In the frenzied minutes after Major League Baseball’s July 31 trade deadline, three of us writers at The Athletic filed our annual list of winners, losers and snoozers.
We labeled 10 teams as trade-deadline winners. Some were bad teams capitalizing on a seller’s market. Others were contenders appropriately addressing needs. The Philadelphia Phillies and San Diego Padres landed elite closers. The New York Mets and New York Yankees rebuilt their bullpens. The Houston Astros brought back an old friend.
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Now those teams are in another column: Postseason losers, if they made it at all. But we might also be losers. Only one of the teams we named trade-deadline winners reached the Championship Series: the Seattle Mariners, who acquired Josh Naylor and Eugénio Suárez. We had the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays as losers, and the Milwaukee Brewers as snoozers. Considering how those takes have aged in the past 75 days, there’s a lesson to be learned: Even if the entire industry is bagging on a team’s inaction or overpay, there can be an enormous gulf between our expectations of what it’ll take to win a pennant and the reality of October baseball.
Now, as both Championship Series get underway, let’s see what lessons we can draw from how these four teams reached the ALCS and NLCS.
Los Angeles Dodgers
The lesson: When well-laid plans go awry, be flexible and creative
Enlightened as I would look if I went with a far simpler lesson — spend all the money and get all the good players — the story of the Dodgers’ postseason so far has not been the stars. Or not the superstars, anyway. It’s been their starting pitching, their on-the-fly rewriting of their bullpen plan and the absolute scenes that ensued when Andy Pages bounced a broken-bat grounder back to the mound Thursday night.
When writing this story ahead of last year’s Championship Series, the lesson I drew from the 2024 Dodgers was, “When you have a glaring need, address it emphatically,” as they had done trading for starter Jack Flaherty to patch a leaky rotation. Ahead of this year’s trade deadline, the Dodgers’ most pressing need was for bullpen upgrades. Tanner Scott, Kirby Yates and Michael Kopech were hurt. Brusdar Graterol and Evan Phillips were out for the year. Blake Treinen was having a career-worst season. Then, the only reliever the Dodgers added at the deadline, Brock Stewart, pitched just four times for them before a shoulder injury ended his season. The reigning champions’ bullpen was in shambles.
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No one imagined the answer would be Roki Sasaki — least of all Sasaki himself. The 23-year-old rookie had a 4.72 ERA in eight starts early this season, appearing a shell of himself before a shoulder injury put him on the shelf. He had diminished velocity, weaker stuff and almost as many walks (22) as strikeouts (24). The Dodgers had no need for him in their postseason rotation. But they had the gall to consider him as a leverage relief option, an area of sudden and desperate need. The Dodgers hurriedly reworked Sasaki’s delivery, as detailed by ESPN’s Jeff Passan, and he threw twice in middle relief at Triple A before returning to Los Angeles.
Since then, Sasaki has thrown 7 1/3 scoreless innings in relief — nine strikeouts, two hits, no walks. From lost season to lockdown closer, an outrageous development punctuated by Sasaki breezing through three perfect innings in Game 4 of the NLDS. Not every player or every team has the capacity or willingness to experiment on the grandest stage in the name of putting together the best possible postseason roster.
Milwaukee Brewers
The lesson: Winning on a budget is possible with a sound roster-building philosophy
In some ways, it would seem this version of the Brewers began with the arrival of Freddy Peralta and Christian Yelich in 2018. But did it really? Those were still the days of Ryan Braun and Lorenzo Cain, Matt Garza and Jésus Aguilar, Jeremy Jeffress and Josh Hader.
No, this Brewers roster has almost entirely come together in the past few years, from a farm system churning out major leaguers and from savvy signings and trades. The front office has had a clear plan, first led by David Stearns and now Matt Arnold, and a philosophy for the types of players that fit the Brewers. It has come with painful departures, like Hader and Corbin Burnes. Such is the reality of operating with a small-market budget — the Brewers have a bottom-10 payroll this season, per FanGraphs. The Brewers have managed to win (and win a lot!) with their guys. Their guys happen to be small, by and large, but these short kings sort of prove the point. At a time when every team is scouring the player pool in search of a marginal edge, a market inefficiency, the Brewers have found it in players with an obvious physical disadvantage, yet all these other attributes: range, speed, contact and a willingness to evolve. Those traits are all over the Brewers lineup, a starting nine peppered with names the average fan is still learning.
