48 Hours Until The Trade Deadline

We’re just under 48 hours until the trade deadline, and the Dodgers are going to get Jon Lester, David Price, Cole Hamels, John Lackey, Jonathan Papelbon, Cliff Lee, Andrew Miller, Koji Uehara, Joaquin Benoit, Ben Zobrist, and Bartolo Colon in exchange for Matt Kemp, Corey Seager, Julio Urias, Joc Pederson, Carl Crawford‘s health insurance bills, the rest of Alex Guerrero‘s ear, and a map to the secret location where Andre Ethier is being hidden.

…unless they don’t, of course.

I have to say, this is shaping to be one of the odder trading deadlines for the Dodgers in a while, in the sense that I can see this going in absolutely every way. As one of the extremely few teams who can satisfy the three requirements of “money, prospects, and a competitive pennant race,” they are as well-positioned as anybody to make a big splash. As a team with the second-highest likelihood of winning their division of anyone, and relatively few current health concerns, they could arguably say, “only two teams in baseball have more wins than we do, so no thanks, we’re good,” and as the only team in baseball who can roll out Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, and Hyun-jin Ryu in a playoff series, they match up with any other rotation in baseball regardless of whether or not they add a Price or a Lester.

All of which means that until the 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT deadline on Thursday, the Dodgers are going to be involved in almost every single rumor out there, even if there’s no sense of reality to it whatsoever. (Sources tell me the Dodgers are in on Derek Jeter.)

This doesn’t mean that I really think Darwin Barney is going to be the only acquisition this week, of course. They’ll do something. Ned Colletti always does. If I had to spitball some odds, I’d say it’d go something like this:

• 90% chance that they add a reliever
  • 98.2% chance that said reliever won’t bump Chris Perez off the roster, leading us all to hate the new reliever no matter how good the deal is
    • 2.3% chance that the reliever is Octavio Dotel
• 75% chance that they add a starter who isn’t Price, Lester, or Hamels
• 35% chance that they do add Price, Lester, or Hamels
• 3% chance that they add Price, Lester, AND Hamels, because screw it, they’re the Dodgers
• 50% chance that they trade an outfielder
• 30% chance that the outfielder is Kemp
• 10% chance that the outfielder is Pederson
• 5% chance that no outfielder goes and an outfielder is added
• 0.000001% chance that outfielder is Andruw Jones, back from Japan
• 73.23% chance that they trade for Carlos Santana, only to immediately trade him for Blake Wood and Casey Janssen

It’s going to be a fun 48 hours, friends. Or maybe the opposite of fun. It could be that too.