Inner Half

August 3, 2026 marks the MLB’s trading deadline. Over the next few weeks, teams will decide whether they want to win this year or punt to the future. Veterans and prospects alike will be traded. 

Usually, two teams come together to make a mutually beneficial trade that will get the respective club closer to their goal, whether it be contention for a World Series or rebuilding for future teams. That doesn’t always happen.

Today, I’m going to tell you about a trade that, seen as under-the-radar at the time of its conception, would have massive ramifications years down the line. It happened 10 years ago at the 2016 MLB trading deadline.

The Trade

Going into August 1, 2016, the Houston Astros sat at 55-49, 6 games back of the first-place Texas Rangers in the AL West division and 2.5 games out of the second “wild-card” playoff spot in the American League.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, meanwhile, stood at 59-46, 2 games behind the San Francisco Giants in the NL West division and in possession of the first of two NL wild card spots. 

That day, these two organizations made the following trade:

• Los Angeles Dodgers acquire: RHP Josh Fields, age 30
• Houston Astros acquire: 1B/OF prospect Yordan Alvarez, age 19

To that point of the season, Fields had seen more time in the minors than the MLB. In 15 major league appearances for the Astros that year, he held a 6.89 ERA. He had been on the Astros’ AAA squad from mid-May to the day of the trade. Before 2016, he wasn’t exceptional, but serviceable. He held a career 4.27 ERA through 143.1 innings that included 177 strikeouts and just 54 walks. He was coveted by other teams as a depth piece in their bullpen.

Fields had been dealt for a 6’4”, lefty-swinging 19-year-old from Cuba that the Dodgers had just signed as an international free agent in June of the same year. Yordan Alvarez was, as Astros Director of Pro Scouting Kevin Goldstein described him, “a player with exciting offensive upside.” Goldstein remarked Alvarez had “excellent power for a teenager, as well as a feel to hit.”

Andy McCullough, in a great piece for the LA Times in 2019, pointing out the Astros’ scouts and Yordan Alvarez had mutual love for each other before Houston’s front office opted to spend their allocated money elsewhere. The Dodgers scooped him up towards the end of the designated signing period for international amateur free agents. McCullough quotes Dodgers’ president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman as saying that his organization “signed him the day before the period ended, and it was more because we were about to be cut out of big-ticket signings,” indicating the Alvarez wasn’t among their primary targets and, instead, a fallback option of sorts. 

That sentiment rang true even a couple months after signing Alvarez to his contract. On August 1, when negotiating the trade, then-Astros’ GM Jeff Luhnow had asked about “Alvarez” when responding to the Dodgers’ inquiry on Josh Fields. Friedman mistakenly assumed Luhnow was referring to Dodgers’ pitching prospect Yadier Alvarez, a Cuban pitcher the organization had spent $16 million on in 2015 as an international amateur free agent. The confusion had to be clarified that it, in fact, was 1B/OF prospect Yordan Alvarez that Luhnow was keen on.

That Yordan Alvarez could be so expendable as to be something of a throw-in for the Dodgers’ front office seems laughable today, but at the time in 2016, many question marks existed for a teenage prospect with limited defensive potential and power concerns. At the time, baseball was in a weird spot. Teams were trying to figure out where they could get an edge in a sport that was consistently being dominated more and more by the three true outcomes: home runs, strikeouts, and walks. Alvarez was a piece the Dodgers were willing to part with, and so they did. For Josh Fields.

Where Are They Now?

What makes this trade such a fascinating case study starts with what the Astros managed to develop with Yordan Alvarez. 

Yordan won a unanimous Rookie of the Year in the American League in 2019 at the age of 22. He hit 27 home runs on a .313 batting average, .412 on-base percentage, and .655 slugging percentage, totaling a 1.067 OPS. Acting as Houston’s designated hitter and also playing left field, he accumulated 3.7 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in just 87 games.

After an odd 2020 season in which he tested positive for COVID-19 and dealt with knee issues, the next 4 seasons for Alvarez proved his elite abilities. From 2021-2024, his .958 OPS was 65% above league average. He slashed .296/.387/.571 and established himself among the elite hitters in baseball. He’d help his Astros make two straight World Series appearances in 2021 and 2022, taking the latter series against the Phillies. His legendary 450-foot, 3-run home run to dead center field off Jose Alvarado in Game 6 would give Houston a lead they’d never relent. 

From 2021-2024, his 136 home runs are tied with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. for 6th in baseball, trailing only Aaron Judge (196), Shohei Ohtani (178), Kyle Schwarber (163), Pete Alonso (157), and Matt Olson (156). His .571 slugging percentage (total bases/total at-bats) ranks 4th. 

An injury-riddled 2025 season saw him appear in just 48 games, but the 2026 season has him barrelling down a path to his first MVP award. 

Through 96 games, he leads MLB in on-base percentage (.426), slugging percentage (.633) and OPS (1.059), and leads the American league in hits (111), home runs (31) and RBIs (70). As another sign of his dominance, he leads MLB with 15 intentional walks because teams simply don’t want to pitch to him.

The Astros hit the jackpot with this deal. What about the other side?

Josh Fields filled a need the Dodgers had at the time, which was bullpen help. He filled that need nicely, firing a 2.79 ERA in 19.1 innings for them in the second half of 2016. 

2017 saw good results, too, in the form of a 2.84 ERA in 57 innings out of the bullpen. He’d make multiple appearances for the Dodgers in the 2017 playoffs, the least memorable of which was allowing back-to-back home runs in the 10th inning of Game 2 of the World Series against none other than, yes, the Houston Astros. The Astros would win the World Series in 7 games. Fields wouldn’t make another appearance after that inning.

In 2018, Fields pitched another 41 innings for the Dodgers to a 2.20 ERA, but failed to make their postseason roster. That would be the last of Fields’ MLB appearances, as he parted ways with LA and wouldn’t break the MLB rosters with the Brewers and Rangers, who had signed him to minor league deals at one point or another.

On the surface, the Dodgers acquired a useful bullpen addition that was very productive for them over the course of 2.5 seasons. However, it is the postseason performance that will be remembered most. Fields’ 2017 World Series meltdown is what he’ll be remembered most for. That, and the fact that he was the guy whom the Astros had to give up to acquire one of the best left-handed hitters the game of baseball has ever seen.

The significance of this trade and its implications

What makes this trade fascinating, in my eyes, is the idea of present value versus future value. Baseball is unique in that many trades involve trading a present MLB player for the potential of another MLB player. Prospects make up a lot of the returns we see at the trade deadline, and we’ll see a lot of them on the move come the end of this month.

The truth is that this trade shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as a “bad” move. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, and it’s easy to look upon it now and ask why the Dodgers would ever consider making the move. The truth is that front offices that want to win in the present, like the Dodgers in 2016, don’t care (as much) about a teenager that’s years away from making an impact, compared to a player like Fields that could make an immediate positive impact. Which he did do, to be fair. 

This trade also underscores the importance in a trusted scouting department. The Astros’ scouting team loved Alvarez as a prospect before he signed with the Dodgers. They never lost that faith because they believed in him. It’s paying off for them now. 

Baseball has a way of making stories like this one possible. Minor happenings here and there can turn out to be of tremendous importance down the line and hold ramifications within the league that will change its landscape for years to come. Just as the Dodgers’ need for bullpen help in 2016 did.