The Indians added Leonys Martín and beat Minnesota on trade deadline day and their playoff expectancy on FanGraphs went from 99.4 to 99.8 percent. It’s not much — as written in these digital pages, the move was safe and cheap if not exciting — but it kept the needle moving in the right direction.
The deal that most interested me, however, came in just before the 4pm deadline, when all unconsummated trades turned to pumpkins, with the Indians and Cardinals swapping some minor league outfielders. It seemed a deal of little import — we only included it in our news and notes — but what if trading for Oscar Mercado was the Tribe’s biggest deal of the deadline?