On the baseball calendar, the three weeks between the All-Star Game and the beginning of August are always circled. That’s trade season, the crunch time when teams make key decisions about their trajectory, and then lean into those assessments with transactions ahead of the MLB trade deadline.
As this year’s swaps are highlighting, though, there’s a whole other section of the calendar that will, in retrospect, help define those decisions. Serious contenders such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and Baltimore Orioles closed up shop on Aug. 1 with headline additions that bet heavily on players rediscovering past form, such as Lance Lynn (6.