Top of the Order: Welcome to the Second Half

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

It’s amusing that we consider this morning the start of the second half of the Major League Baseball season, considering 1,449 games have been played, with only 981 left on the schedule. Yet, of course, we know why that’s the case: The All-Star break offers players and coaches a little breather and provides an easy dividing point in the action. Besides, “first uninterrupted segment of the season” is quite the mouthful.

So, anyway, now that the lopsided first half is over, I figured this would be a good time to take a high-level view of where things stand as we begin the second section of the season. Let’s run things down division by division, first covering the National League from East to West before doing the same for the American League.

See also: Trade Deadline previews for the National League and American League.

It isn’t quite a fait accompli that the Phillies will the division, but they’re certainly in good shape, and even though the Braves will probably fall short of winning their seventh-consecutive NL East title, they’ll almost definitely make the playoffs again. The shared goal for the two clubs between now and the July 30 trade deadline is to improve their rosters as much as possible to prepare for a deep playoff run.

The Mets’ odds to make the postseason are close to a coin flip, but they’re showing signs that they intend to buy, adding depth relievers Phil Maton and Alex Young to shore up a bullpen that’s struggled even as they’ve turned their season around. Since their ugly loss to the Dodgers on May 29, the game in which Jorge López threw his glove into the stands after he was ejected, the Mets have the best record in baseball, at 27-13.

Washington and Miami are out of it and have already begun selling off players; the Nationals recently traded reliever Hunter Harvey to the Royals, while the Marlins sent Luis Arraez to the Padres back in early May. The Nats aren’t going to blow anything up as they look to build around CJ Abrams, James Wood, and eventually Dylan Crews, but the Marlins are open for business under new baseball operations head Peter Bendix.

The NL Central is made up of the first-place Brewers and the four teams in the glut of the NL Wild Card race.

While the Pirates, Cubs, and Reds don’t have very good Playoff Odds right now, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be sellers. Both Pittsburgh and Chicago finished the first half strong, with the Pirates sweeping the White Sox to enter the break at .500, and the Cubs winning seven of their last 10. All three clubs have strong enough farm systems to get controllable players who can help them for more than just the remainder of this season. Like the Mets, the second-place Cardinals enter the second half with Playoff Odds north of 40% after overcoming a slow start to surge in the standings.

This would be the most straightforward division in the muddled NL… if not for the big ol’ ¯_(ツ)_/¯ for the Giants. The Dodgers haven’t quite met expectations this year, with the injury bug once again biting them, but the division remains theirs to lose. The Padres and Diamondbacks have similar odds to many other NL teams, but unlike some of the squads in the mediocre middle, San Diego and Arizona are clearly motivated to augment their rosters and push for the playoffs. The Padres are run by A.J. Preller, and the Diamondbacks are the reigning NL champs who’ve recently brought their record above .500. Both teams are trying to win, full stop.

But then there’s San Francisco. They Giants have played really well at times and have looked awful at others. They’ve gotten some out-of-nowhere contributions from players like Heliot Ramos, but three of their offseason additions — Jorge Soler, Jung Hoo Lee, and Blake Snell — have underperformed and/or been hurt for much of the year. I could absolutely see it all clicking over the next 10 days, prompting the Giants to go hard at the deadline, just as easily as I could see it all falling apart. Sure, that’s true for many other teams, but at least within the NL, San Francisco might be the hardest of them all to pin down.

Because both the Orioles and Yankees went cold to close the first half, neither of the two AL heavyweights could gain much ground on the other, though New York’s woes began about a week earlier and allowed Baltimore to pull ahead in the division. Chances are both teams will rebound the rest of the way and upgrade their rosters before the deadline; this is a dogfight that’ll probably continue through the end of the season.

Don’t forget about the surging Red Sox, who were 35-35 and 14 games out in the AL East entering their June 15 game against the Yankees. Since then, they have the best record in baseball (18-7), pulled within 4.5 games of first place the standings, and cemented themselves as clear deadline buyers behind breakout All-Stars Tanner Houck and Jarren Duran, and face of the franchise Rafael Devers.

The Rays will, as they often do, straddle the line at the deadline; Phil Maton is already out the door and others could follow. And perhaps no team in baseball can impact the trade deadline more than the Blue Jays, who surely will deal at least some of their boatload of rentals. But will they take more drastic measures and trade Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and/or Bo Bichette? We’ll soon find out.

It’s not quite to the level of the AL East, but the AL Central is nonetheless shaping up to be a fun race down the stretch, with the Twins well within striking distance of the Guardians, which should make for a huge series the next time they meet, when they’re set to play four games in three days from August 9-11 in Minneapolis. The Royals have slowed down since ending May at 35-24, but they’re still in the thick of things; their recent acquisition of reliever Hunter Harvey may be just the start of a busy July.

The Tigers and White Sox mirror the Nationals and Marlins, with the former likely selling off only rentals like Jack Flaherty, while the latter should be willing to trade anyone and everyone. (Yes I’m aware of the Tarik Skubal rumors, but I can’t imagine a world in which Detroit trades him.) The White Sox may facilitate the two largest trades of the deadline if Garrett Crochet and Luis Robert Jr. are out the door.

The Astros’ 12-24 start is firmly in the rearview mirror, as they nearly ran down the Mariners before the break. The two teams meet in Seattle to open up the second half, though neither club’s deadline plans are going to change based on the three-game series; they’re both full-go to add at the deadline. The Mariners are in dire need of offense while the Astros could use some pitching.

The Rangers are in an especially fascinating spot; it would be shocking to see the reigning champs sell, but they’re running out of time and their Playoff Odds are pretty slim. With a bevy of rentals like Kirby Yates, Andrew Heaney, José Leclerc, and Michael Lorenzen on the roster, they could get some nice pieces before the calendar flips to August without compromising their chance of contending in 2025. As Dan Szymborski wrote last week, “Retooling shouldn’t be a dirty word for the Texas Rangers.”

The Angels and A’s are about what most of us expected they would be: varying degrees of bad. The Angels will likely, as they almost always have under current ownership, convince themselves they can win next season and move only their pending free agents. Reliever Carlos Estévez is the most valuable piece that they might consider dealing. Oakland, meanwhile, is fully open for business. It seems likely that the A’s will trade slugger Brent Rooker, but will any team meet their ridiculously (read: reasonably) high asking price for All-Star closer Mason Miller.