Hoornstra: This MLB trade deadline features more smoke than fire

Behind closed doors, nothing elicited a good snicker among baseball executives these days more than the latest Shohei Ohtani rumor. Headlines such as “Several teams interested in Ohtani” were evergreen before Wednesday night, but tend to play well when our appetite for nothingburgers is unquenchable. Trade rumors are nothing if not digestible.

I got a brief window into Japan’s collective hunger for Ohtani rumors recently when not one, but two television stations in Ohtani’s homeland invited me to discuss the possibility of their favorite player becoming a Dodger before the trade deadline. One didn’t even bother to provide an interview topic beforehand. “Kaz Matsui, right?” I finally asked.

The question of whether or not the Angels will trade Ohtani before Tuesday was answered by General Manager Perry Minasian in June as “self-evident.” The Angels made their intentions completely clear Wednesday night, when, just hours after a report that they were officially pulling Ohtani off the market, they acquired pitchers Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez from the Chicago White Sox in exchange for a pair of their top prospects.

The evidence that the Angels never were truly motivated to trade Ohtani lies in the fact that they have been approached about trading him before, yet never have. The team has not finished with a winning record since 2015, yet the best player they have traded at a deadline since then is … Andrew Heaney? Brandon Marsh?

Now, the team is 3½ games out in the American League wild-card race. Mike Trout, Chris Drury and Logan O’Hoppe are all on track to return from the injured list in August. Set your own pessimism aside and ask: where was the evidence that Ohtani was going to be traded? Follow the Angels’ internal logic, and the answer was obvious. Ohtani wasn’t going anywhere. Not before the end of this season, at least.

Here are two things I’m actually watching as the deadline approaches:

The impact of the new rules

In August 2014, the Kansas City Royals selected the contract of Terrance Gore, a minor league outfielder who had all of 20 at-bats above A-ball to his credit. Over the next two seasons, Gore went on to appear in 20 regular-season games and eight postseason games with the Royals, mostly as a pinch runner.

For years, Gore stood as the exception to the rule: the rare position player whose base-stealing acumen alone made him worthy of an annual postseason roster spot. The Royals, Chicago Cubs, Atlanta Braves and New York Mets all rostered Gore in October from 2014-22.

As a minor leaguer, Gore had stolen 168 bases and been caught 17 times, before he earned his first big league promotion. That’s an astonishing 91% success rate. Now, with MLB’s new rules juicing stolen-base totals across the league, there’s an entire team (the Mets) with a stolen-base success rate higher than Gore’s.

Good teams are stealing bases again, too. It’s no longer a tactic teams use to overcome their inability to put runners in scoring position by hitting the ball hard; it’s a reliable means for putting pressure on opposing defenses. For contending teams whose offense lacks the speed element (the San Francisco Giants and New York Yankees come to mind), adding a speedster to the bench makes more sense this year than ever.

The Royals’ Dairon Blanco, the Oakland A’s Tony Kemp, and the St. Louis Cardinals’ Tommy Edman are not stars. They are limited players with a knack for stealing bases, currently trapped on teams out of playoff contention, who ought to be liberated to play the Terrance Gore role somewhere in October.

Who is a seller, exactly?

My greatest fear after MLB added a third wild-card team in each league was that it would allow mediocre teams to sneak into the playoff field. One could argue that last year, when the 87-win Philadelphia Phillies captured the National League pennant and three 101+win teams did not, that fear was realized.

This season, the standings are more tightly bunched. Nine-and-a-half games separate the best and worst AL teams currently in playoff position. The gap in the NL, where Atlanta is the only team in either league on pace to win 100 games, is larger. But the gap between the second- and seventh-best teams is a mere 4½ games. Twenty-three of the 30 teams can find a reason not to give up on this season if they want to find it. To be a seller in this environment, a team has to be really bad.

Among the other seven teams, the list of trade candidates is short on stars. A player like Blanco, Kemp or Edman might make the biggest impact in October of any player who moves before the deadline.

St. Louis, uniquely, could change that by trading Paul Goldschmidt or Nolan Arenado, but both stars are believed to be committed to whatever the Cardinals are planning to do in 2024 and beyond. Both also have full no-trade protection in their contracts.

While Juan Soto, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander make for good rumor fodder, those rumors feel easy to dismiss. This trade deadline will change the major league landscape – it always does – but expect a week of light gardening rather than wholesale re-sodding.