Melvin falls on middle of results versus projection so he could be intrigued by both Washburn and Bedard. Hardy has been on the trade block since mid-last season so I believe Dave is right that a Hardy trade is inevitable*. JJ has had a bad year at the plate so far the trade value is there and when he was coming up he was a glove first player so the analysis seems correct. I hope it is a match but if not the M’s have other options

• Jeff, I read your comment and I hope this counts as behaving because it was intended to be.If not I apologize

is that ZiPS is putting a premium on Gutierrez’ ML performance in years past and seems to be ignoring the fact that his minor league numbers as well as his last tow months of last season support that this is exactly the kind of player he is. I doubt he will maintain the power production he had in June-early July, but I will be disappointed if he does not finish the season with twenty homers or so. I don’t see why he should be anything less than a league average hitter.

I am also hopeful that Kenji has a little pop left in his bat, though if he does, he’s hiding it very well. As for the rest of the projections, they all seem very reasonable. Branyan seems to be settling back into his career norms, even developing a fairly normal platoon split over the last month after spending the first two having none.

Overall, I am very interested to see how the actual run scoring compares to predicted run scoring from here. The offense so far has been below average, but not so far below as the RS column might indicate, suggesting that there is some bad luck involved – maybe wOBA with RISP, I don’t know. But when something like this goes on for a long time and does not normalize you have to wonder if there is some way of constructing a roster that is bound to score less than wOBA would suggest. In our case, we have a black hole bottom of the order and a clean up hitter whose IsoD is approaching his BA.

Basically, lineups don’t matter very much at all. A perfectly constructed lineup is probably going to equal one extra win (at best) over the worst possible lineup construction.

In general, you want your five best hitters 1-5 based on OBP or wOBA. Your 1 and 2 hitters should be your best OBP guys and your 4 and 5 should be the third and fourth best of those five with power. 3 is the least important position in your top 5. 6-9 should be in descending order of OBP or wOBA, unless you’re in the NL in which case it makes sense to bat your worst hitting position player 9 and the pitcher 8 because it will give your leadoff hitter more PAs with runners on base.