Jonathan Villar, to an extent, represents the best-case scenario for players in this mold. Signed by the Phillies as an international free agent, he went to the Astros in the 2010 Roy Oswalt trade. In the Houston farm system, he started to gain some traction, making the team’s top prospect lists for 2011 and 2012. Both times, BP praised his tools and potential, while noting his limited upside. Writing on the former list, Kevin Goldstein put it best: “He’s everything a scout would look for in a shortstop, except for hitting ability and fielding consistency.”

Villar has since become a big leaguer, and a solid one, too. Over 658 career plate appearances, he’s accrued 2.0 WARP. That’s about an average level of production — in 2015, batters averaged 2.0 WARP per 600 plate appearances — and it looks sustainable: PECOTA projects Villar to earn 1.4 WARP in 470 trips this season. For a team that won’t contend, a satisfactory player has a good deal of value.

Villar’s performance, on the surface, doesn’t seem especially average. A sickly .239 lifetime TAv, along with just -0.3 FRAA, makes Goldstein’s words look pretty prescient. Villar has succeeded, relatively, despite a terrible bat and a mediocre glove. His prosperity comes from his baserunning, which have granted him 7.0 runs above an average player and has made him an asset.

Some of that stems from stolen bases. Villar has done so 42 times at the major-league level while failing on 14 attempts, as reflected in his Stolen-Base Runs of 2.3. But that’s only about a third of his value; the rest comes from advancement, which he’s done as well as anyone. Had he compiled his 4.7 lifetime Advancement Runs in 2015 alone, he would rank 11th in baseball, between Jason Heyward and Ben Revere. Villar’s ability to move ahead and snare the extra bag has helped him get ahead, figuratively speaking.

While speed accounts for some of this — only the quickest players can steal that many bases — it can’t explain everything. Take, for example, this play from last season:

Not many players will bolt from third to home in an instant, as Villar does here. That has as much to do with smarts as it does with talent — Villar’s heads-up approach allowed him to move up. We see a similar phenomenon in this 2013 play:

Villar pauses after rounding third yet keeps his eyes on the ball, ensuring that he can take advantage of any miscues. When the error happens, he’s all the way home in the blink of an eye. We shouldn’t credit his speed for this — intelligence brought him home.

These kinds of aggressive plays have defined Villar’s game over the past three seasons. According to Baseball-Reference, he’s taken an extra base on 59.3 percent of singles and doubles (the MLB average is usually below 40 percent). He’s also advanced 14 times on fly balls, passed balls, wild pitches, balks, and defensive indifference. These can add up over the course of a 162-game season, as Villar’s aforementioned run totals prove.

This presents a good example for the Cecchinis, Walshes, and Pintos of the world to follow. Borderline major-league types can give themselves a leg up on the competition if they excel at the little things. It doesn’t necessarily mean they should run the bases assertively — they might lean in at the plate to make pitchers hit them more often, or always look to nab the lead runner on a ground ball. Whatever they do, they should capitalize in the areas that they can to make up for their shortcomings elsewhere.

Most of the crap that the 2016 Brewers will throw at the wall won’t stick. In all likelihood, those three players will wash out, just as their former teams expected them to. That doesn’t have to be the case, though: These men can stick around, if they imitate their predecessor and cohort. They’ll fall short of stardom, but we’ll gladly settle for usefulness.

In half a season, Parra has already cost Milwaukee 2.9 runs on the bases — more than he earned for his teams in the previous two years combined. Not only does that mark place him last among his teammates, it also ranks 16th-lowest in all of baseball. Parra has gone from a solidly above-average baserunner to a horrid one, and that drop may harm his trade value.

It’s probably useful to sort through the component of this statistic, in order to get a better idea of why Parra has struggled. Five different statistics make up BRR; Stolen Base Runs (SBR), perhaps the most common among them, measures the runs above or below average of a player’s base-stealing ability. As anyone who has seen Parra (particularly in his Arizona days) can testify, he’s rarely been anything but a liability when trying to swipe a bag:

The nadirs for Parra came in 2009, when he only succeeded in five of his 12 attempts, and in 2013, when catchers cut him down an even 10 times out of 20. (The latter season inspired this memorable Dave Cameron post.) Oddly enough, Parra’s gone in safely six times this year, and has only run into an out twice. In other words, a failure to steal hasn’t cost Parra on the bases in 2015.

However, there’s more to running the bases than advancing a base behind the pitcher’s back. The best baserunners will consistently advance at every opportunity, and the other four elements of BRR — Ground Advancement Runs (GAR), Air Advancement Runs (AAR), Hit Advancement Runs (HAR), and Other Advancement Runs (OAR) — gauge their capacity to do so. With the exception of the latter, Parra has come up short in all of those regards thus far.

We’ll begin with ground balls and fly balls, each of which could see Parra set a new career low:

The 2015 season has given Parra more shots at taking advantage of these types of plays. His current pace would put him at 50 Ground Advancement Opportunities and 40 Fly Advancement Opportunities, each level the second-highest of his career (after 2013 and 2014, respectively). In other words, come season’s end, he’ll theoretically have been on base 50 times with a base open in front of him and a grounder hit at the plate, and will have been on base 40 times with a base open in front of him and a fly ball hit at the plate.

Parra has responded to the increase in chances by moving ahead less than ever before. Entering 2015, he had never accumulated fewer than six Bases Taken in a season, and had posted at least 12 BTs in five of his six campaigns. Thus far, he’s moved ahead a base just twice. Even prorating that over a full season gives him a mere four, easily a career-low.

What about when the ball in play goes for a hit? For that, we have HAR, which also dislikes Parra’s 2015 output:

After a 2014 spike, Parra has come back to Earth with a vengeance. Of the three types of situations that HAR incorporates (moving from first to third on a double, scoring from first on a double, and scoring from second on a single), that drop has come from one in particular:

Parra hasn’t had too much difficulty with coming around after the batter knocks a two-bagger, nor has he stopped much at second following a single. He’s fallen short, though, when a single could score him from second base. In that facet of baserunning, the going has gotten tougher than ever.

The possible causes of this all-around decline certainly don’t stand out. Parra has not, to the best of my knowledge, played through any injuries this year, or anything else that may have hampered his performance. His rates of doubles and triples haven’t budged from his career marks, so he doesn’t appear to lack speed (and, as stated earlier, he’s kind of excelled with stealing bases). The Brewers did bring in a new hitting coach after last season, so perhaps Darnell Coles has affected Parra’s running for the worse, but even that is purely speculation. It’s also important to note that, with sample sizes as small as these, metrics such as this can fluctuate rather rapidly; for the rest of the year, Parra may very well return to his old self.

Whatever the cause for Parra’s depreciation, it’s happened, and in an era when major-league teams employ massive analytics departments, any team that hopes to deal for him will probably take note of it. Should he manage to turn his baserunning around in the next few weeks, he could regain the glimmer he had when Milwaukee brought him in last season. For now, though, he remains a terrible baserunner, and one that will soon run terribly elsewhere.