Ranked and briefly analyzed below are the prospects who have been traded during the loosely defined “2024 deadline season,” which for simplicity’s sake I consider all of July. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of have been analyzed at length on this site. An index of those pieces can be found here; you can also click the hyperlink in the “Trade” column below, which will take you to the relevant article. I’ve moved all of the 35+ FV and above players listed here to their new orgs over on The Board, so you can click through to see where they rank among their new teammates and read their full scouting reports. Our Farm System Rankings, which update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up following the draft and the deadline.

Yesterday, Michael Baumann wrote about the enormous proportion of the Yankees’ offense that Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are responsible for. According to weighted runs created, those two sluggers have been responsible for just under 39% of the Bronx bombardment this season, a percentage that is unmatched not just in this cursed year of 2024, but in this entire cursed millennium. Today, I’d like to focus just on Judge. He’s having the best season of his career at the plate, which is a ludicrous thing to say about a player who hit 62 home runs just two years ago, and who, if not for an oddly situated concrete embankment in Dodger Stadium’s right field, might well have done so again last year. If we follow Baumann’s lead and look just at this century, the leaderboard for single-season wRC+ among qualified batters looks like this:

First of all, no, I didn’t make a mistake. As of Thursday morning, Judge was running a 212 wRC+, which makes him tied with a peak Barry Bonds season. Second of all, I lied just a moment ago. We don’t need to limit ourselves to the 2000s for the top six wRC+ marks to go to Bonds and Judge. If we start traveling back in time, the leaderboard looks exactly the same until we get all the way to 1957, when a couple of guys named Ted Williams (223) and Mickey Mantle (217) crash the party. Judge is hitting like an inner circle Hall of Famer, again. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2024 trade deadline is now in the history books, so it’s time for a post-mortem on how it went. As I do every year, I set the ZiPS projection system the task of seeing which teams moved their division, playoff, and championship probabilities the most. The methodology is relatively simple: I take the ZiPS projected standings the morning after the trade deadline and compare them to a second set of projections in which I undo every trade that was made over the prior three weeks. I always find the results fascinating because people often underestimate the secondary effects of the deadline, such as how a team did relative to their competition, how a team’s strength of schedule can change based on the strength of their opponents, and how the contours of the Wild Card races change when a competitor effectively drops out or suddenly gets better.

With players like Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, Luis Robert Jr., and Blake Snell staying put, there weren’t many impact trades, but it was still a busy deadline. On the whole, ZiPS found this deadline to be considerably more consequential than last year’s. In 2023, ZiPS only projected three teams as having moved their playoff probability by at least five percentage points, while this year, there were eight. In fact, two of the changes were the largest percentage-point shifts that ZiPS has seen as long as I’ve been doing this, one positive (Baltimore), one negative (Tampa Bay). Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, I swam through the soupy Delaware Valley air to catch the Phillies-Yankees game at Citizens Bank Park, mostly to see Juan Soto and Aaron Judge in person. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but these two dudes are both having monster seasons. Through Tuesday’s games, they were first and third in the league in WAR, first and second in walk rate, first and second in wRC+, first and second in OBP, and first and fourth in slugging percentage. For those of you who like to go old school, they’re also third and seventh in batting average, first and fourth in runs scored, and first and fifth in RBI.

Back in December, I predicted that something like this might happen, in an article titled “Juan Soto Is Going to Score A Bajillion Runs Hitting In Front of Aaron Judge.” Soto isn’t quite on pace to score a bajillion runs, but he is on pace for 132, which would be one of the 10 highest totals since the strike. Read the rest of this entry »

Another year, another frenetic trade deadline. This year’s bonanza was light on top talent relative to recent years, but it made up for that in volume. With tight races in both leagues and plenty of teams looking to shore up clear weaknesses, it was a seller’s market, particularly when it came to pitching. Now that the dust has settled, I’m here to hand out some judgment.

