Winners and Losers From the 2025 Trade Deadline

Now that the deadline dust has settled – or at least, started to settle – it’s time to start making sense of it. The Padres, Twins, and Orioles were everywhere. Top relievers flew off the board. Both New York teams spent all day adding. But who did well? Who did poorly? Who was so frenetic that they probably belong in both categories more than once? I tried to sort things out a little bit. This isn’t an exhaustive list. There were 36 trades on deadline day, a new record, and more than a dozen before it. Nearly every team changed its trajectory at least a little, and this is just a brief look into the chaos. Here are the trends that most stood out to me.
Winner: Teams Trading Top Pitchers
This year’s crop of rental players was lighter than usual, but deadline activity didn’t slow. Instead, it simply spilled over into relievers under contract for a while. Mason Miller, Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax, and David Bednar are under contract for a combined nine more years after 2025. That drove the prospect price up on all four. Having long-term control of relievers might be less valuable than at other positions, but it’s still valuable.
Most of the best prospects who swapped teams at the deadline were involved in a trade for top pitching. Leo De Vries, the consensus best player of the 2024 international signing period, was the big name here, but both the Phillies and Yankees offered up multiple good minor leaguers in exchange for Duran and Bednar. Taj Bradley, whom the Twins got back for Jax, is a former top prospect who won’t be a free agent until 2030. Read the rest of this entry »