The tendency is to evaluate the trade deadline as some mythical clash between titans. Dave Dombrowski strikes the first blow by trading for Jhoan Duran. A.J. Preller sees that and raises him, acquiring Mason Montgomery, Ramón Laureano, and Ryan O’Hearn. Dombrowski folds and limps away with Harrison Bader.

The reality is that contenders can’t be built in the middle of a season. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble pretending you can. Dombrowski knows this first hand. While the Phillies president has a reputation for aggressive trade deadline moves, he said something on Thursday that offers a tidy summation of Dealin’ Dave’s current Dombrowski Doctrine.

“Now,” he said, “it comes down to playing better on the field.”

» READ MORE: With Jhoan Duran in the fold at a modest price, the Phillies might as well go for broke

That’s the only honest truth of it, isn’t it? The trade deadline is more triage unit than laboratory. You fix the stuff that can be fixed without doing long-term harm. Otherwise, you keep on dancing to the playlist you downloaded for the long flight through the season. The best way to avoid a move you end up regretting is to pick your spots and keep the long-term odds in your favor.

For the most part, the Phillies have done that during Dombrowski’s tenure. Until Wednesday, when they traded Mick Abel and well-regarded catching prospect Eduardo Tait for Duran, the only blue-chipper they’d traded away was catcher Logan O’Hoppe. Even then, they swapped him for another young player at a premium defensive position. The return of Brandon Marsh hasn’t been nearly as lopsided in the Angels favor as conventional wisdom suggests.

Compare that to Preller. The Padres general manager has seemingly reached a point where the trade market is tail wagging his draft strategy. With Thursday’s deadline acquisitions, he has now traded a remarkable 12 of the 15 first round picks he has made in his 12 years at the helm. A good chunk of those trades have come only a year or two after the player was drafted.

The problem is, you can win these deals at an incredibly high clip and still end up seriously in the red. If 29 of 30 prospects don’t end up panning out but the one who does is James Wood, you’d need to acquire an elite hitter every offseason for six straight offseasons in order to justify the strategy. Imagine the team the Padres could field today with the players they’ve traded away.

— A lineup with C.J. Abrams, Trea Turner, Wood, and Josh Naylor batting one through four.

— A rotation fronted by Max Fried and MacKenzie Gore with Ryan Weathers and Zach Eflin providing depth.

» READ MORE: What does the Phillies’ deadline trade for outfielder Harrison Bader mean for Justin Crawford in 2025?

Combine that with homegrown players Jackson Merrill and Fernando Tatis Jr. and the Padres wouldn’t have needed to be chugging Mountain Dew the last couple of trade deadlines.

But let’s be honest here. Preller may not have had a job by the time the counterfactuals became reality. The Padres won fewer than 75 games in each of his first five years on the job. Conversely, they’ve finished above .500 three straight years, headed for a fourth, and seem likely to make the playoffs for a fourth time in six years. Juan Soto played a big role in that: on the field for a year-and-a-half and as a trade chip that landed the Padres current starters Michael King and Randy Vasquez.

The dirty little secret is that most trade deadline analysis is glorified fan fiction. Only history can determine winners and losers, and we ain’t there yet. Baseball trades are more derivative swaps than commodity purchases. These are not players changing hands. They are probabilities.

The Phillies won’t win any extra games because of all the saves that Duran racked up in his four years with the Twins. The hope is that he’ll help them win more over the next two and a half years than Tait would have whenever his six-year window of big league club control begins, assuming it ever does. That may sound pedantic. But every year we assign deadline winners and losers without so much as a nod for the amount of projection required for the veterans in the deal.

The instant analyzers tend to emphasize the uncertainty inherent in prospects like Tait. They often glaze over the uncertainty in the other side of the equation. It’s true that the vast majority of prospects never come close to the value that the Phillies will likely reap from Duran in this season alone, let alone prospects of Tait’s profile (i.e., 18-year-old catchers). It’s also true that a sizable chunk of elite bullpen arms will be far less than elite a year or two down the road. Jordan Romano was one of the best closers in the game between 2021-23, with numbers that were awfully close to Duran’s. In 2024, he was non-tendered. We’ve all seen how it’s gone from there.

» READ MORE: Jhoan Duran is the Phillies’ new closer and will give the bullpen ‘a lot of length,’ Rob Thomson says

Duran is younger than Romano, and with much better stuff. I’m not making any predictions here. The point is that nobody can.

For example, look at the saves leaderboard from a couple of seasons ago.

— Camilo Doval saved 66 games with a 2.73 ERA in 2022-23 at the ages of 24-25. In 2024, he had a 4.88 ERA. In 2025, he lost his job and was traded.

— David Bednar spent time in the minors a year after saving 39 games with 2.00 ERA in 2023.

— Alexis Díaz saved 47 games with a 2.47 ERA in 2022-23. In 2024-25, he has a 4.52 ERA.

There are unicorns like Edwin Díaz and Josh Hader. And there are guys like Devin Williams, who, despite some significant regression in both ERA and strikeout numbers, remains one of the most feared relievers in the game.

Duran sure has the look of a guy who belongs to that second group. The Phillies thought there was a good enough chance of it to warrant trading away the chance that Tait blossoms into a bona fide big league catcher with an impact bat. Run all the simulations and the most common bad outcome is it ends up as a wash that slightly favors the Phillies: Duran gives them a massive bullpen upgrade for the rest of this season, when such a thing could make the difference in a World Series run, then gets hurt or falls off a cliff. Meanwhile, Tait never makes the majors.

The calculations are the same for the moves the Phillies did not make. They could have dipped further into their upper tier of prospects to add a bat better than Bader’s. But, in doing so, they would be betting on the nearly unpredictable outcome that said bat would hit as well in a three-week stretch in October as he did over the first four months of the regular season.

“I can’t tell you there was any club over the last time period that we did not speak to,” Dombroski said. “There is no stone unturned. But we felt good with our club. We didn’t have a lot of gaping holes. Some of, again, our offensive improvement is going to have to come internally. We think it can. … But we feel comfortable with the guys that we got and really weren’t enticed to trade the big names, although some of our top prospects, people still asked about them.”

» READ MORE: Phillies acquire outfielder Harrison Bader from the Twins: ‘He’s going to play a lot’

The verdict on this year’s trade deadline is the same as nearly every one before it. We’ll see. The most honest thing anybody can say right now is that nothing has changed. The Phillies still have the second-best World Series odds behind the Dodgers. The Mets, Cubs, and Padres still pose a worthy test behind them. Anybody who tries to say anything more is talking out of the wrong end of their body.

Dombrowski did what he absolutely needed to do, which was land a playoff-caliber high-leverage arm and a cost-effective right-handed outfield bat. He did it without sacrificing a prospect who might help them in a big way over the next two or three years. It was a sensible performance, which is the best you can say. The rest will be up to history.