That’s perfect hindsight. That’s a second guess. It’s not what many, including me, thought at the time. But it’s also a perfect illustration of the hard lessons that baseball loves to teach. A premature white flag can come back to haunt a team.

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Some Nats thought the deals were unnecessary and unwise at the time. Why not wait until a real deadline? Teams must get a player before Sept. 1 for him to be eligible for the postseason. But Aug. 21? Why? Looks like they were right.

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With the Braves and Phillies both floundering — in 8-12 and 5-12 skids, respectively — the Nats are now left to wonder where they might be if they had never traded that pair of fine left-handed bats for a bag of beans. Now 7½ games behind Atlanta, how much closer might they be to the National League East lead if they had held ’em just a little longer rather than deal when there was no deadline urgency?

What’s the difference between being perhaps 4½ games behind with only a slight chance to reach the postseason vs. 7½ games behind with next to no chance? Ask fans (the customers) which scenario they would prefer given that the Nats’ deals have little chance of netting anything more than a saving of more than $12 million on this year’s payroll — a rounding error in modern MLB.

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The issue was clearly defined Wednesday. In the afternoon, the stumbling Braves blew a 7-1 lead in the eighth inning to the Red Sox, then blew an 8-7 lead in the ninth to lose, 9-8. It was the kind of bullpen mega-collapse in September that sometimes leads to historic skids by young teams trying to hold on to an unexpected division lead.

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In the Nats’ clubhouse, players watched on TV and, once Atlanta lost, buzzed with pleasure. If the Nats could win that night against St. Louis, they would be 6½ games behind in the NL East with 22 to play. A long shot. But bigger leads have been blown. And later.

Then the Nats went out and lost, 7-6, to the Cardinals because of two home runs and four RBI by Adams, who was their teammate just 16 days earlier. As Washington was losing, the Nationals Park scoreboard showed that the Phillies, also ahead of the Nats in the division, were continuing their collapse.

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Since Washington traded Adams and Murphy, who is raking as a Cub, the Nats have gone 7-8. But what might they have been with those two?

Within three days, the Nats fell into the longest scoreless-inning streak of the season in MLB — 32 innings — and lost 2-0, 3-0 and 3-0 despite stellar starts in which Tanner Roark, since-traded Gio Gonzalez and Max Scherzer allowed just four runs in 20 innings. In those games, the score was 0-0 after six innings, 1-0 after seven and 0-0 after five. What might Murphy, the ex-Met turned Met-killer, have done to change those outcomes?

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When we look back on this season, the consensus view probably will be: “They played badly, had too many injuries and gambled on a rookie manager with a built-to-win team. By Aug. 21, they weren’t going to make the playoffs anyhow or anyway.”

The Nats, it should be noted, did not make deals at the July 31 deadline, as many pundits nationwide nagged them to do — hey, why not trade Bryce Harper? General Manager Mike Rizzo said, “I believe in this team.”

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But three weeks later, when no Nats hot streak arrived, minds had changed. Principal owner Mark Lerner released a public letter after the deals, explaining the team’s thinking and vowing for better results in the future. But that thinking merits a review.

There are three justifiable reasons for a team that expected to be a contender to make we-give-up trades deep into the season.

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The first is to get valuable prospects in return. The value of the players the Nats got for Murphy, Adams, Gonzalez, Ryan Madson and Brandon Kintzler can’t be measured for years. But minor leaguers can be projected, especially if their play is mediocre or poor deep in the minors. The Nats got lottery tickets, not prospects. Will one be Tanner Roark? Doubtful.

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The second is to get under the luxury tax ceiling. That has several advantages, none huge but, taken together, sometimes enough to make it worth doing. For example, if the Nats got under the tax and Harper left as a free agent, they would get a better compensation pick in next year’s draft. On the other hand, if the Nats end up signing Harper to a huge deal, then get a “reset” on future penalties, that gives the Nats more flexibility in adding future free agents or extending stars such as Anthony Rendon.

On Wednesday, Rizzo, who prides himself on telling the truth or else saying, “That’s our business,” insisted that the Nats had not gotten under the luxury tax ceiling. He added that it “wasn’t close” — the gap being “millions of dollars.” Also, he insisted that getting under that number had never been a goal of the trades.

The third reason for such deals as the Murphy and Adams trades is to save a significant amount of money that can change your options for the near future. The Nats’ dumps saved more than $12 million. That doesn’t move the needle at all.

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For context, the Nats make sensible, market-appropriate long-term budgets with which no one in the organization disagrees, but then in season, on short-term deals to add or subtract players at various deadlines, they often have made penny-wise decisions as if hitting this season’s or next season’s budget on the nose is somehow written in blood. Yet if Lerner wants to sign Max Scherzer, then that $210 million comes out of some different, undefined budget (his).

So that’s three strikes, you’re out, no matter whether the Nats would have or could have gotten back in the NL East picture between Aug. 21 and Saturday.

If you don’t get real prospects in return or get major luxury tax relief or even save a whole bunch of money, then making unforced before-any-deadline deals that subtract key players just because your season seems lost is a pointless act. And one that, once in a great while, may preclude your team from having the kind of miracle comeback that fans talk about for many years.

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Over the years, the Nats will face similar situations, probably several times in this tangled era with 10 teams in the playoffs and two wild cards in each league.

The Nats — and the rest of us (me) — would be smart to remember those 32 straight “zeros” and Adams’s long home runs — and the fun that this September might have been.

For more by Thomas Boswell, visit washingtonpost.com/boswell.