all in Game 2, and that tied their manager's hands. It does seem wrong to blame it on Leyland when his hitters managed only four hits and struck out nine times in eight innings against -- Sonny Gray? Ever heard of him? Gray was the 18th overall pick in 2011, out of Vanderbilt. The A's brought him up this season and he went 5-3 with a 2.67 ERA in 12 starts.

Gray was right there with Detroit's Justin Verlander, who didn't have his typical year (13-12, 3.46). But Verlander showed up for this one, allowing four hits and striking out 11 in seven shutout innings.

The Tigers finally hit a little in Game 3, scoring three times in the fourth and tying the game at 3-3. Here, now, Leyland might be second guessed. His starting pitcher, Anibal Sanchez, already wasn't very good in this one. It's often a pretty lame second guess to hammer the manager for leaving his starter in for too long. But in a playoff game with a deep bullpen, built-in days off and a starter who has allowed runs in the last two innings, it's a pretty easy first guess.

Leyland missed it. He rolled Sanchez out there for the fifth inning, and the A's rolled him quickly. Oakland's Brandon Moss homered with one out, then Yoenis Cespedes singled, then Seth Smith homered. All the air had to come out of Comerica Park as the Tigers fell to a 6-3 deficit right after battling back to tie the game.

So, the Tigers are in very deep trouble now, and it could end for them very soon. Game 4 comes up Tuesday in Detroit. The Tigers will go with right-hander Doug Fister, who didn't win in last year's postseason even though he allowed only three runs in 19 1/3 innings.

The Tigers aren't hitting any better right now. And it might not get better, because Oakland's starter Dan Straily, a right-hander, led all AL rookies in wins with 10 and strikeouts with 124.

We might not be seeing the Tigers for long.