Trade Season Kicks Ass Until They Sell Your Beautiful Son

Who is ruining baseball? For me, for today, it’s the Washington Nationals. Games played by my home team make up a solid 90 percent of the baseball I watch in a given regular season. Like a lot of baseball fans I was hoping Tarik Skubal would go to the Milwaukee Brewers or the Tampa Bay Rays instead of to the Dodgers, but in a distant, uncommitted sort of way, the way that I might hope that my friends have favorable weather while they are taking a trip someplace. Skubal’s trade destination is firmly not my problem. While the Nationals are playing competitive baseball, I really do not give a rip what the Dodgers are up to. While the Nationals are anywhere near the hunt, I might watch as many as two Dodgers games a month, and the chances are very good that Skubal will not happen to be pitching in any of them. Also, sorry to Detroiters but the Tigers can burn in hell for all I care.

The Nationals have had a good season. They were supposed to be bozos in 2026, but instead they have been frisky and fun. They’ve had the best offense in the majors, and not even in a dreary, optimized, true-outcomes sort of way. Yes, they hit lots of home runs—they are presently first in all the majors in dingers—but they also collect lots of all kinds of knocks (third in total hits) because they put the ball in play a lot (9th best team strikeout percentage). They also lead all of the majors in stolen bases, which just objectively kicks ass. They’ve had good vibes, and though their pitching has been broadly horrendous, more often than not it has been a good idea to tune in for one of their games. You are likely to see a dinger or two, you’re likely to see some action on the bases, you’re likely to get some early offense and some late offense. Guys are smiling and bat-flipping and having a great time.

The Nationals made it to the second half still right there in the mix for the final National League wild card. New general manager Paul Toboni made comments suggesting that he was going to lean into this unexpected success and try to give the team its best shot at playing into October. When the Nationals traded Curtis Mead to the Boston Red Sox, it was possible to accept this as a kind of fortification: Mead was extremely productive for the Nationals, but they’ve got plenty of offense and have a desperate need for starting pitching. Connelly Early, the player they received in return, is a perfectly solid starting pitcher who is expected to join the big-league rotation later this month, after completing a rehab stint. Then the Nationals dropped a series to the Blue Jays and lost the first three of a four-game set in Atlanta. For Sunday’s finale, against a rookie right-hander, Luis García was suddenly scratched. When Andrés Chaparro took a ball to the noggin and had to come off for a concussion test, and the team needed a healthy first baseman, they turned not to García but to Brady House, who has never played first base in his life. Everyone understood.

This is of course nothing like the Juan Soto trade, except that García, like Soto, is a homegrown player who debuted as a teeny little child and finally became the subject of trade intrigue due to dwindling years of team control on his playing contract. The Soto trade returned the universe: Washington’s two best players, James Wood and C.J. Abrams, were acquired in that deal, along with pitcher MacKenzie Gore, who this past offseason was flipped for another handful of hot-shot prospects. García, meanwhile, was dealt to the offensively challenged New York Yankees, in exchange for four right-handed pitchers: one fairly anonymous reliever for the big club, two rising but unheralded prospects for the developmental staff down in Double-A, and one Jake Bird, presumably for laughs.

But García is a very likable player and was having a breakthrough season, and it sucks to see him go. He smiles every moment that he is playing baseball; he engages with everyone around him, all the time; he is the guy at the end of the dugout who finishes every home run celebration with a big warm hug; and he absolutely mashes righties. I was gutted by the Soto deal, because of what it meant about my team’s owners and their seriousness about running a first-class baseball operation, but those lousy feelings were tempered somewhat by relief for Soto, that he was being cut loose from a team on a steep downward trajectory. Here the Nationals are trading away one of my favorite players just when it seems like my team is about to be good again, and not so that they can be better when I turn their game on later this evening. They are doing it because it makes sense to reverse course on that wild-card chase. They’re going to be worse for a while, again.

It is not lost on me that the Nationals—famously in need of starting pitching, sagging out of the wild-card chase largely due to terrible starting pitching, so desperate for starting pitching that they have now traded two productive bats from the middle of their lineup, including my favorite guy—were never in on the Skubal sweepstakes. The fact is, only a handful of teams could reasonably compete there: The Tigers only had one Skubal to deal, and they were not dealing him for cold cash but for players. The circumstances line up such that a team needed excellent players to send back Detroit’s way, but without gutting its big-league roster so severely that it would become pointless to have the game’s best starting pitcher. A few of the organizations with the most exciting farm systems, including the Dodgers, also field excellent big-league clubs. The Nationals have neither an excellent big-league club nor a particularly exciting farm system, so they were right out.

It would be pointless to feel mad about any of this. The trade makes sense, and it’s the sort of thing a baseball general manager is supposed to do, and I recognize that the mid-season trade deadline presents a particular opportunity for middling teams to fortify their ranks and improve, in the medium and long term, from mediocrity. It’s also something that juices up baseball, and professional sports, even with all the moral hideousness: It’s fun when teams execute trades, and it’s fun when the schedule presents pressure points that force teams to choose directions and thus causes trades to ping around in a frenzy. Also, I might as well admit this now: If Jack Cebert, acquired in the García trade, rises from Double-A, debuts for the Nationals in 2027, and becomes a reliable rotation guy, I will be pleased as punch. Some of those guys down in the minors whose developmental progress I will check and re-check 1,000 times next April, I can’t even remember how they got into the team’s pipeline. Probably one or two of them even came along in the Soto deal. Who can remember? I mean other than Andrew Flax.

In the aggregate, trades like this one in particular are part of what I like about baseball, even when they sting. But by deleting my favorite player from the team and signaling a retreat from the wild-card hunt, the Nationals have reduced enormously my interest in tuning in for the rest of this regular season. I remember what happened last year, when the team fired Mike Rizzo and Davey Martinez mid-season and team morale went into the tank and the second half was bottomlessly miserable. I may not be mad at the Nationals today, but I care less about their games and I dread another late-summer malaise, and that’s a bummer, because as much as I enjoy Major League Baseball, most of what I want to watch is my guys on my team. What a funny, confused state, for a baseball fan: Glad for trades, enjoying trade season, locked into the MLB Pipeline pages of 30 different organizations, but also meaningfully less inclined to watch what is left of the baseball season in front of me, due to trades. You might suggest that I could continue to enjoy a smiling García, making new friends and giving out big hugs and socking huge dingers, by simply tuning in for Yankees games. I will die first.

Feel free to use the comments under this blog to chat about the 2026 trade deadline! Just know that I will personally kick the ass of whosoever advocates for a salary cap in the next baseball CBA.