(1) The Major League Baseball trade deadline is this coming Monday, August 3, at 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Trades will be announced between now and the deadline and then trading for the year stops for all practical purposes. Major league players have contracts with their current teams which, under MLB rules, require players to become “free agents” after a set number of years. A free agent can sign with his own team and extend the contract, or go anywhere else.

This all means that the dynamics of Major League trading must take into account a number of things. For those teams who believe they have a chance to go into the season ending playoffs and maybe make the World Series, it is a time to add players who will fill holes and help them to get there, sometimes even if a given player will become a free agent at the end of a season. For a team not expecting to make the playoffs and which has a quality player who will become a free agent at the end of a season, it enables that team to get players in return rather than simply lose the player when October comes. And then of course there are those trades where both teams are looking to their long term needs, not necessarily to help for this season alone. And finally of course, Major League baseball players make wildly different amounts of money, and Major League teams have wildly different amounts of money to spend, so that, too, becomes a factor.

The baseball season in Washington this year has been a very pleasant surprise. The Nationals, coming off several very unsuccessful season, started this season with entirely new non-player personnel. New manager, totally new coaches, new general manager, new everything. It was expected it would take some time to make their mark, but the Nationals, almost 2/3 of the way through the season, stand at 55-53, a little above the middle of the pack, much better than anticipated. They are doing so well because of an extraordinary offense (the Nationals have collected a number of younger players who are beginning to come into their mature baseball years). The Nationals are performing only at 55-53 because of their poor pitching record (their starting pitchers have been so-so; their relievers have, overall, been just awful). So, at the trading deadline, with a team which certainly has the possibility (if not the probability) of making the playoffs, the hope and the fear is that the Nationals will make a number of deals.

Presumably any deals that they make will be to better the quality of their pitching staff. This will be welcome, but the fear is that it might come about by trading away part of their stellar offense, trading away players that the team’s fans have been counting on. No one knows what current management will do.

There has been one trade so far, a trade with the Red Sox, which sent a promising young Australian player, infielder Curtis Mead, to Boston for a respected young pitcher, Connelly Early. This is the type of deal you would expect, although everyone hated to see Mead (who was having a breakout year, with unexpected power) go. Early has not yet pitched for the Nationals, because he has been dealing with an elbow inflammation, but hopefully he will be healthy soon. Mead, on the other hand, in his first game with the Red Sox, was hit by a pitch on his wrist, has a broken wrist, and will be out for some period of time, perhaps for the entire season. Very sad for Mead (and unfortunate for the Red Sox); everyone wished him the best on his new team.

So the Nationals are filled with young stars, and no one wants any of them to depart. Whatever deals are made to help the pitching staff (and they are necessary) will have a degree of disappointment and frustration in them. The Nationals for several years have been trading away their better players to get young, even more promising players and that strategy this year has finally seemed to pay off. I hope we don’t have to go through more of the same. It must stop some time.

When I say that the Nationals have surprised everyone this year with their offense, I mean that in capital letters. As you probably know, there are 30 Major League teams. Here is where the Nats stand in several batting categories.

Batting average: 5th

Home runs: 1st

Runs Batted In (RBIs): 1st

Runs scored: 1st

Hits: 2nd

Doubles: 4th

Triples: 3rd

Walks: 8th

Stolen bases: 1st

Slugging: 1st

On the other hand, its pitching is much different

Earned run average: 27th

You see what I mean. It sets the team up for some potentially interesting and necessary trades. But they may be painful.

(2) One a completely different topic, having decided I was reading books that were too fact filled, and that I needed some more relaxed reading for a while, I have read two Penguin mysteries, written (and published) in Penguin Paperbacks in the mid-1950s. The books were not carbon copies of each other, but they shared some characteristics. They both had interesting characters and plot lines, and neither author succeeded in being able to write a good conclusion. The endings of both books tied too many loose strings together, and the protagonists in both cases were reconciled with the loves of their lives for what looked like might turn out to be happily-ever-after happiness.

One book, Cork and the Serpent, by English author Macdonald Hastings (one of a series of books featuring Sir Montague Cork, insurance company president and venerable claims investigator), I am not going to really mention. The other, The Content Assignment, by American author Holly Roth, I will.

You probably never heard of Roth. I certainly had not, but her books were apparently pretty good on the whole. This one is a Russia against the West thriller, with the CIA tracking down a document that shows the Communist plan for future world domination, step by step. The prime CIA operative, a woman named Ellen Content, disappears and her English journalist/boyfriend is determined to find her. Of course, he does, two years after her disappearance from a ship crossing the Atlantic from Britain to New York.

This was Roth’s first book. For the majority of this book, Ellen Content is presumed lost at sea. What is a bit eerie is that ten years after the book was published, in 1964 Holly Roth was lost at sea. She and her husband owned a former Norwegian rescue boat which had been refitted as a sort of yacht, and which was crossing the Mediterranean when it faced a storm. The story is that Content was on the deck and was swept overboard, and that her husband, who was down below, was unable to rescue her when she stopped responding to his calls. To my knowledge, there is no question of foul play.

When I read this, I thought about all the people who have been lost at sea, and I thought that it might be interesting to write a post about them. I looked at Wikipedia’s list (of course, there is such a list), and realized that the vast majority of them were people I had never heard of. Perhaps the three most prominent were Natalie Wood (we will never know what happened there), Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell’s journalist/spy? father), and Rudolf Diesel (inventor of the diesel engine). I don’t know what really happened to any of them for sure, but I do know that I do not want to be lost at sea. Ever.