MLB teams
Dan Szymborski, Special to ESPN.com 9y

Teams with most to gain at trade deadline

MLB, Houston Astros, Toronto Blue Jays, San Francisco Giants, Detroit Tigers, Chicago Cubs, Minnesota Twins

With only a week to go until baseball's non-waiver trade deadline, the Houston Astros struck the first blow, landing pitcher Scott Kazmir from the Oakland A's for two lower-level prospects. For more details on that, check out Keith Law's rundown of the players involved in the Astros-A's trade. With 18 of baseball's 30 teams within five games of a playoff spot as of Thursday afternoon, Houston's salvo is likely just the first of many leading up to the July 31 deadline.

The start of baseball's busiest week is always a good time to get the updated ZiPS projections for the rest of the season. Teams have hard decisions to make at this time of the year, far more complex than simply deciding if an acquisition is a good one. Big additions don't come for free, and with most players worth only a win or two over a replacement-level player over the final two months, teams need to be sure that the very expensive wins they're acquiring are high-leverage enough to be worth the inflated prices. Wait-and-see time is over; teams now have to decide whether to throw in a towel, a gauntlet, or just find a cozy bunker for when the smoke clears.

To get an idea of which teams have the highest-leverage wins remaining, I instructed ZiPS to simulate the rest of the season a million times to get up-to-date playoff odds for each team. Then, I repeated the exercise 60 times, each time adding one or two wins to a team's bottom line to see how the change affected the playoff odds. By doing this, we can more easily see which teams have the most to gain from a big-name addition. Incidentally, these playoff odds include the Kazmir trade, boosting the Astros' playoff probability by 7 percentage points from Thursday morning.

^ Back to Top ^