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Talking about having an organizational identity often seems smarmy; something a college football coach might claim to have built by recruiting our type of guys. But the Brewers are an example of a franchise that has established a philosophy that has permeated the clubhouse. They can identify undervalued players who fit the team’s style — William Contreras, Joey Ortiz, Quinn Priester, Andrew Vaughn, Caleb Durbin, Chad Patrick, et al — and then put them in position to thrive. It’s one thing to tell a player about your winning culture. It’s another for them to see the career-changing impact it will have.
Seattle Mariners
The lesson: Pitching alone doesn’t win championships, but it is the most crucial component of one
There’s much worth saying about the way this Mariners roster was constructed, and particularly how Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto’s wheeling and dealing over the years brought Seattle everyone from J.P. Crawford to Luis Castillo, Andrés Muñoz to Matt Brash, Randy Arozarena to Jorge Polanco. Dipoto played the right cards at this year’s trade deadline, too, landing Naylor and Suárez to shore up the middle of the Mariners lineup.
Yet as Game 5 of the ALDS evolved into a classic, the most evident takeaway was how a team really can’t have too much good pitching. As the Tigers turned to unreliable arms out of the bullpen, depending on their Houdini acts to extend the game deep into extra innings, the Mariners never ran out of top-tier options. After getting five innings from starter George Kirby and then summoning their best leverage relievers, the Mariners went to Logan Gilbert, then another stud reliever, then Luis Castillo. Trotting out past and present Cy Young candidates from the bullpen? That’s why it felt like the Mariners were fully in control of a winner-take-all ballgame, even as the Tigers continued wriggling out of trouble.
Recent iterations of the Mariners’ rosters were lopsided, with superb starting pitching yet a lineup that struck out too much to be a factor in October. Because this team has balance, the pitching puts it over the top. Even in an ALDS in which Seattle hitters had a combined .634 OPS and the Mariners were without their best starter, Bryan Woo, their pitchers held the Tigers to a .201 batting average and a 1.04 WHIP. That was enough. The Mariners have the depth to put a quality starter on the mound in each playoff game, rather than deploy a leverage reliever as an opener or over-engineer a path to 27 outs (or 45!).
Each offseason, we see evidence that starting pitching is the most expensive market in the sport, and each October, we’re reminded why that’s true. Still, we spend much of the summer stacking lineups alongside each other to compare contenders. Who ya got?! But pitchers run the playoffs. And a manager like Dan Wilson will find no greater relief than knowing whatever pitcher he hands the baseball to next is one he trusts to get the job done.
Toronto Blue Jays
The lesson: Don’t force the window closed
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It’s not hard to envision an alternate universe where the 2025 Blue Jays lost 94 games instead of winning 94 and winding up here, four wins from their first World Series appearance since 1993. In recent years, the story told about these Jays was a cautionary tale about a team that had a clear competitive window, centered on Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, and fumbled it away, failing to land superstar free agents and coming away with only three wild-card sweeps. Toronto could have easily traded Guerrero and Bichette as rentals, moved starters Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt and cut bait with George Springer.
But Blue Jays brass chose a different direction — forward, at full speed. Even with the New York Yankees coming off a World Series appearance and other AL East teams on the upswing, Toronto execs did not view the division as unwinnable. They signed a closer, Jeff Hoffman, and a leverage reliever, Yimi García. They acquired two Gold Glovers from Cleveland, second baseman Andrés Giménez and Myles Straw. They signed switch-hitting slugger Anthony Santander and future Hall of Fame starter Max Scherzer.
Then they kept the big fella, extending Guerrero for 14 years and $500 million.
Still, the Jays were an obviously flawed team this season. Their pitching staff’s production was solidly in the bottom half of the majors. Their activity at the July 31 trade deadline initially felt more like quantity over quality; we rated them as a trade-deadline loser for not swinging bigger in the bullpen, in particular. But those additions did seriously improve their odds this October. Seranthony Domínguez and Louis Varland are pitching in leverage spots, and the small bet they placed on Shane Bieber returning healthy has paid off in the form of a sorely needed No. 3 starter in the playoffs, with Bassitt and José Berríos out.
Before we go, can we learn one more lesson from the Jays?
Save a little surprise for the end of the season, if you can.
As fascinating as it has been to watch Trey Yesavage announce his arrival on the game’s grandest stage, it must be confounding to be in the opposing dugout as he hucks heaters and splitters. Think any of these Mariners hitters got a look at Yesavage when he was in A-ball in April, or High A in May, or Double A in June, or even Triple A in August? The Jays last won a pennant a decade before Yesavage was born. He’s 22 and taking the ball in the ALCS. There’s nothing cooler than that.