The 2026 Major League Baseball trade deadline has come to pass. There was a flurry of activity Monday afternoon that provided some surprising moves, none of which were exceedingly shocking.
The big news of the trade deadline actually broke late Saturday evening when it was announced that the Los Angeles Dodgers have come to terms on a trade with the Detroit Tigers to acquire ace lefty Tarik Skubal.
Skubal is the back-to-back reigning American League Cy Young winner, and the first reigning winner to be traded in-season since Justin Verlander in 2023 — only the sixth ever. He led all of baseball in WAR and strikeouts in 2024 and went a combined 31-10 with 469 punchouts across 2024 and 2025. There was talk he may not be traded at all this year after he had loose bodies removed from his elbow in May and was back on a mound 38 days later. The Dodgers are now the first team in league history to have a reigning two-time MVP and a reigning two-time Cy Young winner on the roster together in the same season.
Unlike most baseball fans, I was happy to hear the news. The most important reason for that is my hope was that he would not end up on the New York Yankees. The Yankees had a rather quiet deadline, but they did acquire Luis Garcia Jr. from the Nats, he leads the NL in slugging percentage. GM Brian Cashman seems to like his team’s chances should they get Judge, Stanton and Bellinger back healthy before the end of the season.
Failing to acquire Skubal hasn’t cost the Yankees much in the way of championship odds with only a slight drop from +550 Sunday afternoon to +600 Tuesday afternoon.
I screencapped two sets of odds to track the movement on FanDuel, giving a wide enough birth from the deadline itself to still get a reasonable picture of the changes it brought:
Sunday at 5 PM:
Tuesday at Noon:
The question that I have for the Yanks is— what would their odds currently be had they acquired Skubal?
What would the third most favored team, the Milwaukee Brewers (+950 odds) odds be if they’d acquired Skubal?
A key reason to ask, is that the Dodgers didn’t give up a whole helluva lot to get the superstar pitcher — outfielder Zyhir Hope, the No. 5 prospect in their system and No. 25 in all of baseball, right-hander River Ryan at No. 7 in the system and No. 68 overall, and right-hander Brady Smith at No. 17, per MLB Pipeline. Los Angeles managed to hold onto their top four prospects and still get a nuclear arm added to their arsenal.
The Dodgers sit at an unprecedented +155 to win the World Series in early August. That speaks to the incredible team they have constructed, and also the weaknesses of the rest of the field.
A three-peat would give them the first one since 1998-2000, when the Yankees pulled it off, it would also elevate the cries of the Salary Cap hungry owners and the majority of MLB fans who support such a measure.
Seeing a cap and floor model in the vein of the NFL would give fans a sense that any team could win it all. Just don’t tell that to Cleveland Browns fans, hell, don’t even mention it to Bills fans. Teams that scout, draft, recruit, sign, develop and take care of their players will still have an enormous advantage, and those in low-tax, high-revenue, nice-to-live locations will have built in advantages that will become more stark in a hard capped league.
Point being, don’t expect a salary cap to fix all your franchises woes overnight, but I do understand the appeal and would love to see what America’s pastime looked like with a more level playing field.
Other noteworthy items from the deadline:
The Boston Red Sox basically dumped one of the members of their golden age of prospects they’ve been championing for the last several years. The oft-injured Marcelo Mayer never found his groove in the big leagues, and made more headlines for his attitude and alleged off-the-diamond issues. Word is the organization felt he was detrimental to the prospect they just locked up for nine-figures last summer in Roman Anthony. Mayer was said to be a regular fixture of the New England late night scene (according to 98.5 The Sports Hub of Boston), which fed into questions about his motivations and maturity. He was shipped to the San Francisco Giants for lefty reliever Erik Miller and minor-league outfielder Carlos Gutierrez.
The Red Sox also paid a pretty heavy price to nab Adley Rutschman from the Baltimore Orioles. The switch hitting catcher is currently injured, but could provide a valuable dynamic to the Red Sox lineup heading into the final stretch of the season, and the postseason should they land a spot. I quipped that the Red Sox are now going after players who are “pre-injured”, as another key acquisition before the deadline was Curtis Mead, the former Nationals second-baseman who has some serious pop in his bat right now and could provide much needed defensive stability to the Red Sox middle infield, was injured in his first game with the Sox. A pitch struck and broke his wrist. He now heads to the infirmary with ace Garrett Crochet, who hasn’t pitched since April 25 and still hasn’t picked up a baseball after shoulder inflammation turned into a lat strain, Roman Anthony, out since May 5 with a torn ligament in his hand and no timetable, shortstop Trevor Story, on the 60-day list since sports hernia surgery in late May and only now aiming at a rehab assignment. Rutschman officially begins his Boston tenure on the 10-day list with left wrist inflammation. Which when you compare it to the medical report I just got done delivering, is actually pretty healthy!
Boston moved from +3500 odds on July 13, to +1800 on Sunday afternoon, climbing as high as +1500 after the acquisition of Rutschman before settling to their current line at +1600. Still a dark horse by those odds, but third behind division rivals Tampa and New York in American League team odds to win it all.
The Atlanta Braves were quiet at the deadline, their odds have dropped slightly as a result. But Chris Sale did win July’s NL Pitcher of the month, and the Bravos still have big October aspirations.
My recent article, The Dead Tradeline, discussed how the expanded Wild Card slots (and the longstanding inability to trade future draft picks) makes for less excitement at the trade deadline. Far more teams being “buyers” now than sellers limits the amount of top end players who are available to be moved, and not trading future picks limits the amount of resources teams have to acquire them. I discussed how the Red Sox could greatly benefit by being deadline sellers, but their improbable win streak, and Breslow’s desire to save his General Manager job, had made that highly unlikely. The Red Hot Sox haven’t slowed down yet, having just completed a sweep of the Dodgers this past weekend, placing them at a mind-blowing 28-5 since June 24.
The last few weeks have felt like a holding pattern as we waited for the deadline to come and lock in the rosters. Now that we’ve seen its fruits come to bear, the headline that remains: the rich get richer in LA, the Yankees don’t make major waves, and the odds of a serious labor stoppage that puts the 2027 season at risk have grown ever higher as the owners will seek to use the Dodger’s success as the smoking gun that demands a salary cap at all costs.
So enjoy this postseason run, it may be the last one we get for a while.