Last-minute MLB trade deadline intel: What Buster Olney and Jeff Passan are hearing
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Buster Olney
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Buster Olney
ESPN Senior Writer
- Senior writer ESPN Magazine/ESPN.com
- Analyst/reporter ESPN television
- Author of “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty”
The MLB trade season is heading to the homestretch!
While this year’s deals have been a bit slow to develop, there have been intriguing acquisitions, with the Seattle Mariners landing Josh Naylor and the New York Yankees getting Ryan McMahon headlining the early moves.
Now, with less than 48 hours remaining to deal before the 6 p.m. ET deadline arrives Thursday, conversations involving big names, including Eugenio Suarez, Dylan Cease and Luis Robert Jr., continue to circulate through the industry.
Which players will move in the final days? Which teams will go all-in to add the best available players? And which trades will have the biggest impact on the rest of the season? We enlisted ESPN MLB insiders Buster Olney and Jeff Passan to offer their latest intel as the deadline nears.
What are you hearing that could keep things moving in the final hours?
Olney: The New York Mets‘ effort to get better. The Arizona Diamondbacks are the epicenter of the teams looking to part with players, but between now and the deadline, the Mets might be the most aggressive club adding players, looking for a starter who could pitch Game 1, 2 or 3 of a postseason series. Relief pitching and an outfielder — perhaps Cedric Mullins of the Baltimore Orioles — is also among their needs.
Passan: The number of teams that want high-leverage relief pitchers — and the relative paucity of them on the market. There are the top rentals: Pittsburgh’s David Bednar and St. Louis’ Ryan Helsley. And then the group of controllable arms who could move but don’t have to: Minnesota’s Jhoan Duran and Griffin Jax, and Tampa Bay’s Pete Fairbanks.
Considering the number of teams that desire impact relief help — the Philadelphia Phillies, Toronto Blue Jays, Texas Rangers, Detroit Tigers, both New York teams and the Los Angeles Dodgers — the ones that have it are understandably holding out for a strong return. There are second- and third-tier relievers, sure, but there isn’t enough elite supply for the demand that exists. Which is why San Diego is dangling Robert Suarez, San Francisco is fielding calls on its back-end guys, and even the A’s could conceivably get an offer they can’t refuse for Mason Miller.
Which deal do you think will have the biggest impact on the rest of the season?
Olney: Whichever late-inning reliever is acquired by the Philadelphia Phillies — whether it be Ryan Helsley or Griffin Jax or someone else — Rob Thomson will have to rely on that pitcher heading into the postseason. Jose Alvarado is sidelined in October because of his PED suspension.
Passan: It all depends on teams’ willingness to move players with multiple years of control. The market of impending free agents ranges somewhere between meh and ugh. But if Joe Ryan or MacKenzie Gore were to go? Duran or Jax? Steven Kwan? All are possible. The cost, at this point, is prohibitive, but the deadline does odd things to front offices. Discomfort can be the most underrated tool at a deadline.
We’ve seen varying activity levels from the World Series favorites. What are you hearing about the last-minute plans for the division leaders?
Passan: The Blue Jays want at least one more reliever after getting Seranthony Dominguez from the Orioles. Detroit wants to shore up the back end of its bullpen and isn’t against nibbling for value on bigger pieces. The Astros want a starting pitcher. The New York Mets will get an arm and a center-field bat. The Brewers won’t do much, unless value falls into their laps. The Dodgers will go big-game hunting, with a reliever the top priority.
Olney: In the American League, the World Series favorite means … everybody. Since the league seems so wide open is driving a lot of the enthusiasm for the Mariners, Texas Rangers and even the Yankees. You can draw up a reasonable path to the World Series for about seven teams in the AL, and this might well fuel some bold moves in the last hours before the deadline.
The wild-card races are tightening. What are you hearing the Chicago Cubs, Phillies, Yankees and Mariners could do next as they try to keep their grip on the top spots?
Olney: The Cubs would love to add a frontline starting pitcher, someone who could effectively replace Justin Steele in their rotation. But maybe more than any team, they could be hamstrung by how thin the market is unless they value the cost of acquiring Joe Ryan or Cease or if they work something out for Merrill Kelly.
The Yankees are focused on adding bullpen help and a right-handed hitting outfielder, such as Harrison Bader. The Phillies need a high-end bullpen pitcher but are also in the mix for Luis Robert. And the Mariners are going to do something for their bullpen — plus, some rival execs still view them as the favorite to land Eugenio Suarez.
