This is as good as it gets: MLB front offices send players a message with what they do — or don't do — at the trade deadline

NEW YORK — The 2018 Chris Archer trade is generally remembered as an abject failure for the Pittsburgh Pirates. They bought extremely high on the two-time All-Star, who was never good again, giving up Austin Meadows and Tyler Glasnow for what proved to be a season-and-a-half of an ERA close to 5.00.

But at the time?

“It felt incredible,” Trevor Williams said recently.

Williams, now with the Washington Nationals, was on that Pirates team that overpaid for what it hoped was a frontline starting pitcher. As the July 31, 2018, trade deadline approached, the Pirates, who hadn’t won a World Series since the 1970s and had seen their previous two postseason appearances end after a single game, were right on the bubble: not in possession of a playoff berth but a couple of games over .500 and certainly close enough to convince themselves they could get there — with the right reinforcements.

“You know, hindsight is what it is. But at the time, it was something where we were really happy that ownership and the front office did that,” Williams said. “It boosted confidence for us, for sure.”

Except it didn’t work. Not only was Archer bad and just a few years away from being out of baseball, but also the 2018 Pirates didn’t make the postseason and haven’t since. Still, the vote of confidence the front office showed the clubhouse by doing something so bold was plenty resonant.

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'It was definitely a shock'

The trade deadline is a pivot point in the baseball calendar. Every team in the league takes stock — of what they have, what they need and where they’re going. The contenders try to plug holes, the basement-dwellers try to turn their proven talent into future contributors, and the executives of middling teams, in some ways, have the trickiest job of all: Pick a path that will necessarily speak volumes to the players they already employ.

Especially if that message comes as an unpleasant surprise.

The 2021 Seattle Mariners were outplaying their run differential, one game out of the wild-card picture and nursing the longest playoff drought in North American sports when the front office dealt their closer to a division rival, leaving the clubhouse feeling “betrayed.” Even after it proved to be part of a broader “buy and sell” deadline plan, the Mariners missed the 2021 postseason by just two games.

Last year, the Milwaukee Brewers attempted a similarly too cute approach to the deadline, dealing arguably the best closer in the game while leading their division, with a plan to piece together enough relief (not unreasonable, given the rest of their bullpen) to still make the playoffs. The problem was that the loss of Josh Hader rocked a clubhouse that saw the move as a money-saving tactic at the expense of culture, camaraderie and the confidence an untouchable closer gives a club.

“It changed completely,” Omar Narváez, the Mets catcher who was in Milwaukee at the time, said recently of that Brewers’ team. “I think they were trying to get good people to help, but they never thought about how close we were, everybody together in the clubhouse.”

“Organizations do what they have to do,” said Trevor Gott, a reliever with the Brewers last season who recently came over to the Mets. “But yeah, it was definitely a shock. I think a lot of guys thought we were going to try to make a push, try to win and get to the playoffs and stuff. But it didn't happen.”

For the first time since 2017, the Brewers missed the postseason last year. They had a three-game lead in the division at the deadline but faltered in the wake of Hader’s stunning departure.

“I don't want to throw anyone under the bus or anything, but I think any team, when you trade away a player like Hader, it feels like you're giving away a lot of talent, a pivotal piece to that bullpen and that organization for so many years,” Gott said. “I think for a lot of guys, it did kind of feel like we’re working for the future.”

Narváez said the move hung over the clubhouse, affecting them for the remainder of the season, “mentally and emotionally.”

In it to win it?

Aside from the Mariners again shipping out their closer while reasonably close to contention, the shock of this year’s deadline came mostly from which teams were already bad enough to be sellers. But with the playoff picture knotted up near the bottom, a number of teams opted to barely pick any path at all — perhaps supposing that with little ventured, there’d be little lost while leaving themselves some possibility that things will pan out this year.

The Twins have relied on the weakness of their division to buoy them into postseason position thus far and apparently found that sufficient to stand pat, making virtually no significant moves. The rest of the AL Central might’ve decided it’s not even worth trying to win, given that whoever comes out on top stands little chance against the caliber of competition in October. Their steps back are Minnesota’s gain, but the same logic applies to the barely improved Twins, who sent their clubhouse a message that coasting to what is likely to be yet another frustrating playoff experience is sufficient.

The Reds are ahead of schedule by virtue of an entire class of rookies lighting up highlight reels and making the team easy to root for in spite of ownership’s best efforts. They needed an influx of reliable starting pitching — or even just a rental to tide them over — to take them from fun to formidable, and instead they … added a single middle reliever? Now their improbable rise to the top of the NL Central seems a lot more tenuous when you consider the modest but certainly more impressive deadline moves made by the Brewers.

Somehow, the San Francisco Giants are second in an NL West that is run by the Dodgers until proven otherwise and home to the upstart Diamondbacks and the so-talent-heavy-it-has-to-amount-to-something-eventually Padres. But while the Giants made more moves, numerically speaking, than the Twins or Reds, they seemed similarly uninterested in further investing in their current club.

And then, of course, there’s the derelict inaction of the New York Yankees, who were so bewildered by their confusing position at the bottom of a juggernaut AL East that they decided to simply stay there. Longtime general manager Brian Cashman said he would “rather be obviously” … “10 games back” (or “three and a half games up,” but who wouldn’t?) — a sentiment that perhaps he should’ve kept to himself.

Granted, Cashman’s inconsistent team has given him little cause for confidence — and there’s a case to be made that the Yankees should’ve sold, despite their record — but Cashman explained the team’s deadline approaching as reflective of being “in it to win it.” If that were true, additions probably would’ve spoken louder than words — inside the clubhouse and beyond. Instead, the Yankees were the last team to make a deadline move, and when they did so, it was to add a single reliever.

Contrast that with how the third-best team in baseball approached the deadline:

“We have a team that we really think is capable of winning the World Series. We really do. That's our ultimate goal,” said Peter Bendix, general manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, the Yankees’ opponents this week and the new employer of a starting pitcher who arrives with a 2.34 ERA.

“If we were to have that quality team and then find ourselves short starting pitching, that's irresponsible. That was the approach that we took going into this deadline: We need to really make sure that we give this team the chance to be as good as we think it can be.”

For teams that did little at the deadline, then, the message is clear: This is as good as it gets.