Every Los Angeles Angels victory, every day they spend over .500, every win-now move they make reinforces what people across baseball now almost universally believe: They will not trade Shohei Ohtani, the best player in the world, before the 6 p.m.
ET deadline Aug. 1. Of course, a year ago today, Washington Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo went on a D.C. radio station and said he was not trading Juan Soto.
Two months later, Soto was a San Diego Padre. Baseball's trade deadline is a beautiful mess of lies and posturing and leverage.
What's true yesterday and true tomorrow might not be true today. And so hazarding guesses two months in advance is dangerous, particularly when logic suggests that holding onto Ohtani is far likelier than not to lead to a disastrous outcome for an organization that has spent the last two decades spinning its wheels and the last decade wasting the careers of two Hall of Famers.