Hug Watch

Forwarded this? Subscribe here and get The Long Game every Friday.

Your name is Adley Rutschman.

It’s Monday, August 3rd and you’re enjoying a rare off day in the middle of the Major League Baseball 162-game schedule.

You have big plans: a Spider-Man: Brand New Day matinee on the big screen with your boys, Colton Cowser, Ryan Mountcastle, and Gunnar Henderson — the guys you have come up with since your minor league days in the Baltimore Orioles system. Just a couple of hours to unwind from the grind before getting back to work.

Your day off also shares space with an unofficial MLB holiday: the trade deadline. You have heard your name in trade rumors before. That’s the tax on being valuable. And it’s very likely you’ll have a handful of new teammates by the time Spidey saves the day. But you’re one of the faces of the franchise and the Orioles are only 2.5 games out of a playoff spot with 50 games to play. You’re surely staying put, right?

Before you’re asked to silence your phone, it rings. And it's the call. You're being traded to the Boston Red Sox.

Think about everything that shifts with this single phone call. The city you live in. The routine you had built. The friends you were about to spend your one free day with. You are extraordinarily talented at a very hard job, and you had almost no say in the biggest decision of your year. That is the human cost of the MLB trade deadline.

There is a phenomenon in baseball around this time of year called Hug Watch. A player gets pulled mid-game, seemingly out of nowhere, and everyone in the park understands what it means. He has a few minutes, sometimes only seconds, to hug and dap up his brothers in that uniform before he takes it off for the last time. Then he boards a bus, or a plane, and pulls a different one over his head tomorrow. And so it goes.

That is exactly what happened on Monday. There was no game to get pulled from, just four friends who never made it to their Spider-Man showing. Afterward, Colton Cowser summed it all up to an Orioles reporter.

That is the reality of Hug Watch. Not a transaction. A grown man telling one of his closest friends he loves him in the last few minutes before the uniform changes.

Of course, we fans don't experience it like that.

While Adley was at the movies Monday morning, I was multi-screening. On one, emails and the red-lined manuscript review I owed my team. On the other, MLBTradeRumors, refreshing every ninety seconds like a man possessed. Deals were coming in hot and players were being traded like quick favors.

Then one of those refresh pulls led to an audible “What!” Orioles and Red Sox have a deal in place for Adley Rutschman. Wait. We're actually trading Adley? My first (and so far only) Orioles jersey? While initially devastated, I made a speedrun through the five stages of grief and landed on a familiar acceptance. Because I’ve felt this exact feeling my whole life. I just usually feel it in teal.

I was born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, which made me a Miami (née Florida) Marlins fan, one of the loneliest fraternities in American professional sports. There are dozens of us. Truly. Hundreds, on the nights the Mets or the Yankees came to town and filled our building with someone else's fans. I spent my childhood baking under the Florida sun at what was then Pro Player Stadium, which is roughly four naming deals ago now, back before the Marlins moved into their spaceship over in Little Havana.

If you know the Marlins for anything, it’s one of two things. One, terrible attendance. Reliably bottom three in baseball, and it usually isn't number three. And two, trading away every star player we ever dared to love.

I say this as someone who watched us win it all in the prime of my childhood. The 2003 Marlins were a beautiful accident: mercenary veterans like Pudge Rodriguez behind the plate, with Jeff Conine and Ugueth Urbina (don’t Google him) picked up midseason, all stitched together with young studs like a 20-year-old future Hall-of-Famer Miguel Cabrera, and Dontrelle Willis with that gorgeous high leg kick, and a 23-year-old Josh Beckett who shut down the Yankees in their own building to clinch it. It was magic. It was also, I would learn, a fire sale in waiting.

Because that was the natural cycle in South Florida. You watch players arrive, you watch them thrill you, and you watch them leave, almost never by their own choosing, almost always right around now, the trade deadline, when the Marlins are safely out of the race and open for business as the league's favorite trading post. The one franchise player we never did trade, the one I loved most of all, we simply never got the chance to (RIP Jose Fernandez).

So when news of Adley's trade flashed across my screen, I felt the familiar childhood parasocial dread of losing someone you love in a uniform before it ever felt like their time to go. Sports lend themselves to that sort of vicarious relationship. The athletes we watch have been in our living room on ordinary Tuesdays and unforgettable Octobers. They’ve been the backdrop of our summers and the subject of countless casual water cooler convos. So when a player like Adley gets traded, we’re allowed to feel a small, personal grief for someone who A) is still very much alive and B) has no idea we exist.

But let’s forget the fan-centric focus for a minute. Let’s take a deeper look at the reality of what it means to live your life as an MLB player this time of year.

Imagine knowing, every single day you go to work, that you can be uprooted at any moment. Not fired, exactly. Reassigned. Sent hundreds or thousands of miles away to do the same job for different colleagues in a different city, effective immediately. It isn't even a betrayal when it happens, because it was in the fine print all along. It is implicit in the contract you signed: you can be traded or demoted at any time. Your continuity, your ability to stay where you have built a life, depends on your health, your performance, a whole lot of luck, and the goodwill of an owner you have probably met only once or twice.

What would a trade deadline look like in the startup world? Picture all of us refreshing our screens on the first Monday in August to see which engineers Anthropic just acquired from OpenAI, straight up, no consent required. Some chips-to-be-named-later deal struck with NVIDIA. A promising Adobe designer flipped to a competitor for future cash considerations. We would call it dystopian.

And yet in professional sports, we don't just accept it, we turn it into a quasi-holiday.

We read all of this in transaction logs. Cold little lines. Player X to Team Y for Player Z. But every one of those lines is a person now re-contemplating where they will sleep, redrawing their daily routine, kissing a city goodbye, and somehow expected to perform at the highest level in the world the very next night, or risk being a whipping boy for their new team’s fanbase.

There is something deeply existential in that, and if I am honest it has taught me one useful thing: to appreciate the here and now, because the here and now is the only thing any of us are actually guaranteed. As a baseball fan, you are never promised the same twenty-six guys running out of that dugout day after day. You get who you get, while you get them.

And it goes for the players even more than the fans. I have never competed anywhere close to that level, but they carry a knowledge most of us are spared: that any given afternoon might be the last time they ever suit up beside the men next to them.

Most of us don’t have a trade deadline. No hard date in early August when a single phone call can pick up our lives and set it down hundreds of miles away. But don’t mistake that for safety. Life can come calling at any moment. A layoff. A diagnosis. A loss you never saw coming and couldn’t possibly plan around. In some ways, we are all on a quieter, constant version of Hug Watch.

I don’t say that to end on a note of existential dread. The premise of this newsletter, and the book soon to come out, is that the plan you drew up is not the one that saves you. You will get traded. Life will send you somewhere you never asked to be. What carries you is not the plan, it’s who you are, and the people who would drop everything to hug you before you go.

The era ends. It always does. Adley stood for a new age of Orioles baseball that never fully came to fruition, and now Baltimore has to envision a future without him. But life will go on. As long as we are still breathing, another era can always begin. The last one ending is the only way the next one starts.

Which brings me back to you.

It is Friday now. You're still Adley Rutschman, but you have a new uniform, a new clubhouse, a new city learning how to pronounce your name. None of that is small, and none of it was your call.

Yet you are still you.

You still know how to play the game you love better than almost anyone alive, and you still know how to do the hardest thing there is, which is to keep showing up and keep adapting in the face of a future nobody guaranteed you.

So it’s time to play ball.

— Kevin "Coach" Carter