Why, After All These Years, MLB’s Trade Deadline Is No Longer a Fixed Time and Date

This year’s cutoff will be Tuesday, Aug. 1 at 6 p.m. ET, proving last year’s deviation from what the baseball world had known for decades prior is here to stay.

For decades, MLB’s trade deadline was a fixed, steady point: 4 p.m. ET on July 31.

Yet last season brought a shift in both date and time. The 2022 deadline was Aug. 2 at 6 p.m. ET, the latest non-waiver-trade deadline in more than a century. But that change didn’t receive much attention. Much of the baseball schedule was shifted backward last year due to the lockout: Opening Day was pushed back by a week, and with the rest of the calendar squeezing to accommodate that change, it was easy to overlook the deadline move as a potential one-off.

Turns out, the shift is here to stay. Under the new collective bargaining agreement, MLB now has more flexibility in setting the date of the deadline and has pushed the time back by a few hours. That means this year’s trade deadline is Aug. 1 at 6 p.m. ET.

A league official described the conversations on the time change as straightforward. A move from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. ET means it should be easier for more fans to follow along with the potentially busy final hours of the deadline. It’s fairer to teams brokering deals on the West Coast, too. (Not that front offices across the country weren’t already working around the clock if needed this week, anyway.) And a 6 p.m. ET deadline still gives teams a bit of time before games begin: The earliest scheduled first pitch Tuesday is at 6:40 p.m. ET, as the Phillies visit the Marlins, with the rest of the evening’s slate beginning soon afterward.

As for the date change? A simple matter of preserving options. Per MLB’s release last year on the CBA: “The Office of the Commissioner shall have the flexibility to set the Major League Trade Deadline on a date between July 28th and August 3rd.” There had been one-time adjustments to the date in the past when July 31 fell on a Sunday. Now, the league has the ability to schedule the deadline anywhere in this window. This is the second consecutive year the deadline will fall on a Tuesday—an ideal day for it on the baseball calendar, given that there are usually no afternoon games on a Tuesday, so no adjustments to the schedule are required.

So when 4 p.m. rolls around Aug. 1? Just know that you have two additional hours of potential trade activity to enjoy. And remember, this deadline really is the final cutoff—all this change has not revived the waiver trade deadline.