2026 MLB trade deadline grades: Report cards for every deal - ESPN

MLB trade season is here!

From the early deals that got things rolling to the last-minute flurry of trade deadline day activity, this is your one-stop shop for grades and analysis breaking down this year's biggest trades.

ESPN MLB experts Bradford Doolittle and David Schoenfield evaluate and grade the most significant moves below.

Red Sox get:
IF Curtis Mead

Nationals get:
LHP Connelly Early

Red Sox grade: C

Perhaps this is giving short shrift to pre-Statcast evaluators, but this feels like a deal that would never have happened before the advent of tracking metrics. In a nutshell, Early's Savant page features a lot of blue and gray bars (bad) while Mead's have a lot of pink and red (good). Surely it's more complicated than that, but this is a good way to think through a deal that just doesn't work very well for Boston in a more traditional model of trade-related valuation. The machinery at Baseball Trade Values, for example, sees Boston as getting fleeced.

It's easy to understand the rationale. Early is a promising lefty, a consensus top-50-to-75 prospect entering the season, who has a 126 ERA+ over his first 21 big league starts. Even on the traditional stats line there are concerns, which we'll get into below, but that's still a valuable pitcher with loads of team control remaining. Mead was once a top-50-to-75 prospect himself, but that was several years and three teams ago. His 2026 season (137 OPS+, 2.0 bWAR) represents a breakout, but he was below replacement level entering the season.

The blue bars on Mead's Savant page are telling: He can't really field or run. But his long-tantalizing bat has come alive for the Nationals this season. With this deal, Boston is banking on that breakout being sustainable. Mead