The Dark Art: Declaring Your Team DOA.

Trade deadline special

Thanks for reading The Dope.

---

The run-up to the trade deadline — in any sport, really — is understood to pivot primarily around the actions of projected winners. That is, the folks at the top of these franchises either think they’ve got a potential playoff run in them or that they’re close enough that they really ought to give it a shot. And with hours to go to the MLB trade deadline, we’ve seen that in spades.

The Mariners think they can give it a run. The Mets are all over it — but a different kind of run, a pennant-type run. The Blue Jays are adding, and the Cubs, and et cetera. These teams generally add talent from teams that are already clearly out of the running: White Sox, Diamondbacks, Rockies, Twins, Pirates, and so on.

All grand. But let us spend a moment here pouring one out for the teams whose ownership/front office groups threw in the towel despite being in a sort of middle hell. In an era of expanded playoffs and third wild cards, it takes some real calculating to look at a group that is hovering on the edges of post-season contention — even if it’s only the fringe of the edge — and say, Nope.

That is a dark art, projecting likely failure despite maximum effort and okay results, and yet front offices do it every year. It’s one of the more under-appreciated aspects of the deadline, if “appreciated” is the proper term to apply here.

Sometimes you cut bait.

Here, I’ll show you.

The Giants. On June 11, this club stood 12 games above .500, firmly in the conversation for post-season running — and first-year grand poobah Buster Posey then stunned the baseball world by adding talented but occasionally petulant slugger Rafael Devers from Boston, a huge move that pre-dated the trade deadline and signaled an all-in mentality.

Just before the All-Star break, though, the team began sliding, and the slide got steep. By Wednesday, the Giants had lost 11 times in 13 games to fall to .500, five games behind the final N.L. wild card spot. That is not impossible ground to make up, and with Devers settling in, Willy Adames catching fire and Matt Chapman healthy after missing most of June, you could make a case for staying in it when you’re right at .500. Posey dropped anchor instead, trading high-leverage reliever Tyler Rogers, a big part of manager Bob Melvin’s bullpen, to the Mets for prospects. More could happen today.

Posey informed Rogers of the move during Wednesday’s game. The Giants went on to lose to the talent-shedding Pirates, 2-1, capping a homestand in which they went 0-6. That hasn’t happened to the franchise since 1896. Maybe Posey is on to something. Still, that’s a hard call.

The Guardians. A little surprising to me, as Cleveland is such a borderline case. And to be honest, this assumes that I’m understanding the club’s direction. By the time you read this, things may have changed.

This is a club that made a deep post-season run last year. The 2025 campaign hasn’t been smooth, and the Guards hit this week sort of grinding along at .500 — but they play in the American League, where the wild cards feel a little more open, and Cleveland is just 2.5 games behind Seattle and Texas for the final slot. They’re also 8-5 since the All-Star break.

---

---

But where the Mariners have been active, adding corner infielders Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suarez and reliever Caleb Ferguson, the Guardians’ executives mostly waited to see how the team would play before deciding what to do. In the meantime, they’ve traded away some injured but mending arms — Shane Bieber to Toronto, Paul Sewald to Detroit — that might have given them stretch-run help, and they’ve dangled All-Star and Gold Glove outfielder Steven Kwan, which sounds insane.

Cleveland’s decision-making is no doubt skewed by the status of closer Emmanuel Clase, who’s on paid leave pending a gambling investigation. (We’ll get to that in a future piece.) It doesn’t feel like the Guardians’ year — and that is the calculation their executives have to weigh.

The Cardinals. Depressing. I wanted this team to stay in it. But the word in St. Louis was that ownership’s view on what to do at the deadline would spin almost exclusively around how the team played in July, and it went 8-16. The Cards had a great May and a .500 June, and now this. Their front office just clearly doesn’t project a bounceback.

Still! You look at the standings right here, today, and the Cardinals are a .500 team sitting 5.5 games out of the final playoff spot. The message seems to be that “third wild card” is not a worthy target unless you’re fairly certain your team is on a solid upward trajectory, and you can’t argue that for St. Louis.

So the Cardinals went from potentially cautious buyers to open sellers. Closer Ryan Helsley went to the Mets, Steven Matz to the Red Sox. Nolan Arenado is available, and teams are asking on outfielder Lars Nootbar, who’s on injury rehab.

Sigh. And I’m sure that any Cards fan worth his/her salt could line us up for a long conversation about the ways that the front office has let them down over the past couple of seasons. Still, there are days when you look at your team, even your favorite team, and see it for what it is — and what it isn’t. Good talent on the move today.