Passan: Shane Bieber is another option for the Cubs. The Phillies are among the most aggressive teams in the relief market and will add an arm. The Yankees aren’t as gung-ho as they were, say, two weeks ago, but they’re going to backfill with at least one solid reliever.
The Mariners are the deadline wild card, though. They’ve got a cadre of top 100-caliber prospects — eight in all — and the question they’ll ask themselves is: Are we comfortable moving someone like Harry Ford for a rental like Suarez? To this point, the answer has been no. But weird things happen in the final 40 hours before a deadline. And a team really going for it — the Mariners want a bullpen arm, too — is far from the worst thing, particularly when said team has never even made the World Series.
Who are some other available players you are hearing discussed most by front offices?
Passan: Wednesday is the day that teams are hoping to see the asks in return for controllable players come down. If they don’t, those teams will start pivoting to the rental market, understanding that it’s going to be flooded and looking to strike rather than be put in a panicky position over the final 12 hours before the deadline. The big names — Eugenio Suarez, Merrill Kelly, Zac Gallen, Luis Robert Jr., Bednar, Helsley, Bieber — have plenty of traction, and most, if not all, will go.
Olney: I’d guess that 75% of the players moved between now and the deadline will be relievers. This will be like a game of musical chairs, as front offices sort through options such as the Minnesota Twins‘ Danny Coulombe and Griffin Jax, the Rays’ Pete Fairbanks, the Rockies’ Seth Halvorsen, etc. All of the contenders are looking to add relievers, and they are looking at the same players.
Which other teams are you hearing could be the most active before the deadline arrives?
Olney: The Tampa Bay Rays and Diamondbacks figure to be the most prominent to deal players, and the San Diego Padres will do something to augment their offense and try to get back into the October dance.
Passan: The Orioles, even after moving Dominguez and Gregory Soto, have a huge inventory. The D-backs will be busy. The Marlins, with Sandy Alcantara, Edward Cabrera and a group of relievers, could play a big role. The Twins have lots to offer. Beyond Duran and Jax, left-hander Coulombe and right-hander Brock Stewart are two relievers with markets, and super-utility man Willi Castro could go, too. The Pirates will be busy. And the Guardians hold a lot of cards with Kwan and Bieber.
What else are you hearing ahead of the deadline?
Olney: A lot of frustration because teams looking to trade prominent players — knowing this year’s market — are holding their asking prices high, and the teams who want to add are trying to wait them out. “It’s a slow-moving market,” one exec said Tuesday night. But at some point, rest assured, the dam will break, and the deals — mostly for relievers — will happen fast and furious.
Passan: The Padres, as always, are toying with doing something big. The Twins continue to have exceptionally high asks on their relief arms. The chance of the Guardians moving Kwan is higher than teams believed a week ago. The Phillies and Mets are being very aggressive. Some teams are looking at players controlled through 2027 and factoring in the possibility that labor discord could significantly impact that season. And the lack of star power that could move will be made up for by the volume of deals.
Sports
Cal Raleigh hits home run No. 60! A monthly breakdown of the slugger’s historic 2025 campaign
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David Schoenfield
The list of MLB players who never hit 60 home runs in a single season includes many of the game’s all-time greatest sluggers: Willie Mays, Albert Pujols, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Jim Thome and Jimmie Foxx. Heck, Henry Aaron never hit 50. Neither did Frank Robinson or Reggie Jackson or Lou Gehrig or countless other inner-circle Hall of Famers.
But Cal Raleigh, the quiet, humble catcher for the Seattle Mariners, is now part of one of baseball’s most exclusive clubs: 60 home runs in one season. It is an unfathomable, improbable, astonishing performance. It is baseball at its most fun: the unexpected. He has given Mariners fans — all fans, really — something to root for on a nightly basis.
He joins a club that includes Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Aaron Judge, Roger Maris and Babe Ruth — three New York Yankees and three players with tainted legacies. Raleigh most obviously resembles Maris, the quiet, shy slugger from North Dakota who recoiled at all the attention he received from the press when he chased down Ruth’s record in 1961 and finished with 61 home runs.
Maris, however, was at least the reigning AL MVP entering the 1961 season. Raleigh, on the other hand, had never been an All-Star before 2025. When he recently hit his 55th and 56th home runs in the same game to break Mickey Mantle’s single-season record for home runs by a switch-hitter and tie Griffey’s franchise record, he seemed almost embarrassed to discuss the achievement.
“I feel like my name shouldn’t be in the same sentence as those guys, Mickey Mantle and Ken Griffey Jr.,” Raleigh said. “I don’t really have words for it. I don’t really know what to say. I’m sure one day it will set in, but for now it’s just ‘keep it going.'”