These are going to be inherently subjective, but that doesn’t mean I don’t put a little rigor into my system. I’m focusing on two things here when I look at individual teams. First, and more important: Did a team’s moves match up with its needs? This is easy to gauge, and since it’s the whole point of the deadline, it carries the most wait. Second: How’d teams do on the trades they made? I think this part is inherently more subjective – there’s no unified prospect ranking or database where we can see how traded players will do the rest of the season, and we’re working with less information than teams have. That doesn’t mean I’m not crediting teams for trades I like or docking them for moves I don’t, just that I’m weighting it slightly less than the first category. Let’s dive right in.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, when the Dodgers designated lefty starter James Paxton for assignment, general manager Brandon Gomes spoke of the team targeting “an impact-type arm” ahead of the trade deadline. Gomes and president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman hit their target shortly before the 6 p.m. ET deadline on Tuesday, landing Tigers righty Jack Flaherty in exchange for a pair of prospects. Separately, the Dodgers also fortified their outfield depth by acquiring Kevin Kiermaier from the Blue Jays for lefty Ryan Yarbrough.

For all the talk about the top-of-the-line starters who could be moved before the deadline, the most discussed ones besides Flaherty — the Tigers’ Tarik Skubal, the Giants’ Blake Snell, and the White Sox’s Garrett Crochet — all stayed put, making the Dodgers’ addition of the 28-year-old Flaherty feel that much more impactful. To acquire the Los Angeles native — who was traded on deadline day for the second year in a row, after being dealt from the Cardinals to the Orioles last August 1 — the Dodgers parted with 21-year-old catcher Thayron Liranzo and 24-year-old shortstop Trey Sweeney.

After years of injuries capped by a subpar campaign that included the aforementioned change of address, Flaherty is in the midst of his best season in half a decade. Because he’s skipped a couple of turns due to injections of painkillers (not cortisone) to address recurrent lower back pain (one on June 10, the second on July 2) and then had Monday’s turn scratched in anticipation of his being dealt, his 106.2 innings is 1.1 short of the threshold to qualify for the ERA title, but his numbers are impressive. Among AL pitchers with at least 100 innings, he ranks seventh with a 2.95 ERA and sixth with a 3.11 FIP. Among all AL pitchers, he’s tied for 11th with 2.5 WAR, and among the pitchers traded this month, he’s second only to the more contact-oriented Erick Fedde (2.7). Flaherty’s numbers are a huge improvement from last year’s 4.96 ERA and 4.36 FIP in 144.1 innings. While putting up a 6.75 ERA post-trade, he was bumped from the Orioles’ rotation in mid-September and finished the season in the bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

Around the time of the Austin Hays trade last week, Chelsea Janes of The Washington Post reported that even though Hays and Lane Thomas were both best suited to a platoon corner role on a contender, the Nationals were determined to sell Thomas only if a suitor were willing to pay a starter’s return for him.

“Good luck,” I thought to myself. Thomas is a good player — a 3.1 WAR guy with 28 homers last year. This season, he’s nearly doubled his walk rate and has 28 stolen bases. That’s the third-most in baseball, more than Corbin Carroll and Byron Buxton put together. Thomas is on his second straight season of a wRC+ bumping up against 110 — this is a good player. But it’s also a guy who’s hitting .224/.299/.364 against right-handed pitching, which is most of the pitchers in the league.

Well, we have not because we ask not. Nats GM Mike Rizzo had a weekend to play with before the deadline, and it only takes one team to meet his price. And I’ll be darned, Big Rizz actually pulled it off. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers lineup has been hit hard by injuries, particularly their infield, which in recent weeks has lost shortstop Mookie Betts, third baseman Max Muncy, and multipositional backups Miguel Rojas and Chris Taylor. On Monday, the team made a move to shore that up, acquiring versatile former Gold Glove winner Tommy Edman — who himself has yet to play a major league game this season after undergoing offseason wrist surgery — from the Cardinals as part of a three-team, 10-player trade that also involved the White Sox.

