At the link, you can see John Hickey (picked because he was the first one I found -- Bob Melvin told the same story to everyone) relaying that with Ryon Healy coming up to the majors, he'll be the team's main third baseman, which has the effect of pushing Danny Valencia into a supersub role, which is kind of a hilarious spot for someone with his serious defensive limitations: He'll play first, left field, and designated hitter while presumably (though Hickey doesn't say this) picking up third base time whenever Healy's not playing.

We can do two things with this information: We can scream and cry about how Valencia is the A's best player and why are the A's so dumb, what are they doing, they're wrecking his trade value; or we can presume competence and make some guesses about the thought process that isn't being fully shared. If you've been to this blog for more than five minutes, you know I prefer the latter mode of analysis.

The first thing to note is that Danny Valencia is really not very good at defense. You don't have to buy DRS or UZR, which have him in the double digits below average already (and DRS has him on pace for a historically bad season, a Ryan Braun-type season), in order to conclude this, and you don't have to believe in the infallibility of your eyes, either. You can note his reputation, which has always been bad, and add to that some eye test (which, speaking for myself, grades him out as "wtf"), and dash in a sprinkle of stats at the end. The conclusion, then, is that he's taking runs back off the board (or putting them on for the other team -- same difference) with his glove. As well as he's hit, you can't just look at the team-leading OPS and declare him the team MVP.

The second thing to note is that he's hitting .304 coming into Friday's game. Over 1,923 plate appearances in the majors from 2010 to 2015, he batted .267. That 35 points matters because Valencia, for all his positives, doesn't walk. For his career, including this year-long revival he's engaged in over 2015-16, he's walked in 6 percent of his plate appearances. He's not setting hacking records, but he's not beating down doors with his OBP either. This matters looking forward: if he's now a .300 hitter, then he's also an .850 OPSer; if, however, we should expect him to hit more like .270 going forward, then you chop more than 60 points off the OPS, which drops his stat line from Evan Longoria to Brian Dozier. Dozier's a good player! But he's not Longoria.

The third thing to note is that Valencia is 31 and has been in professional baseball since he was drafted in 2006, and in the majors since 2010. Teams that are interested in acquiring him will send scouts to look at him because that's what teams do, but everyone has a pretty good idea what he is right now. Those teams will be trying to figure out whether he's turned the corner and will now hit .290 to .300 for the foreseeable future, or whether he's made some adjustment to which pitchers should be expected to adjust back soon, or some other conclusion entirely. The A's have had the most and the closest looks at him, in the cage, in the clubhouse, and on the field, and thus have the best idea of what other teams are going to see when they do their evaluations.

That last point is most relevant to the worry that the A's are lowering Valencia's trade value by cutting into his playing time. Any acquiring team is going to know what they're getting with Valencia, on offense and defense and, most likely, in the clubhouse. There are no warning signs to be had here, not two weeks from the trade deadline. If the Astros (or whoever) wanted Valencia a week ago, there's no reason to think they'll want him less now (put the Gurriel signing aside) because the A's are only going to play him 75 percent of the time instead of 90. It's not reasonable to think that in 2016 teams operate with that level of irrationality and emotional thinking.

The first two points are relevant to the idea that it's dumb to sit the team's best player. Valencia is a good player, but he's not an MVP candidate. He wasn't really an All-Star snub. He's a powerful right-handed hitter on the wrong side of 30 who isn't adding anything to the team's ledger unless he's got a bat in his hands. He's also extremely likely to be traded, so the lost value to the A's, even if he's not traded until the deadline itself and even if he sits more often than I guessed above, is going to be on the order of 25 plate appearances. That's our sturm und drang. One twenty-fourth of a season's worth of hitting.

I don't mean to be a scold. You can be whatever kind of fan you want to be, and air whatever grievances you want to air. You can do The Wave. It's just helpful, maybe, in terms of our own sanity in this utterly irrational enterprise of fandom, to dig past "team-leading OPS" and "right-handed power" when we think about whether we're happy with our team's management or not.