He has kept it going — all the way to the 60-home-run mark (in another double-homer performance, naturally). With his 60th blast of the season now in the books, let’s look back at each month of his remarkable 2025 campaign.
March/April
Number of home runs: 10
Longest home run: 422 feet in Cincinnati off Emilio Pagan (April 17)
Most clutch home run: Two-run blast off the Texas Rangers‘ Chris Martin in the bottom of the eighth to give the Mariners a 5-3 victory (April 11)
Raleigh didn’t begin the season giving any indication he was about to embark upon a record-setting campaign. In his first 13 games, he hit .184 with two home runs and just three RBIs. Indeed, the biggest news surrounding Raleigh at this point was the Mariners’ announcement the day before the regular season began that they had signed him to a six-year, $105 million extension that began with the 2025 season and runs through 2030, with a player vesting option for 2031. Interestingly, Raleigh had switched agents in the offseason, changing from Scott Boras to Excel Sports Management. Boras, of course, has a reputation for pushing his clients to free agency — and, certainly now, Raleigh’s deal looks like a relative bargain for the Mariners.
But the home run off Martin on April 11 got Raleigh going on a hot streak. He homered six times in six games and eight times the rest of the month. The home run off Pagan was another big one: That led off the top of the ninth and Randy Arozarena followed with another home run to tie the game, which the Mariners won in 10 innings.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the chase for 60 was on.
May
Number of home runs: 12
Longest home run: 432 feet in Texas off Jack Leiter (May 2)
Most clutch home run: Two-out, two-run HR off the Houston Astros‘ Bryan Abreu in the seventh inning to turn a 3-3 tie into a 5-3 victory (May 23)
In the Mariners’ first game of May, Raleigh homered twice off Leiter: The first one was his longest blast of the month, off a first-pitch slider. The second was a grand slam, off a 2-2 curveball — the first of his three grand slams in 2025. Raleigh then hit a little lull, going homerless for eight games, but then really got hot, hitting .313 with 10 home runs over his final 18 games in May, including two more two-homer games, against the Washington Nationals on May 27 and the Minnesota Twins on May 30. The game against the Twins pushed his OPS over 1.000, and while it was still just a third of the way through the season, MVP talk began percolating.
June
Number of home runs: 11
Longest home run: 440 feet at Wrigley Field off Colin Rea (June 22)
Most clutch home run: Two-run shot off the Chicago Cubs‘ Caleb Thielbar with two outs in the seventh inning to give the Mariners a 6-4 lead (June 20)
Raleigh began June with a home run, homered again on June 5, homered twice on June 7, went seven games without a home run and then blasted six over another six-game stretch, including a two-homer game against the Cubs on June 20. From May 16 to June 23, Raleigh had his hottest stretch of the season, hitting .313/.401/.794 with 19 home runs and 40 RBIs in 34 games.
The key to his success:
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He improved dramatically against left-handers this season: He has 22 home runs and a 1.030 OPS from the right side of the plate compared to 13 and a .696 OPS in 2024.
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He’s really good at pulling fly balls.
The latter skill has allowed Raleigh to punch his ticket to 60, even if he doesn’t hit his home runs quite as far as the season’s other big sluggers — Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Schwarber and Judge. Here’s a breakdown of each player’s home runs in 2025, with Raleigh lagging behind the others in home runs of both 400-plus feet and 425-plus feet:
As you can see, however, Raleigh’s ability to pull the ball more often means his rate of home runs to fly balls remains extraordinarily high, just like the other three.
July
Number of home runs: 9
Longest home run: 440 feet in Seattle off the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ Bailey Falter (July 4)
Most clutch home run: A solo homer off the Milwaukee Brewers‘ Nick Mears in the sixth inning — the only run in a 1-0 victory (July 22)
The season of Cal continued in July. He hit a second homer off Falter on July 4 and added another two-homer game against the Tigers just before the All-Star break, which he entered hitting .259/.377/.634 with 38 home runs in 94 games. The Mariners had played 96 games at the break, so that put Raleigh on a 64-homer pace and made him the talk of baseball at the Home Run Derby.
Which, of course, he won, becoming the first catcher to win the Derby and doing it with his dad Todd Sr. pitching and his 15-year-old brother Todd Jr. doing the catching. In one of the season’s most charming moments, a video of an 8-year-old Cal singing, “I’m the Home Run Derby champ! I’m the man, I’m the man, oh yeah, oh yeah” went viral leading up to the contest.
“That video is crazy,” the always understated Raleigh said from Truist Park in Atlanta. “I mean, I don’t know where they found that thing in the archives. Yeah, just kind of surreal. You don’t think you’re going to win it. You don’t think you’ll ever get invited. Then you get invited. The fact that you win it with your family, super special. Just what a night.”
