As the deadline crawls beneath the horizon behind us, I have to admit that it feels strange that they’ve kept playing ballgames all this time. Trade season and baseball season operate on separate planes, and to exist on one requires a certain detachment from the other. Mostly, this is a matter of tense. Baseball, the actual playing of baseball, operates on a spectrum of time bound tightly to the present, and one can only wander a few steps into the past or future before one becomes untethered. It exists not in the true present, because nothing exists in the present, but in the reactive present, a past given just enough time for the senses to incorporate. The trade deadline, meanwhile, takes place in a hazy otherness, a World of Tomorrow.

To live in the World of Tomorrow is like wearing wet socks: It isn’t painful, but it never quite becomes normal. There’s a discomfort to it that never really goes away, a lack of solid ground. Anything can be true if one believes or dreads it enough. Anything can be argued. Anything can be hoped. We tend to have an uneasy relationship with the future, a vague sense of guilt about crimes already committed and habits that won’t be broken in time. “Wait ‘til next year” used to be declared as a salve, a toast among friends; now, there’s often a dark undercurrent to it. It’s not entirely clear, sometimes, how Tomorrow is going to feel about us.