In the full deal, both the NL West-leading Dodgers (63-44) and the Wild Card-chasing Cardinals (54-51) acquired one player for their lineup and one for their pitching staff, while the White Sox (27-81) loaded up on young infielders. The head count for the deal includes two players to be named later, though the teams could instead exchange cash. Here’s how it all shakes out:

Dodgers get:

• INF/OF Tommy Edman (from Cardinals)
• RHP Michael Kopech (from White Sox)
• RHP Oliver Gonzalez (from Cardinals)

Cardinals get:

• RHP Erick Fedde (from White Sox)
• OF Tommy Pham (from White Sox)
• Cash (from White Sox)
• Player to be named later or cash (from Dodgers)

White Sox get:

• 2B/OF Miguel Vargas (from Dodgers)
• 3B Alexander Albertus (from Dodgers)
• 2B Jeral Perez (from Dodgers)
• Player to be named later or cash (from Dodgers)

Edman, a 29-year-old switch-hitter who historically has been stronger against lefties (117 wRC+) than righties (93 wRC+), is a contact-oriented hitter who doesn’t walk much but who has some pop to go with his speed. He batted .248/.307/.399 (92 wRC+) last year for the Cardinals while hitting 13 homers and stealing 27 bases; for his career, he’s hit .265/.319/.408 (99 wRC+). In 2023, he split his time between shortstop (46 starts), second base (40 starts), center field (37 starts) and right field (six starts), continuing a career-long trend of never staying pinned to one position for very long. He played more third base than anywhere else in as a rookie in 2019 and in ’20 as well, and has dabbled in left field here and there. In 2021, the year he won the NL Gold Glove for second basemen, he made 35 starts in right field and three at shortstop as well as 115 at the keystone. When he’s healthy, he should fit right into a Dodgers roster that has a lot of moving parts, but his health is a question mark, and beyond his ability to steal a base — something the Dodgers besides Shohei Ohtani haven’t done much of — he doesn’t have a lot of upside offensively.

Edman missed three weeks last July due to right wrist inflammation, and the injury hampered him through the end of the season. He actually hit for a higher wRC+ after the injury than before (98 versus 89), though he did slump just prior to being sidelined. He underwent surgery on the wrist in October, but by early March it was clear he hadn’t recovered enough to be ready for Opening Day, as he was still experiencing lingering pain due to inflammation. A planned rehab stint in late June was forestalled by a right ankle sprain. He finally returned to action on July 9 with Double-A Springfield, but played just four games before reinjuring the ankle just before the All-Star break. Though Edman has been able to return to hitting, he’s been limited to DH duty, hitting a thin .207/.294/.241 in 34 PA spread over eight games. The lack of defensive work means that he’ll need to continue his rehab assignment for at least a few more games.

Update: Shortly after this article was published, the Dodgers reacquired utilityman Amed Rosario from the Rays in exchange for Triple-A righthander Michael Flynn, a move I’m shoehorning into this analysis post-publication as it may affect how (and when) they’ll deploy Edman. Rosario, a righty-swinging 28-year-old, split last season between the Guardians (where he played himself off of regular shortstop duty with woefully bad defense) and Dodgers, then signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal with Tampa Bay. He’s hit .307/.331/.417 (115 wRC+) with a career-high 4.6% barrel rate but just a 2.5% walk rate, though his real appeal is as a lefty-masher: He owns a 121 wRC+ in 455 PA against southpaws since the start of 2022, and a 92 wRC+ against righties in 1,035 PA over that same span. Defensively, he’s made 18 starts in right field, 17 at second, and 10 apiece at short and third. His metrics are brutal (-5 DRS and -3 FRV in center, -5 DRS and -4 FRV at the three infield positions), but the samples are small; he hasn’t played more than 153.1 innings at any position — probably for a good reason.

Assuming Edman returns in a timely fashion, the Dodgers will probably slot him at shortstop initially; until then, they may opt for Rosario over Nick Ahmed, who debuted for the team on July 24 but could be on the bubble, roster-wise. Betts — who’s played 65 games at the position after playing 16 games there last year — has been out since an errant fastball fractured a metacarpal in his left hand on June 16. Cleared to swing a bat last week, he could be about two weeks away from returning to the Dodgers lineup. Once he returns, the Dodgers could deploy Edman at third base, as Muncy’s progress in his return from a strained oblique suffered in mid-May has been “stagnant,” per manager Dave Roberts. The Dodgers were 29-16 when Muncy last played, but they’ve gone just 34-28 since, with their third basemen hitting a combined .169/.253/.263 (52 wRC+) in a lineup that’s distinctly lacking in length. Enrique Hernández, Taylor, and Cavan Biggio have done most of the damage in Muncy’s absence; none of them has hit well at any position, with Biggio posting an 86 wRC+ overall with Toronto and Los Angeles, and both Hernández (70 wRC+) and Taylor (62 wRC+) even less productive.

