Louis Cardinals as a team that may have been struggling as far as wins go, but would give them a real test. The comeback against the Chicago White Sox where they turned a 7-2 deficit into a 10-7 win started to push them into buy mode.īut that was a White Sox team in disarray. It was just last week that things started to crystalize for Hoyer and his front office. That game Hoyer referenced was the start of the 11-3 run the Cubs are currently on. At that point, it did look like things were going in (a selling) direction.”

We ended up scoring 17 that night and then sort of didn’t look back for a while. It looked like we were going to drop to eight under. “I think back to when we were seven under and playing the Nationals down 3-0. “There was a period where it looked like we were gonna be sellers,” Hoyer said.

But it wasn’t long ago that the direction the Cubs would go this deadline wasn’t so clear. 500 and just four games out of first place. It may seem obvious now, especially after Tuesday’s 20-9 win over the Cincinnati Reds got them back to a game over. But there were times over the last few weeks when it sounded like he was riding the same roller coaster fans tend to. That’s the right way to attack things during a long baseball season. He, like many of the new-age, front-office types, won’t act rashly and refuses to judge his team on a day-to-day basis. There was little sense in risking much more of their future for what remains something of a long shot at the 2023 postseason.Ĭubs team president Jed Hoyer tries to stay dispassionate.

The needle the Padres threaded, it turned out, was a balance between buying and not buying overly aggressively. “Around the edges,” manager Bob Melvin said, “is what we were looking for.” Whether it was Preller’s typical exhaustiveness, an attempt to drive up the price, or a brief but genuine foray, the Padres at least asked the New York Mets about Justin Verlander before withdrawing from those sweepstakes well ahead of the 40-year-old’s eventual return to the Houston Astros, league sources told The Athletic.Īnd amid three separate trades Tuesday, it might have been the most un-Preller-like deadline yet. 500 on the outside of the postseason picture - would care to venture. The Padres, for instance, again inserted themselves where most clubs in their current, midsummer position - multiple games under. In the end, it came as no surprise that the Padres approached the past two days - after a sweep of the Texas Rangers that highlighted their unmet ceiling - with a certain amount of aggressive abandon. He’s the type who heads back to the ATM and reloads. They also have stained the executive’s spotty transaction history in the form of Austin Nola and Mike Clevinger and Adam Frazier, not to mention all of the present and potential value surrendered along the way.īut Preller, like Padres owner Peter Seidler, is not the type of gambler who hurries home after an extended run of bad beats and large losses. The trade-deadline returns have included Juan Soto and Josh Hader. Preller has bought continuously since a pandemic turned the world upside down three years ago, creating a unique opportunity to go big when so many other front offices erred on the side of caution. The needle the San Diego Padres threaded in the final hours before Tuesday’s trade deadline was not, it turned out, a complicated balance between buying and selling. Here’s where you can buy tickets to upcoming games. View all of our trade grades in one place. Grading Scott Barlow to the Padres, Josh Bell to the Marlins and other buzzer-beating deals. How the Phillies improved their rotation depth with Michael Lorenzen. Is Jack Flaherty enough to bolster the Orioles' pitching? How Verlander ended back in Houston and what it means for the Astros' playoff push. Scherzer said the Mets told him their new vision is to build toward 20. New York executed its deadline plan, but it must learn from the failures that led to it, Tim Britton writes. Which teams made the right trades and which ones missed at the deadline? Mets trade Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer The Astros and Rangers get high marks … the Yankees, not so much. Jim Bowden grades the deadline performance of all 30 teams. Our big-picture look at the winners, losers and snoozers of the 2023 deadline period. Catch up on the latest: Around the league Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander went south to the Rangers and Astros, respectively, while Shohei Ohtani stayed put in Anaheim. Major League Baseball's 2023 trade season is over.

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