How much longer must we wait for a Cubs trade?

Looking back since Hoyer joined the Cubs, I was curious about when trades happened around the deadline, and their specific timeline. As Tom Petty sang…the waiting (or, more accurately, the waaaaaaayyaaaaaaayting) is the hardest part. Of course, not sure Tom had to suffer the bitter ends to the 1984, 2003 and 2018 seasons.

The Cubs have made 46 trades in the month of the deadline since 2012, and here’s how they break down by number days before the deadline.

Number of days before Deadline	Trade Count
between 29 and 5 days	12 (1 per day)
4 days	2
3 days	3
2 days	2
1 day	7
On deadline day	20

I bunched together the trades more than 5 days before the deadline, as no single day had more than 1 trade.

There were a few very substantial trades before the deadline. The Aroldis Chapman trade was 6 days before. The Jose Quintana trade was 18 days before. And the Jake Arrieta trade was 29 days before the deadline.

But as we get closer and closer to July 31, anything that happens today and tomorrow would be an outlier. I would caution Cubs fans that they should expect to wait until Wednesday night or Thursday for the big trades we all expect.

To add to this, I’m not sure the Cubs would want to add any distractions to the 3-game series against the Brewers by announcing a big trade right in the middle. I certainly could be wrong about this, as maybe it would provide an emotional boost, but I still doubt we will see anything.

But I also predicted that Ben Brown’s start against the Royals would be his last, and we saw what happened yesterday. So maybe the Cubs announce a big trade in the next two days, so that we can start providing snap judgements on the merits of the trade, criticize Jed for giving up too much, and pontificate on how we would have traded for someone better.