If the Dodgers ever approach full strength, Edman or Rosario could share time at second with the lefty-swinging Gavin Lux, who’s hit for just a 33 wRC+ against lefties this year (94 vs. righties). Edman could also find time in center field, where the Dodgers have netted -0.1 WAR with a 73 wRC+, mainly from Andy Pages, a righty-swinging rookie, and James Outman, a lefty whose struggles have sent him shuttling between L.A. and Oklahoma City.

Both Edman and Kopech are under control though 2025. Edman is making $7 million this year and is signed for $9.5 million next year; he’s also got awards-based bonuses in his deal. Kopech — who moved to the bullpen after a dreadful 2023 season spent in Chicago’s rotation — is making $3 million this year and will be arbitration eligible one more time. The 28-year-old righty is renowned for having thrown a 105-mph fastball as a minor leaguer back in 2016. He still averages 98.6 mph with his four-seamer, and is viewed as having fantastic stuff by our two pitch-modeling systems (he throws his cutter slightly more often to lefties and his slider slightly more often to righties). However, his command is an issue; in addition to striking out 30.6% of hitters, he’s walking 12.6% (both improvements compared to last year), and he’s also served up 1.65 homers per nine, so he has a gaudy 4.74 ERA and 4.82 FIP in 43.2 innings:

Kopech has saved nine games and generally has a late-inning profile, but he’s going to be a bit of a project for pitching coach Mark Prior and company. The Dodgers bullpen ranks fourth in the NL with a 3.64 ERA, but it’s 13th in FIP, and it’s been downright terrible since the start of July, posting a 5.77 ERA and 4.74 FIP in 93.2 innings, tied for the second-highest total in the majors; relatedly, their banged-up rotation has a 5.10 ERA and 5.47 FIP in 100.2 innings this month, the majors’ second-lowest total. Righty Evan Phillips leads the team with 15 saves, but he has just two over the past five weeks, as Roberts has more often turned to righty Daniel Hudson, who has four saves since July 12 and seven overall; lefty Alex Vesia has five saves, and both Blake Treinen and Brent Honeywell have one apiece.

As for the Cardinals, their big addition is Fedde. A first-round pick by the Nationals in 2014, he spent parts of six seasons (2017-22) with Washington, getting knocked around for a 5.41 ERA and 5.17 FIP in 454.1 innings. Upon being non-tendered in November 2022, he spent a year pitching for the KBO’s NC Dinos, where he flat-out dominated, going 20-6 with a 2.00 ERA and 2.38 FIP in 180.1 inning. His performance earned him All-Star and MVP honors as well as the Choi Dong-won Award as the league’s top pitcher, and it rekindled interest in him stateside. The White Sox signed Fedde to a two-year, $15 million deal last December.

As Eric Longenhagen detailed when Fedde signed with Chicago, he improved primarily by raising his arm slot, boosting his changeup usage, and reshaping his slider (Statcast classifies it as a sweeper). On a team whose current .250 winning percentage is level with that of the 1962 Mets, Fedde posted a more-than-respectable 3.11 ERA and 3.76 FIP in 121.2 innings — a performance far better than he ever managed with the Nationals. With his sinker/cutter/sweeper/changeup mix, he’s striking out a modest 21.5% of hitters but walking just 6.8%, and generating a healthy 44.8% groundball rate:

It’s a command-over-stuff profile, but then, this is the Cardinals. After a 91-loss 2023 season in which their starters were lit for a 5.08 ERA and 4.61 FIP, they spent this past winter reshaping their rotation by signing free agents Sonny Gray, Kyle Gibson, and Lance Lynn. All three have been solid but unspectacular, with Gray the best (3.79 ERA, 2.85 FIP) as expected, but the unit nonetheless ranks 12th in the NL with a 4.44 ERA and 10th with a 4.09 FIP. Andre Pallante, a 25-year-old righty, has spent the past two months as the fifth starter, succeeding where the likes of Matthew Liberatore and the now-inured Steven Matz have scuffled. His 3.42 ERA and 3.78 FIP in 47.1 innings over nine starts is, uh, miles beyond the work of Miles Mikolas (4.99 ERA, 4.25 FIP). Thanks to Gray’s backloaded deal, Mikolas is currently the team’s highest-paid pitcher, however, so it would be a surprise if he ends up in the bullpen, whereas Pallante pitched in that capacity for the Cardinals for the first few weeks of the season.

