Red Sox & Nationals kick off trade season, Padres & Tigers determine their deadline fate and Erick Fedde talks White Sox & Pop-A-Shot

Now, this is how you start a party.

What a wonderful opening salvo to this year's trade deadline as the Washington Nationals and Boston Red Sox consummated a swap late Saturday night with the Nats sending corner infielder and second baseman Curtis Mead to the Boston Red Sox for left-handed starting pitcher Connelly Early.

I think that a month ago, if I had told you that neither the Red Sox nor the Nats would be selling, outright selling at the deadline, you would have been quite surprised.

Both Early and Mead are under team control for quite a while.

This is not your typical deadline deal where teams are gearing up for the stretch run and for the playoffs, and that is part of what makes this deal so interesting.

Very rarely do we see one-for-ones anymore, let alone one-for-ones with young big leaguers.

This is the epitome of a very alluring challenge trade.

Yeah, I think, uh, you, you summed it up well on the, the YouTube short that you did, which by the way, if you're not subscribed to the Yahoo Sports MLB YouTube channel, go do that.

Helps us out a lot.

That's where you can find all things Baseball Barbecast, including things that I'm alluding to now beyond the podcast that you hear, hear right now.

Uh, yes, we are so used to this time of year talking about how, oh, okay, expiring contracts for prospects.

That's how it works.

But can we not say? I mean, I don't wanna say, g- take too much credit here, but w- were, were these front offices listening to our pod last week and thinking, "Hey, you know what? Maybe we can do major leaguer for major leaguer." That, that is something that, uh, is allowed under the current CBA.

We don't have to just trade guys in A ball for, for veterans.

We are allowed to do this.

And that, but that, the phrase you used there I think is, is the fun one.

Challenge trade, right? Challenge trade.

That is one that I think applies here, but is also...

I, I don't know.

Let's, let's talk about that concept and why that is, is an appropriate fit for both of these.

I think the premise of a challenge trade is that you are kind of saying, "Yes, we recognize that what we are doing is bold from both sides, but we are saying we believe more in the other guy than the guy we are giving up, even though both of them will have a lot of runway to prove us wrong." Is that maybe a good way to summarize it? And we can apply that to both of these players here with these specific deals.

That is a, a fair way to summarize it, and it is perhaps why it's not the best fit for this deal, because these two players serve very different functions, um, because these two organizations have proven themselves to be very good at two very different things.

The Washington Nationals in year one under new president of baseball operations, Paul Pobotoboni, uh, has, they've been incredible at getting juice out of hitters at the big league level.

Their offense is the best in the sport.

The Nats lead baseball in runs per game, home runs, and OPS.