August
Number of home runs: 8
Longest home run: 448 feet in Seattle off the Athletics’ Jacob Lopez (Aug. 24)
Most clutch home run: Three-run HR off the Tampa Bay Rays‘ Griffin Jax with two outs in the bottom of the eighth, turning a 2-0 deficit into a 3-2 win (Aug. 8)
Raleigh continued a slump at the plate this month. After hitting .304 in May and .300 in June, he hit .194 in July and .173 in August, although the home runs kept coming at a steady pace. His most clutch home run of the season came at home against the Rays. Facing tough right-handed reliever Jax with runners at first and second, Raleigh got ahead in the count with two balls. Jax could have just pitched around him with two outs but threw a sweeper at the bottom of the strike zone — not a terrible pitch but not quite on the outside corner where Jax wanted it — and Raleigh crushed it 417 feet over the center-field wall.
Along the way, he hit his 49th home run to break Salvador Perez‘s record set in 2021 for most home runs by a primary catcher. That was part of a two-homer game in which he hit Nos. 48 and 49, and the next day he hit No. 50. He finished the month with a five-game homerless stretch, however, so entered September with 50 home runs in the 137 games the Mariners had played up to that point, which left him on a 59-homer pace.
September
Number of home runs: 10
Longest home run: 426 feet in Atlanta off Rolddy Munoz (Sept. 7)
Most clutch home run: First-inning two-run shot off the Los Angeles Angels‘ Kyle Hendricks (Sept. 14)
Raleigh hit just one home in the first four games of September, which meant he’d hit just one home run in a nine-game stretch — a period in which the Mariners had gone 2-7 and were barely hanging on to the third wild-card spot by a half-game over the Texas Rangers with three other teams within 2½ games. Raleigh would hit two garbage-time home runs against the Atlanta Braves on the road: a ninth-inning shot in a 10-2 win and then the ninth-inning three-run blast off Munoz in an 18-2 victory.
Suddenly, Raleigh’s chase for 60 and the Mariners’ pursuit of a division title were back on. Starting Sept. 7, the Mariners won 14 of 15 games heading into Tuesday’s series against the Colorado Rockies, as Raleigh hit .286/.437/.714 with seven home runs. He had his 10th two-homer game of the season against the Kansas City Royals to pass Mantle’s switch-hitting record and tie Griffey’s club record (he broke Griffey’s record with a blast against the Astros on Saturday). With his 11th — which came Wednesday night, sending Raleigh to the 60-mark, he tied Hank Greenberg (1938), Sosa (1998) and Judge (2022) for the record for two-homer games in one season.
I don’t know if 8-year-old Cal Raleigh ever envisioned something like this happening, but here’s the thing that has endeared Raleigh to Mariners fans and made him one of the most popular players in franchise history: He’ll be much happier about the Mariners winning their first division title since 2001 on Wednesday than hitting his 60th home run.
CLEVELAND — George Valera hit a two-run homer in the third inning, Jose Ramírez had a two-run double in the seventh and the Cleveland Guardians became the first major league team to overcome a deficit of 15½ games and take the lead in either division or league play, beating the Detroit Tigers 5-1 on Wednesday night.
Cleveland (86-72) has a one-game lead over Detroit (85-73) with four games to play. The Guardians also have the tiebreaker by taking the season series.
The 1914 Boston Braves were 15 games back in the National League on July 4 and rallied to win by 10½ games according to Elias Sports Bureau. Since baseball went to division play in 1969, the biggest deficit overcome was 14 games by the 1978 New York Yankees to win the AL East.
Tanner Bibee (12-11) won his third straight start and allowed only one run in six innings, extending the streak of Guardians starters allowing two or fewer runs to 19 games. They are the first since the 2019 Tampa Bay Rays to go at least 19 games.
Detroit has dropped eight straight and is out of first place for the first time since April 22, when the Guardians led by a half-game. Jack Flaherty (8-15) took the loss.
The Tigers took a 1-0 lead in the third when Parker Meadows‘ sacrifice fly drove in Dillon Dingler.
Brayan Rocchio led off the Cleveland third with a double and then scored when Valera’s drive appeared short of the wall in center before it was deflected off the glove of Meadows.
Ramírez broke it open in the eighth with a two-run double to right field that deflected off the glove of Detroit second baseman Gleyber Torres. He became the second player in Cleveland franchise history to reach 3,000 total bases. The other was Earl Averill with 3,201 from 1929 through ’41.
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