One buyer, twenty-nine window shoppers
Eighty-nine trades went through in the three weeks to August 4. If you were refreshing the wire, you already know almost all of them were sellers.
The Orioles made ten moves and the Pirates nine, and both of them are under .500 and going home in October. The Mets took their roster apart. The busiest clubs at this deadline were the ones clearing out the fridge before a long road trip.
Then there is Chicago, 64-49, who spent two days buying arms. Kevin Gausman from Toronto. Clay Holmes and Tyrone Taylor from the Mets. Braxton Garrett from Miami. Ryan Zeferjahn from the Angels. Aaron Civale a fortnight earlier. And Jameson Taillon shipped out to Toronto with cash, which turns out to matter as much as anything they brought in.
They fixed the exact thing that was wrong
If you have watched Chicago this summer you already know what was wrong, and the model agrees with you. It rated that rotation at 4.44 by FIP, the worst mark of any contender on the board. Worse than Milwaukee at 3.82, worse than the Dodgers at 4.21, worse than a Phillies staff at 3.95 that has been carrying a mediocre offence all summer. Chicago has been winning games with bats and a prayer.
Gausman is the real acquisition: 3.75 over 127 innings, which is a lot of evidence, and seven tenths of a run better than the rotation he is walking into. Holmes at 3.77 and Zeferjahn at 4.02 both improve a bullpen.
But the sneaky one is Taillon leaving. He was at 5.51, a full run worse than his own rotation's norm, and every fifth day he was handing the game to the other team. Half the improvement here is not a player they added. It is a start they stopped giving away.
Rotation goes 4.44 to 4.09. Call it a third of a run a game.
Why three and not six
A third of a run a game over a full season is about 3.8 wins, and we rounded down to three.
Braxton Garrett has four innings on record. Four. We genuinely do not know what he is, and a number that pretends otherwise is a number we would have to walk back in September. Civale is worse than the rotation he just joined, at 4.84, so he is a body rather than an upgrade. And there are only about fifty games left, so three full-season wins buys Chicago roughly one extra win between now and October.
One win. That is the whole regular-season effect, and if you go looking for it in the standings you will not find it. Their playoff odds move from 96% to 98%, which is to say almost nothing, because they were already going.
The part that actually moved
Pennant odds go from 11.8% to 15.4%. World Series from 6.8% to 9.2%. That is a much bigger jump than one win should buy, and it is the same thing we wrote about on Monday: at the top of the standings, wins get greedy. A better seed buys a bye, a bye buys a tired opponent, and the whole thing compounds through three rounds.
It puts them fourth in the National League behind the Dodgers, the Brewers and Atlanta. Still fourth. If you are a Cubs fan hoping this was the deadline that flipped the league, the honest answer is that it closed some of the gap and did not close all of it.
What we might have wrong
Three is a judgement, not a measurement. The arithmetic said 3.8, and we shaded it down because two of the five arms are question marks. If Garrett turns out to be a mid-rotation starter rather than a mystery, three is light and we will have been too careful.
Our model also cannot see a rotation until it pitches. Run differential still describes the staff that included Taillon, so this overlay is us stepping in front of the data on purpose, with a written reason and a date attached. If it is wrong, it is wrong in public, on the Ledger, where you can check it.