ZiPSing Up the Trade Deadline: 2026 Edition

It looked like it was going to be a quiet deadline for a while, but the floodgate opened over the weekend, and we got a lot of fun moves, including a deal involving two-time reigning Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal. In the end, it feels better than last year’s deadline, when every team seemed preoccupied mainly with shoring up its bullpen. Now, there were certainly a lot of relievers shifting around, but plenty of starting pitchers and position players were also traded, and variety is the spice of deadline life.

Deciding the victor and the goat of the trade deadline is a vexing philosophical exercise, as teams come into swapping season with different goals. That makes it hard to distill deadline performance into a single, all-purpose number. But since distillation is a fun process — we would not be blessed with bourbon without it — let’s narrow down the question to something a projection system can get its virtual mind around. I focused on the 2026 part of the equation to cover the ZiPS portion of the deadline: Which teams helped their 2026 chances the most?

For this, I used my usual methodology, first projecting the league as it currently stands with the ZiPS projections, and then re-projecting the league as it stands, but having unwound every transaction made going back to the July 26 Connelly Early-for-Curtis Mead swap.

As a reminder, just because a team is low in the table doesn’t mean it failed to achieve its goals; it just means that it is worse for the rest of the 2026 season than it would have been without making any moves. The table below is sorted by change in playoff probability by default, but you can sort it however you’d like by clicking on the header of any column:

The first thing that stands out is how the playoff swings are generally much wilder than they were last year. The primary reason for this is that three teams with at least a 20% projected chance of making the playoffs were sellers. While all three (Orioles, Tigers, Blue Jays) are below .500 currently, the general mediocrity in the AL resulted in a lot of teams competing for the last wild-card spot.

Interestingly, although the Tampa Bay Rays made some additions this deadline, most notably Freddy Peralta, Tyler Wells, and Liam Hicks, ZiPS sees the acquisitions made by the Red Sox (Adley Rutschman, Erik Miller) and the Yankees (Heliot Ramos, Luis García Jr.) as being more immediately impactful. These trades don’t dramatically change the contours of the divisional race, but they do firm up the wild-card chances of the Yankees and Red Sox, now both projected past the 95% mark. The race for the six seed remains open enough that the playoff odds of the Blue Jays and even the Orioles haven’t completely disappeared. In fact, at least one of them still made the playoffs about a third of the time in the ZiPS simulations!

I thought the Guardians had a good deadline, but I was a bit surprised to see them get the biggest boost to their playoff probability of any team in baseball. But I probably shouldn’t be; the Guardians and the White Sox basically got to greedily scoop up most of the divisional and overall playoff odds that the Tigers shed over the last week. ZiPS projects Cleveland to benefit more than the White Sox, as the additions of Nathaniel Lowe and Jo Adell directly target the team’s offensive weakness and should push some of the sub-replacement-level projected performances off into the aether. There’s a reason I made a similar proposal in my suggested trades piece this year, with Adell a relatively even stand-in for JJ Bleday. While the Guardians still gave up Jacob Cozart as I proposed, they escaped having to offer up Kahlil Watson. The White Sox made some trades too, but with Luis Castillo the 2026 version, not the 2022 one, the improvements amount to little more than added depth. The Twins did add Jeff Hoffman, A.J. Minter, and Dean Kremer, but ZiPS still sees them as a .500 team.

ZiPS considers the moves in the AL West to be mostly a wash, as the Mariners and Astros basically just keep their current pace with each other via their respective additions of Taylor Ward and Daulton Varsho. Color me surprised, but the Angels might actually understand that they’re a rebuilding team, something I wasn’t quite sure of a week ago. It was a relatively low-impact deadline for the Rangers, and I’m not sure the Athletics were even aware that there was a trade deadline. The Mariners, Astros, and Rangers all picked up a bit of playoff probability from the AL sellers.

The Braves didn’t do anything dramatic at the deadline, but they did cut out some of their downside scenarios by adding some depth to their pitching staff and in the outfield. Even so, Atlanta actually lost a bit of World Series probability. The depth additions improved the team now, but they don’t really move the needle come playoff time, while much of the other NL contenders upgraded their front-end talent. The Phillies added a pretty good chunk of playoff probability by picking up Luis Arraez and fattening up the bullpen a little with Brooks Raley.

The changes in divisional and playoff probabilities kind of underrate the the Cubs’ efforts to upgrade their rotation, which were absolutely necessary. The Brewers were already overwhelmingly favored to hold the division, and the Cubs already had greater than 90% odds to play October baseball. But where you can see the effect of Chicago’s adding Clay Holmes and Kevin Gausman (and others) is in the team’s World Series probability, which saw the biggest non-Dodger jump in the National League. The Pirates had a bit of an odd deadline. They were quite busy, but it seemed to be entirely concerned with remaking the bullpen. And they were able to do that, but the bullpen previously was a middle-of-the-pack unit, not a festering wound of suck, and these moves are more akin to what a team does with a 10-game divisional lead when it wants to focus on tightening up its October roster. You would’ve thought a .500 team that was active at the deadline and combining to hit .221/.292/.360 from the DH position would’ve added a bat. Pittsburgh did not.

The Dodgers saw the biggest jump in World Series win probability using the simple method of identifying the best player available and then trading for him. Suffice it to say, they enter any matchup this postseason as the favorite, though baseball being baseball, the field is still more likely to win the World Series than they are. Like the Cubs, the Padres addressed their primary need this deadline, adding Robbie Ray and Casey Mize to a rotation that was desperate for reinforcements. Arizona was fairly quiet, only adding Lars Nootbaar, about three years later than a team should be trying to acquire Lars Nootbaar. While they’re not worse than they were a week ago, the competition (Phillies, Cubs, Padres) did more than the Snakes did.