I’m not sitting here and watching five teams waste this. The White Sox are leading the AL Central, the A’s are at the Wild Card cut line, the Marlins are on a nine-game win streak, the Cubs are half a game out of a playoff spot, and the Pittsburgh Pirates are right there with Paul Skenes on the mound every five days, and the 2026 MLB trade deadline is August 3rd, which means all five of them have about seven weeks to figure out what they actually believe about themselves. Some of them are going to make a real move. Some of them are going to stand pat and call it smart roster management. One of them is owned by Bob Nutting.
Let’s go through it.
The Chicago White Sox Finally Have a Team Worth Investing In
The Chicago White Sox went from 121 losses in 2024 to leading the American League Central at 37-31. Miguel Vargas and Munetaka Murakami are real bats in the middle of this lineup, Davis Martin has anchored the rotation, and GM Chris Getz told reporters last month “we are focused on 2026.” They’re not laying foundation anymore. The 2026 MLB trade deadline is when they prove it.
They lost 121 games in 2024 and then came back out and lost 102 more in 2025, and for a while there it really felt like maybe this was just what the White Sox were going to be, like Getz was managing the long, slow process of a franchise that had decided to be bad forever, and people on the South Side were making peace with another era of irrelevance, and then all of a sudden it’s June and they’re leading the division. The pieces from the Crochet trade showed up ahead of schedule. From 121 losses to first place. That actually happened.
If your GM is on record saying “we are focused on 2026” and you’re sitting in first place in June, you go get something real. Aroldis Chapman out of Boston has 17 saves, an 0.46 ERA, and 28 consecutive saves going back to last season. He’s the best reliever available and every contender’s front office is already circling him. White Sox should be at the front of that line. The cost will be real prospects and you pay it, because you did not crawl back from 121 losses to be cautious at the first deadline where you’re in first place.
The Athletics Need This Run to Mean Something
The Athletics are 34-35 and sitting at the Wild Card cut line while playing out of Sacramento on their way to a Las Vegas stadium that opens in 2028. Jacob Wilson, Nick Kurtz, and Lawrence Butler are the real thing. Max Muncy just returned. There’s a genuine team here, and this deadline is how they prove they know it.
They’re playing in Sacramento’s Triple-A park and fighting for a Wild Card spot. Baseball is weird.
Oakland fans are never forgiving John Fisher. That is not a debatable thing anymore. Those people watched a franchise that the city actually loved get ripped out of there and they are going to be angry about it until the day they die, and winning in Sacramento doesn’t fix that and John Fisher knows it. The only question now is whether he’s willing to build something real enough in Las Vegas that people eventually show up and care, and the only way you do that is if you put a product out there worth caring about before you even get to Vegas. Right now they’re one game out with a core that’s just starting to come together and the deadline is right there. You make the move. You add something real. The alternative is standing pat, watching September go sideways, missing the Wild Card by two games, and giving every skeptic one more reason to not trust this franchise with their time.
Jed Hoyer and the Cubs Are Doing This Again
The Chicago Cubs went 27-12 to start 2026 and then dropped 18 of their next 24. They’re 36-34 and a half game out of an NL Wild Card, and Jed Hoyer already told the media the trade deadline is “the furthest thing from my mind.” Their rotation ERA is 4.89, second-worst in the sport.
That is the actual quote. The furthest thing from his mind.
I get it, you can’t plan deadline moves around a team that just went 6-18 and the players do have to play better, Hoyer’s not wrong about that. The problem is the rotation is why they went 6-18, and you don’t fix the rotation by watching it and waiting for it to turn around. Their offense can score, it’s been scoring all year, and you can only carry a broken pitching staff so far before it takes the whole season down with it. Hoyer also said he only goes hard at the deadline if they’re in position for a first-round bye, and at 36-34 they’re nowhere near that, which means the Cubs have to get dramatically better to earn the bye, they need the deadline to get dramatically better, and Hoyer won’t commit to the deadline without the bye first. Three years. Same answer.
They needed a front-line starter in 2025 and didn’t get one. Tarik Skubal is the arm that would change what this team is in October and every source in baseball says he’s not going anywhere. Hoyer’s escape hatch is already open and I can already hear what August 4th sounds like from here. The Cubs should go find the next best option and actually commit to it. We’ve seen this before.
The Marlins Just Got Hot at the Worst Time to Be Hot
The Miami Marlins were 26-34 in late May and on their way to being sellers. Now they’re 35-35, having won 9 of their last 10 and six in a row, and they’re one game out of a National League Wild Card spot. Their rotation is shredded by injuries, the offense is hot and Kyle Stowers is leading it, and Peter Bendix has to decide if this is real enough to build around.
The rotation injuries are bad. Eury Pérez needs two months. Robby Snelling pitched a handful of innings in his very first major league start, got hurt, and is done for the year. His career hadn’t even really started yet. Janson Junk is out too. They’re doing this nine-game run with a bullpen doing most of the work and an offense that keeps finding ways to score even with a minus-6 run differential on the season, which means this probably isn’t sustainable on paper and somehow it keeps happening anyway.
Sandy Alcantara has a $17 million salary this year and a club option for 2027 and has been sitting at a 5.15 ERA since he came back from Tommy John surgery. He’s the piece every team has been circling since the start of the year. If Miami is selling, he goes and the rebuild starts now. If Miami is buying, Alcantara stays, Bendix goes out and finds whatever rotation help is left on the market, and you let the offense keep doing this. The Marlins get hot and then stop trusting it, trade the pieces, lose 90 games for two or three years, and then start over again. It’s their whole thing. This looks like a real run. Treat it like one.
Bob Nutting Has a Choice at the 2026 MLB Trade Deadline. Don’t Blow It.
The Pittsburgh Pirates are at .500 and one game out of a National League Wild Card spot with Paul Skenes, the 2025 NL Cy Young Award winner, pitching every fifth day. The bullpen has 13 blown saves. They need a legitimate reliever. Whether Bob Nutting actually goes and gets one is the whole question.
That’s it. That’s the whole situation.
The rotation around Skenes is fine. The offense can score enough. The bullpen has given up a 6.71 ERA over a recent seven-day stretch that ranked 29th in the sport, and while Gregory Soto is fine in the ninth, the bridge from the sixth inning to Soto is where games have been bleeding away all year and there’s no in-house fix coming. Chapman from Boston is the best reliever at this deadline, the best by a lot, and he fixes the exact specific problem this team has right now. Getting him means real prospects and it means Bob Nutting writing a REAL check, not shuffling money around, not finding a creative structure, just adding actual payroll, and that’s the part of this that makes me nervous.
Paul Skenes won the NL Cy Young Award. His career ERA is below 2.00 across 320-plus innings. He’s under team control through 2029 and when he hits free agency he’s going to be worth more money than Nutting has spent on players in his entire time owning this franchise. The Pirates have him now, cheap, pitching every fifth day, and the thing standing between him and October is a bullpen that can’t hold a lead.
We know what Nutting does when the window is open. He watches it. Then it closes and we start talking about what year the next rebuild begins. Eleven years since this team made the playoffs. If it’s not this year, with Skenes on the mound and the Wild Card one game away and a specific fixable problem that costs real money to fix, I don’t know when the answer is ever yes for Bob Nutting.
