In the minutes leading up to 3:40 p.m. ET on Monday, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ brain trust was lamenting a missed opportunity. The Dodgers hoped they had the pieces to complete a trade for Baltimore Orioles closer Zach Britton. At 3:35 p.m., they were told there would be no deal. Earlier in the day, after more than a week of the posturing and pretense that defines conversations leading up to Major League Baseball’s trade deadline, they had abandoned hope of getting the other available elite pitcher, Texas Rangers starter Yu Darvish, too.

Then Farhan Zaidi’s phone rang. Zaidi is the Dodgers’ general manager, and the voice on the other line had grown familiar in recent days. Jon Daniels runs the Rangers, and with 20 minutes to go before the deadline, he was ready to make a deal.

Reality had crashed on Daniels in the hours leading up to 4 p.m., when no market materialized for Darvish and efforts to create one came up empty. Darvish had his flaws. Teams had their hang-ups. The trade market isn’t always rational. And even though Daniels had told Darvish after his previous start that he almost certainly would be traded by July 31, the clock was ticking, the deadline approaching, the Dodgers the only team left in the sweepstakes.

The Dodgers did not need Darvish. At 74-31 going into Monday, they were off to the third-best start through 105 games since World War II. They had won 64 of their last 83 games and outscored opponents on average by more than two runs a game. The Dodgers’ ace and heart, Clayton Kershaw, left his start with a back injury more than a week ago. They hadn’t lost since.

Darvish, for them, would be a luxury, but then the Dodgers – the team with baseball’s richest payroll four years’ running – can afford luxuries, and with 19 minutes before the deadline, they realized if Daniels was on the phone with them, this was like a flash sale on Rodeo Drive. The Rangers understood as much, too, and weren’t going to give Darvish away for the sake of giving him away. Call a team at 3:40 p.m. on deadline day, though, and the implications are obvious.

The Dodgers did not need Yu Darvish. It was a luxury. (AP) More

The clock turned. It was 3:41 p.m., and the teams started exchanging names. Inside the rooms serving as the hub of Dodgers trade activity, officials buzzed about, pulling over a trainer to look at Darvish’s medical information, giving iterations of a possible deal to Zaidi, distilling the factors at hand – the impending deadline, the Rangers’ urgency, the value of Darvish on the field, the value of him inside the clubhouse and to the public – into an overriding calculus.

A few days earlier, the Rangers insisted a deal for Darvish include one of Los Angeles’ two best prospects, pitcher Walker Buehler or outfielder Alex Verdugo. The Dodgers refused to consider either, a position on which they held firm in all offers. Texas eventually softened its stance and considered a deal around Willie Calhoun, one of the most unique prospects in years.

Calhoun is listed at 5-foot-8 and 187 pounds. He is neither. Shave off an inch or two, add 25 pounds or so, and that is Calhoun. He is listed as a second baseman. He is not that, either. Best-case scenario, Calhoun sticks in left field. And should that not work, he would wind up at designated hitter, which was incompatible with the Dodgers but might be a palatable-enough fallback option for the Rangers, because even they can’t deny one truth about Calhoun: He can hit. And not a for-his-size hit or a may-grow-into-something hit. Calhoun can hit now, he will hit in the major leagues soon and he will keep hitting there for a long time.

Both Dodgers and Rangers analysts agreed: Calhoun’s combination of power and contact is rare and elite for a 22-year-old already at Triple-A. Combine that with his body, and he is a true outlier, one of one, the sort who confounds those who compile prospect lists, which have become something of a guiding light to fans during trade season. The idea of trade value being defined by prospects’ place on a list somehow has come into prominence, and it is the height of absurdity, as if being top 50 on one person’s subjective list, as opposed to top 75, makes one particular trade more valuable than others.