In Pham, the Cardinals are getting a familiar face, as the now-36-year-old outfielder was drafted by the team out of high school in the 16th round in 2006 and spent parts of five seasons in St. Louis from ’14-18, when he was dealt to the Rays for three prospects (Génesis Cabrera, Roel Ramírez and Justin Williams) just ahead of the trade deadline. The White Sox, with whom he signed a split deal for a $3 million salary in mid-April, were the sixth team for which he’s played since then. In 297 PA with them, he’s hit .266/.330/.380 (102 wRC+) with five homers and six steals.

Pham isn’t hitting the ball as hard as usual. His 90.5 mph average exit velocity, which places him in the 75th percentile, is nonetheless down 1.6 mph from last year, when he was in the 93rd percentile, and both his 7.2% barrel rate and 39.9% hard-hit rate are in the 40s, percentile-wise; last year, they were in the 69th and 89th percentiles, respectively. He’s still an effective lefty-masher, with a 141 wRC+ in 61 PA against southpaws this year, and a 118 in 392 PA since the start of 2022, compared to a 93 wRC+ (in 1,008 PA) against righties. Dreadful defense (-13 DRS, -6 FRV, and -2.5 UZR, all in 570.2 innings spread across the three outfield positions) has offset the modest value of his offense. He’s got no business in center field, though that’s one of the positions where the Cardinals landed on my recent Replacement Level Killers list, and there is at least a natural platoon fit. In Edman’s absence, rookie Victor Scott II started the year in center but went just 5-for-59 before being sent down. Michael Siani, a lefty-swinging 25-year-old rookie, has done the bulk of the work since, hitting a meek .245/.284/.319 (73 wRC+) but playing stellar defense (12 FRV, 8 DRS, 6.1 UZR including his brief time at both outfield corners). He’s hit for a 44 wRC+ in 80 PA against lefties, so letting Pham take some starts there may not be the worst thing, defense be damned.

Trading Edman was reportedly part of the Cardinals’ attempt to remain payroll-neutral. In dealing him, however, they’ll miss the chance to shore up not only center field but also second base, where Nolan Gorman struggled to the point of making the Killers list.

In a separate post, Longenhagen has analysis of Gonzalez, a 17-year-old righty who’s currently in the Dominican Summer League, and goes into detail regarding the White Sox’s return, but here’s a thumbnail guide. The 24-year-old Vargas, who placed 48th on our Top 100 Prospects list in 2023, fizzled in half a season as a rookie last year before being exiled to Triple-A Oklahoma City. He’s hit .239/.313/.423 (108 wRC+) in 80 PA since returning from the minors in late May; where he played mainly second base last year, he’s been almost exclusively a left fielder this time around. The 19-year-old Albertus ranks 16th on the updated White Sox list as a 40-FV prospect. The 19-year-old Perez, meanwhile, has been reevaluated since he went unranked on the Dodgers Top Prospects list back in March, though he was included in the “Contact-Driven Profiles” section of the honorable mentions. He now carries a 40+ FV grade and is 12th on the updated White Sox list. Initial reports of the trade also included 21-year-old shortstop Noah Miller, but he was not actually part of the deal.

With less than 24 hours to go before the July 30 deadline, the odds are the none of the three teams in this trade are done. The Dodgers have taken a reasonable step to patching up an injury-created weakness while also find a successor for the Hernández/Taylor multiposition role (it’s tough to imagine either of those players on next year’s roster given their struggles); if Edman can provide league-average offense, he’s a boost. They’re still hunting for “an impact-type arm,” with the White Sox’s Garrett Crochet one pitcher who could fit the bill. The Cardinals are looking to improve their bullpen, as is every other contender. The White Sox still have Crochet and Luis Robert Jr. as big-ticket players to restock their system. We’ll see what awaits.

