Earlier this week, Homer Bailey fired 7 innings of scoreless, 2 hit baseball for the Oakland Athletics, a club that’s 17 games over .500 and firmly in the mix for a playoff run in the American League. That same Oakland club just signed Matt Harvey, too, as - spoiler alert - finding decent starting pitching across the baseball landscape is still an incredibly hard thing to do.
In Augusts of yore, quenching that pitching thirst wasn’t so much of a problem. The post-trade-deadline month still featured trades, albeit ones between clubs after players had been placed on waivers, a process that far from prevented player movement.