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SAN FRANCISCO – Among the many things missing in 2020 was a regular trade deadline. The bizarre 60-game season didn’t lend itself to a series of crazy offers, but league officials more than made up for that this week.
The last flurry of Friday afternoon was so mad that Jon Lester, a potential Hall of Famer who spent the peak of his career with the Chicago Cubs, was traded to rivals St. Louis Cardinals and nearly nobody noticed it.
It will take weeks to sort this out and years to see how the teams actually performed, but it’s always fun to take a quick look at the league after the deadline. Aside from the Giants, who found the perfect fit in Kris Bryant, here are our winners after a wild trade deadline and some teams that didn’t fare so well:
Winner: Go-For-It Executives
The trade deadline can often be a prospecting exercise, but sometimes we forget the point of it all. Hats off to the leaders who saw an opportunity and decided to push their chips to the middle of the table.
The Los Angeles Dodgers traded two Top 100 prospects for a much better chance of catching the Giants and coming back back to back. The Toronto front office have parted ways with two very good prospects, including a top 20 guy, for Jose Berrios, making him a threat this season and next. T
es Braves lost Ronald Acuña Jr. for the year but continued to push for the playoffs. The White Sox traded a guy who took fourth overall three years ago. it went on and on. The deals turned the playoff race upside down, which is exactly what should happen this time of year.
Loser: the nationals
Look, give them credit for getting all-in with their sale, and they’ve done pretty well with the returns. But it’s still a tough time for fans of a team that won the World Series just two seasons ago, starting a rebuild and seeing Bryce Harper, Anthony Rendon, Trea Turner and Max Scherzer go elsewhere. over the past three years.
Stephen Strasburg’s extension has been a disaster and Patrick Corbin’s deal doesn’t look much better. The hope in DC is for the Nationals to rebuild themselves around Juan Soto and hand him a mega-deal, but Soto is a client of Scott Boras, so even that seems uncertain.
Winner: Adam Frazier
Frazier spent the next year and a half eating Tin Fish and trying all the best brunches in the Gaslamp, and he traded the Pittsburgh rains for 12 months of sunshine. PNC Park might be one of the top three stadiums, but Petco is there with it and there isn’t a park that’s been noisier this summer.
Yes, Frazier is living the good life, and that’s before it even got to the fact that he traded a last-place team for a club that is in ring hunt mode.
Loser: the Padres
They did well, getting Frazier and Daniel Hudson and making other moves around the sidelines. But they were on much bigger fish, including Scherzer, who ended up with rival Dodgers hours after it looked like he was heading to San Diego.
This was the team that was supposed to end the Dodgers’ run for the top of the division, but they’re going to have a hard time catching up to them now, and they also watched the Giants – a team they are trailing by 5 games. 1/2 – do a blockbuster shot.
The Padres should qualify for the playoffs, but it will be really, really hard for them to avoid the Wild Card Game.
Winner: Marlins fans
To anyone’s surprise, Kim Ng seems to be pretty good at it. Ng faces tremendous pressure as the first woman to lead a baseball operations department and she did well in her first deadline while dispatching pending free agents and bullpen pieces.
The grand prize was Jesus Luzardo, a southpaw who struggled in Oakland but is still only 23 and was in the top 10 a year ago. It is extremely rare to see this kind of arm moving for a rental. The Marlins already have three very good young starters in their rotation and next year they can add Luzardo and Sixto Sanchez to the mix. They are on the way back to fighting.
Loser: Jerry Dipoto
The American League’s most active executive went too far in dealing with most popular close Kendall Graveman with division rival Houston after an A-sweep and a big win over the Astros. The deal wiped out the clubhouse, with the Mariners defeating writer Ryan Divish, earning incredible quotes afterward.
“He sits in his suite, plays fantastic baseball and tears our team apart without telling us,” one player told Divish.
Did the Mariners make the playoffs? Probably not. But it was a fun team that was on a surprise run, and Dipoto forgot an important lesson: you’re dealing with humans, not names on a Yahoo fantasy list. Dipoto has done a good job overall in Seattle, but he may have lost that clubhouse for good.
Winner: The White Sox
Whether it’s Kimbrel in Hendriks or Hendriks in Kimbrel, there won’t be a better paddock duo in October. All-star Liam Hendriks leads the American League in saves. Craig Kimbrel, an all-star player, has an ERA of 0.49. Good luck to the rest of the American League.
Winner: the A
They might have won the deadline on this one tweet:
Andrew Chafin is a huge boost in the bullpen, but the A’s weren’t made. They added Starling Marte at the heart of their roster and strengthened the bench with Josh Harrison and Yan Gomes. All the headlines lately have been about the stadium talks, but their core deserved a real blow to try to win AL West and make some noise in October. Billy Beane and David Forst gave them that.
RELATED: MLB Twitter Explodes With Bryant Traded To Giants
Loser: anyone who fell in love with the fake Jeff Passan tweet about Kris Bryant going to the Yankees
Go on! How many times do we have to do this ?! Maybe next year will be the year when everyone finally learns their lesson …
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