Speaking of strange deadlines, the Braves are 15.5 games back in the division and 14 games back of a wild-card spot. It has been a miserable year in Atlanta. Yet they did nothing to improve their future, holding onto Marcell Ozuna and Raisel Iglesias despite both becoming free agents at the end of the year.

With Major League Baseball's trade deadline now behind us, the next big transactional window is the free agency period that will begin five days after the 2025 World Series ends.

When the work was finished, and five trades involving 22 players had been executed within six hours, A.J. Preller's peers called him everything from a "lunatic" to a "genius," a divergence befitting Major League Baseball's most polarizing executive.