2026 MLB trade deadline grades: Report cards for every deal
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.
Twins acquire reliever Minter from the Mets
Minnesota Twins get:
LHP A.J. Minter
New York Mets get:
IF Bruin Agbayani
IF Billy Amick
Twins grade: B+
Minnesota looked like a team ready to bolster its roster with its recent play, and the rhetoric coming out of the team's brass suggested the Twins would be adding to it. This is the first evidence of this happening. In nabbing Minter, 32, Minnesota adds an experienced lefty who has pitched in numerous big games in recent years. The Twins also addressed the weakest part of their roster -- a no-name bullpen that's kept manager Derek Shelton scrambling all season.
Minter is an impending free agent who has been sharp after returning to big-league action after a long injury absence. He had been out since April of last season due to a torn lat muscle that had to be surgically repaired. He suffered a couple of setbacks during his rehab earlier this season, finally appearing for the Mets on May 26. He proceeded to rack up 14 scoreless appearances, allowing his first run on July 3. Overall, Minter has a 2.35 ERA over 23 innings. Despite allowing just two walks against 20 strikeouts, Minter's FIP is 4.02 because of the four homers he has allowed since his scoreless streak ended.
Red flag? We'll see, but Minter doesn't throw as hard as he used to and relies increasingly on locating his cutter/four-seamer/changeup combo -- which he's done superbly for most of this season. The walks are evidence of that, while the homers are evidence of his reduced margin for error. Still, Minter is a reliever many contenders would have loved to add, and the Twins beat them to the punch by sending the Mets two non-elite infield prospects from their deep system.
Perhaps as much as anything, this deal sends a strong signal to Twins fans and players alike: Minnesota is in it to win it.
Mets grade: C+
This is what teams out of contention do. Minter would be a pivotal player if the Mets were in the race, but they aren't, so he's a short reliever on an expiring contract whose performance could be exchanged for future value. The level of that value, generally speaking, isn't going to jump off the page in a deal such as this. Neither Agbayani nor Amick are top prospects, both missing Baseball America's most recent Mets' top 30, while sliding into the bottom third of MLB Pipeline's top 30.
Agbayani comes from a family with a penchant for baseball heroics. His father, Benny, starred for the Mets during their 2000 run to the World Series. More recently, his sister, Ailana, lifted the Chicago Bandits into the championship round of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League with a game-winning hit. Bruin, 19, is a lanky, left-handed-hitting infielder who, in limited action, has shown good strike zone command and little power.
Amick, 23, is probably the higher rated of the two. A second-round pick out of Tennessee in 2024, he ranks in the top five of the Texas League in homers and RBIs, but his .217 average illustrates his difficulty in making consistent contact. A corner infielder with an iffy defensive profile, he'll likely have to hit his way to New York.
Sexy? No, but at least Mets fans can enjoy the Agbayani family connection. Regardless, this deal is just the start of the exodus from a Mets clubhouse that is going to look very different in a few days.-- Doolittle
Red Sox get infielder Mead in swap with Nats
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 has evolved in measurable ways, which we can see in standard measures (vastly improved strikeout and walk rates, a spike in isolated power) and in more Statcasty ways. For instance, now that we have measures for bat speed and stance, we can see that Mead has adopted a more upright approach and now stands closer to the plate at the very back of the batter's box.
This last bit is crucial: With the changes, Mead's swing decisions have not only improved, but he's become even more of a flyball-heavy pull hitter with the home run results to show the tweaks have worked. A reminder: Fenway Park has long been a haven for righty pull hitters who get the ball in the air. Statcast's observations, which give us the ability to make smaller-sample judgments than those used in a typical valuation model, tell us Mead very much fits that mold.
The Red Sox are hoping Statcast is right because even if they have good rotation depth (which they do), Early is a lot to give up for someone with Mead's track record. And if Early was available, you have to wonder what other righty masher Boston might have been able to land.
Nationals grade: A-
Even if Mead's breakout proves to be real, the Nationals have plenty of offensive firepower to carry on -- and besides, his production was found money for Washington. Mead was a late-spring pickup for a low-level prospect after he was DFA'd by the White Sox. That turn of events seemed dire for Mead at the time, though we now know that the White Sox position group had moved beyond stop-gap solutions.
There is really no reason to not like the addition of Early to a rotation that needs help, now and going forward. He has been out for nearly a month with elbow inflammation that ironically got him removed from a start against the Nationals on June 30. He has resumed throwing and could return later in the season.
Either way, this is a big-picture addition for the Nats, and Early's promise, not to mention his years of team control, make this more than worth the value of Mead's bat-only profile. As mentioned, Early's Savant page doesn't inspire anyone. His command wavers, leading not just to too many walks but far too much hard contact. Early has coughed up 15 homers this season, a 3.8% rate of longballs allowed that would be one of baseball's 10 worst if he had enough innings to qualify.
But did we mention the career 126 OPS+, the top-50-75 prospect ranking and the years of team control? Yeah, it's worth a shot.-- Doolittle
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