Power Rankings: Interrupting your trade talk with the match game

Updated July 28

This is a tough week to be writing about baseball, in that the July 31 trade deadline looms over us like an ominous cloud. The hours leading up to the deadline have spawned a veritable cottage industry, with a handful of networks offering 24/7 coverage and 20 reporters fighting over the same morsel of innuendo. It's impossible to sustain coherent thought, given the way that ...

Omg the Phillies might include lil' Kyle Drabek in their Halladay offer!!! buy sell buy sell buy sell!

See what I mean? The second you get rolling with a line of reasoning -- say, that the strategy of hoarding prospects is absurdly misguided, given how rarely they bloom in unison, a la Tampa Bay in 2008, and how rarely a would-be contender gets burned along the lines of Sizemore/Lee/Phillips for Colon -- the e-mail pings and you're off to chase another ...

GET THIS: SAN FRAN HAS PULLED BUSTER POSEY FROM HIS MINOR LEAGUE GAME AND THE GUY WHO KNOWS SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HIS FAMILY SAYS IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HIS INFLAMED CUTICLE, SO HE'S TOTALLY ON THE WAY TO PITTSBURGH, WASHINGTON, SEATTLE OR CLEVELAND! BE SURE TO CREDIT MY SITE!

Gah. I can't even unleash a rant about trade-deadline metaphors -- the trade winds that blow with gale hurricane force! -- without getting sucked in by the relentless rumor bleat. It's incredibly frustrating, to the extent that ...

UH, UPDATE ON JOE BEIMEL HERE. JOE BEIMEL -- NATIONALS LEFTY, VERY EFFICIENT. YOU'VE SEEN PICTURES. HELLO?

There's no point in fighting it. Hence trade junk dominates this week's Power Rankings, with each team's "perfect fit" player joining the usual non-fact-checked collection of blurbs and bluster. If you need me, I'll be rumor-mongering out in the yard.

RANK	TEAM		MOVE (LW)