PHILADELPHIA (AP) — With the baseball trade deadline set for August 3, the sport’s expanded playoff format is making it far more difficult to determine which star players will be on the move.
As the season’s second half gets underway, an extraordinary 23 of the league’s 30 teams find themselves within four games of a playoff position. The second half opened Thursday with the resurgent Philadelphia Phillies hosting the struggling New York Mets.
“You’ve got a lot of really good teams that were on the bubble that have gotten in and kind of made it,” Phillies first baseman Bryce Harper said. “Anybody that has an opportunity to get in, anything can happen and that’s what makes our sport great.”
At the center of trade speculation is Detroit Tigers pitcher Tarik Skubal, a two-time Cy Young Award winner who will be eligible for free agency after the World Series. The 29-year-old left-hander is 2-3 with a 3.62 ERA across six starts since undergoing surgery on May 6 to remove a loose body from his pitching elbow. He returned to the mound on June 13 following a procedure performed by Dr. Neal ElAttrache using a NanoNeedle scope 2.0, a smaller, more flexible version of the traditional arthroscope.
Detroit entered June with a 22-38 record — sitting 16 games below .500, which matched the 1914 Braves (12-28) for the worst mark of any team that eventually rebounded to reach the postseason, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Since then, the Tigers have gone 22-14 and now sit just 3.5 games behind the final American League wild card spot, though they must leapfrog six other teams. How they perform over the 16 games remaining before the deadline will be key in deciding whether the club looks to buy or sell.
Minnesota’s Joe Ryan and the Mets’ Freddy Peralta are also names being watched. New York could additionally look to move left-handed relievers Brooks Raley and A.J. Minter, while San Francisco may attempt to part ways with second baseman Luis Arraez.
Only two teams hold division leads of more than three games — the Los Angeles Dodgers at 11.5 games and Milwaukee at five.
“There are some middling teams that are potentially going to finish stronger and some teams that are front-running right now that might fall back to the pack,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “It’s what the fans wanted. It keeps everyone involved through September, as many teams as possible.”
Just seven teams are more than four games out of a wild-card position: the Athletics (6.5 games back), Cincinnati (eight), Kansas City and the Los Angeles Angels (ten each), the Giants (10.5), the Mets (12), and Colorado (13.5).
“I think having more teams involved and more fan bases feeling like there’s something to play for later in the season is always good,” said Toronto pitcher Dylan Cease, who won the All-Star Game.
In Philadelphia, the Phillies were 9-19 when manager Rob Thomson was let go on April 28, with Don Mattingly stepping in as his replacement. Since then, Philadelphia has gone 44-24 and trails NL East-leading Atlanta (55-40) by just two games.
Harper pointed to the return of pitcher Zack Wheeler as a turning point. Wheeler came back to the rotation on April 25 after surgery last August for thoracic outlet syndrome and has since gone 10-1 with a 2.13 ERA.
“Once we got Wheels back, I think everybody kind of took a deep breath,” Harper said. “That helped a lot of our other starting pitching kind of just fall into place.”
In Boston, manager Alex Cora was dismissed following a 10-17 start, and the Red Sox have gone 36-31 under replacement Chad Tracy. The club closed out the first half with their first 9-0 road trip since 1977. Despite a 46-48 overall record, Boston sits just a half-game out of the final wild-card spot in an American League where only five teams have winning records.
“We’ve done a much better job overall with our approach,” Tracy said. “We’re taking more pitches. We’re seeing more pitches against starters. We are getting starters deep in counts earlier in games. We’re scoring runs in the first five innings of the game and letting our starting rotation pitch with a lead.”
Should the Red Sox stumble in the coming weeks, closer Aroldis Chapman and starter Sonny Gray could find themselves traded before the deadline.
Looking back at last year’s expanded playoff format, three of the four teams that received first-round byes — Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Toronto — reached the League Championship Series. Of the teams that advanced through the Wild Card Series, only the Dodgers went on to win their Division Series.
Securing a bye gives teams a chance to realign their pitching rotations and ensure their top starters open the Division Series.
Yankees pitcher Cam Schlittler reflected on New York losing the AL East title and the first-round bye to Toronto on a tiebreaker last season.
“Every game matters,” he said.
