As we approach the 2023 MLB trade deadline, the next two weeks will be some of the most intense of the baseball season.
The repercussions are massive. From a fan perspective, your team's behavior at the deadline tells you so much. Is your team in it to win it? If so, how far in? If not, is it rebooting, reloading, rebuilding, resetting, reshuffling or something else entirely?
During the trade season, ESPN colleague David Schoenfield and I are tasked with assigning grades to the majority of the moves. This is done in real time. As soon as a trade goes down, we confirm that it's a thing, then hammer out a response to it as fast as our fingers can type.
Most in-season deals are pretty easy to parse in terms of each team's motivation. Either the team is trying to get better now, or it's trying to improve its long-term outlook or, in some cases, it's trying to do both things at the same time. These motivations serve as baseline criteria for how we grade the deal, while factoring in things like opportunity cost.
Almost all of last season's in-year deals remain a work in progress. That's because it'll take a few years before we know how the prospects in the deals pan out. Yet even a year down the line, we know a lot more about how the deals have worked than we did in the moment.
As we wait for this season's deadline deals to begin, let's revisit some of the swaps from last year. I picked 10 of the biggest deals and set about revising the grades we assigned at the time, while acknowledging that in many cases, even these updates are just the latest snapshots of evolving transactions.
I'll also be looking for some kind of emergent lesson from each move, one that could possibly be instructive for clubs as they wade into the 2023 trade waters.
The trade: The San Diego Padres acquire OF Juan Soto and 1B Josh Bell from the Washington Nationals for LHP MacKenzie Gore, OF Robert Hassell III, SS C.J. Abrams, OF James Wood, RHP Jarlin Susana and 1B/DH Luke Voit.