I updated the Top 100 Prospects list late last week; you can find the accompanying piece I wrote, which has a little more detail on the farm system rankings, recent draftees and the trade deadline, here. I also wrote about all the pitchers on the Top 100. This piece goes through the hitters and why they stack the way they do.

Basically every top position player prospect you’ll read about here is an unfinished product. The very top of the list currently lacks a flawless elite prospect; even the most talented players in the minors right now have adjustments to make or blemishes that might become more of an issue against big league pitching. As with the piece on pitchers, you’ll probably want the list open in a separate tab to follow along with my notes; I’ve got that here, with hitters isolated away from the arms. Read the rest of this entry »

The trade deadline is just a day away and there have already been plenty of moves. The Rays’ sell-off has shaken up the market, and a number of the teams on the fringe of the playoff race could join Tampa Bay as sellers. Meanwhile, the playoff field in the National League hasn’t thinned out much, and the American League Wild Card race should be just as exciting down the stretch.

This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.

To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coinflip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — I’ve taken some editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula.

…

The Dodgers started off the second half of the season with a sweep of the Red Sox and a series win against the Giants before dropping two of three to the Astros last weekend. Thanks to the struggles of the other teams around them in these rankings, that was good enough to leap to the top of the pile. The Dodgers haven’t made a big move ahead of this week’s trade deadline yet, but they did just activate Clayton Kershaw off the IL. Even though they’re slowly getting healthier, they could use some additional depth to help reinforce a thin roster.

The Phillies have stumbled out of the gate following the All-Star break, losing three straight series to the Pirates, Twins, and Guardians. They’re still well ahead of the Braves and Mets in the NL East and still possess the best record in baseball, but they’re looking for ways to improve their roster for the stretch run and the postseason. That led them to acquire Austin Hays from the Orioles and Carlos Estévez from the Angels last week, providing their outfield and bullpen with a little more depth.

The Guardians have have the best record in the AL, a feat they’ve accomplished with the youngest roster in the majors. They just won a big series against the Phillies, showing they can hang with the best teams in baseball with their current roster, but they’re on the hunt for a few key additions to solidify their place as one of the top teams in the majors. Their starting rotation looks particularly thin and they could probably use one more bat, but it’s unclear how much of their shopping list they’ll be able to check off as they hurtle towards the deadline.

The Orioles were aggressive in bringing in reinforcements for their pitching staff, adding Zach Eflin and Seranthony Domínguez in a pair of deals. With such a deep farm system, they have the prospects to continue adding if they feel the need. After stumbling into the All-Star break, they haven’t really turned things around in the week and a half since the layoff, losing five of nine games. They’ll be fine in the long run and will most likely secure a postseason berth, but the real question is if they can maintain their grip on the AL East without additional reinforcements.

Finishing off a series win against their old rivals on Sunday may be just the spark the Yankees need to turn their season around. They also traded for Jazz Chisholm Jr. on Saturday to give Aaron Judge and Juan Soto some support. Chisholm’s flexibility gives New York some options. He could play center, alleviating the need to play Judge at the most important position in the outfield, or he could play second or even third to cover one of the holes on the infield. No matter where he ends up playing, there’s still plenty of work to do to fill the other gaps in New York’s lineup. The Yanks haven’t shied away from being aggressive in the recent past and they probably shouldn’t this year either.

The Brewers might have avoided the worst-case scenario when Christian Yelich said that he was going to try and work through his latest back injury with rest and rehab rather than season-ending surgery. They aren’t out of the woods yet, as that route holds no guarantees, but there’s at least a chance that he could return sometime this summer to anchor their lineup. As for their trade deadline plans, it seems like they’re more likely to add around the margins to deepen their roster. Their latest move — adding Nick Mears to their bullpen — follows that plan exactly. They also activated Devin Williams off the IL yesterday, hopefully giving their already solid relief corps another boost.

The Padres have started off the second half of the season on a hot streak, winning seven of their nine games, including a gem of a no-hitter from Dylan Cease last week. With the Diamondbacks hot on their heels in the standings and a big series against the Dodgers starting on Tuesday, they’re in position to continue making trades if they can find the right suitors. They already added Jason Adam to their bullpen and appear to be in the market for even more pitching.

