The A's are, as the kids say, forked. Baseball Prospectus' playoff odds have them, before tonight's game (which, to be fair, the A's are winning 4-0 in the second inning as I write this), under 5 percent, the lowest odds in the AL West and second lowest in the American League (White Sox). This from a system that liked the team before the season and still expects .508 baseball going forward, a smidge better than the Astros' expected winning percentage. The problem is the 10-game hole they've dug in the division and/or the 7 1/2-game hole they've dug in the Wild Card. That's a lot of games to make up in half a season even if your underlying roster is more Dodgers than Phillies.

With those holes and with the non-waiver trade deadline approaching in just over a month, many of us have been pondering Ben Zobrist trade scenarios; he, along with Scott Kazmir, is the obvious candidate to get shipped out for a prospect or two. The Cubs have apparently been hard on the A's to acquire him, and they've certainly got prospects out the ears. But Billy Beane isn't getting Addison Russell back for two months of Zobrist.

So who could we expect? What does a player like Zobrist, with a contract and service-time situation like Zobrist's, get traded for these days?

Here's where I started, the Baseball Prospectus transaction browser. I narrowed down to trades and just started scrollin', looking for position players who were pending free agents and were still something like starting-quality players. I examined as far back as 2011, and I was only interested in June or July trades, since that's the type we're looking at for Zobrist. Offseason deals are a whole other beast, as are waiver trades. So what do we have in terms of semicomparable moves?

The bWAR column below is the three years prior to the trade plus whatever was accumulated in the season in which the trade was made. Asdrubal Cabrera's bWAR column, then, lists 2011-13 plus the Cleveland portion of his 2014 season. The "Cash?" column indicates whether the trading team had to kick in part of the salary to get the deal done.

A player as cheap as Ben Zobrist with as much ability as Ben Zobrist, but with as little team control remaining as Ben Zobrist, is not available on the market very often. We could dream on a Zack Wheeler-like return, but that move was seen as a massive overreach at the time by the Giants, a wild overpay in prospect cost for two months of an admittedly excellent player. But these names on the prospect lists can wind up feeling lost in time to us, so I'll turn to my stash of Baseball America Prospect Handbooks to refresh. I'll use the next year's book as the best idea of the prospect the team traded for -- from the time of most of these trades through the end of the season, they saw only about another month of performance from the prospects, versus the four months they'd already seen to that point.

Stefan Jarrin, part of the Victorino trade, was in the Arizona League for the Dodgers and never actually appeared in the Phillies organization. Or any other organization after 2012. He's now scouting for the Dodgers.

Brent Lillibridge and Zach Stewart were both in the majors. The former had a 123 OPS+ in 2011 but was struggling mightily by mid-2012 and he never regained his form. He'd been a prospect once upon a time but now he appears to be out of baseball. Stewart had a 72 ERA+ out of the bullpen and couldn't miss bats. He threw two games for the Red Sox, pitched most of the year in the minors, and hasn't been in the majors since. He's now in Salt Lake, and still just 28.

The dream that never dies is a Carlos Beltran return. A reasonable comparable in terms of salary and performance is Shane Victorino. And then there's the Youkilis/Headley range, where you wonder how the trading team didn't get more. At MLB Trade Rumors, I see four teams linked to Zobrist in the last month or so. What's a sample trade in each of these three ranges for each of those four teams?

I'm not suggesting that any particular one of those packages is something either the A's or the trading team would do. Some probably seem high for where they're slotted (e.g. Colon & Lamb) but I'm trying to do this in fairly basic back-of-the-envelope fashion. In fact, my overall attitude might be high -- Victorino's haul might be a sort of sub-ceiling return, a reachable upside compared to the unreachable Beltran upside, rather than a mid-level return.

But I think it's entirely possible that Zobrist is, in many respects, the most attractive player to hit the "expiring soon" trade market in years. I will note that Zobrist's price tag is low compared to most of the players in the first table above, and that it's in 2015 dollars while, say, Carlos Beltran's $19 million was a couple of years ago. This may mean that the A's can get the type of package that other teams had to pick up salary to get. Also, the advent of the qualifying offer raises the cost for the A's to sell -- they lose the ability to get a draft pick back for Zobrist if they make him the offer and he rejects it -- though I could see Beane's trade partners telling him they know his ownership will never approve making a QO offer and daring him to blink.

The A's probably won't be able to add back a Daniel Robertson-like talent, but they may be able to get closer than I thought I'd find when I started this exercise. Look at that! Optimism!