Nearly two months before the July 30 trade deadline, conversations are already happening, which shouldn't come entirely as a surprise in a baseball environment like the 2024 season. Not only is there no obvious World Series favorite, 24 of 30 MLB teams can still call themselves contenders; they're either in playoff position or within five games of the final wild-card spot.
As usual, San Diego Padres general manager A.J. Preller is burning up the phones, this time in search of a starting pitcher, but he's not the only one. This is likely to be a deadline with a plethora of teams looking to add and only a few willing to ship out players. So the contenders are doing their diligence now, sources said, fully understanding that the only hope for the desirable-player inventory to grow is borderline teams acknowledging that their players' value might never be higher than this summer.
It's a point made by a front office official last week: The combination of hungry teams and in-season urgency makes the deadline the best time to deal for teams looking to move big leaguers, even more so than in the offseason. For relief pitching, it's unquestionably true. With starting pitching, it's typically the case. Hitters can be tricky, needing a perfect fit.
Ultimately, this trade class will be defined by the hinge teams that, at this point, remain undecided on their direction. Even though the clearest sense of the market won't come until mid-July, there's enough action to offer a cursory team-by-team look at what deadline season holds. Here is the latest information from more than two dozen major league sources.