The Padres are feeling the pressure because the Diamondbacks have been almost as hot to start the second half. The Snakes are 14-8 in July and haven’t lost a series since late June. Ketel Marte and Christian Walker have been carrying most of the load, but there are signs that Corbin Carroll might be breaking out of his season-long funk; he’s got a pair of home runs since the All-Star break to go along with the pair he hit on July 13.

For a very brief moment, the Mets actually surpassed the Braves in the standings after a pair of wins against Atlanta on Thursday and Friday. With Kodai Senga making his season debut in the second victory, things were looking up for New York. A pair of losses and a season-ending calf injury to Senga later, and it’s back to square one. The Mets did acquire Jesse Winker from the Nationals on Sunday, but their position in the NL Wild Card race feels pretty precarious if they don’t continue adding talent to their roster.

Atlanta’s two victories on Saturday and Sunday against the Mets snapped a six-game losing streak. With both Ozzie Albies and Max Fried sidelined by pretty serious injuries last week, the Braves have been unable to shake the bad injury luck that has followed them throughout the season.

With the Yankees and Twins holding the top two Wild Card spots in the AL, it seems likely the final spot will end up going to one of the Royals, Red Sox, or Mariners — or maybe the Astros if Seattle somehow retakes the top spot in the AL West. None of those four teams are playing all that well right now: Kansas City lost both of its series last week, Boston has won just twice since the All-Star break, and while Seattle just swept the White Sox, it came on the heels of getting swept by the Angels.

The M’s have been one of the most aggressive teams heading into the trade deadline, acquiring Randy Arozarena and Yimi García, and they’re not done yet. They have two potential paths to the playoffs, giving them more opportunities to find a way into the postseason, and the strength of their rotation gives them a big incentive to try and really go for it this year. Meanwhile, the Royals and Red Sox have made just a few moves on the margins of their rosters so far: Boston welcomed back James Paxton and added Danny Jansen, while Kansas City acquired Michael Lorenzen to help cover innings down the stretch.

Even though the Rays are two games over .500 and just a game and a half behind the Mariners in the Wild Card race, they’re busy tearing down their roster. The optics may look a little weird, but the math checks out: The Rays had a very narrow path to the postseason, and with so few true sellers, they’ve been able restock their farm system with a number of high-value prospects without significantly damaging their outlook in 2025 or ‘26. They’ve already moved Arozarena, Isaac Paredes, Eflin, and Adam, and there are likely more moves coming.

The rest of the teams in this tier still have a small chance of making a miracle run into the playoffs, but they might be better served by focusing on next year and taking a page out of the Rays’ playbook. If any of these clubs decide to tear things down, the trade market could really open up. None of these teams have had that much success in the week and a half since the All-Star break, either; the Giants mopped the Rockies and the Blue Jays swept the Rangers over the weekend to bring their second half records to 6-5 and 5-4, respectively, while Texas and Detroit have both gone 5-5.

The Cubs were the surprising winners of the Isaac Paredes sweepstakes, though they gave up a good amount to get him. Even though Paredes has the longer track record and Chicago seemed exasperated by Christopher Morel’s defensive miscues, it’s not immediately clear that the Cubs actually improved their roster with Paredes and they had to part with two prospects to boot. It’s an interesting move — it’s almost certainly one made with an eye towards the future, even though it looks and smells like a move that a buyer would make.

The Athletics have gone 14-8 in July, tied for the best record in baseball this month. Thanks to some scheduling weirdness, eight of those wins have come against the Angels. It also seems like Oakland won’t be a big seller at the deadline; Mason Miller hurt himself in the training room last week, and the A’s have indicated they might want to hold onto Brent Rooker too. They’ve got a bunch of secondary pieces they could part with, but those won’t really move the needle all that much.

Earlier this year, the White Sox lost 14 games in a row, breaking a franchise record. They’re now in the midst of their second 14-game losing streak, with a chance to break that franchise record for the second time in just a few months. They’ve won exactly 25% of their games and are back on pace to set the modern record for losses in a single season. Plus, their roster is about to get a lot worse as they ship out all their veterans ahead of the deadline.