Washington’s four newest pitchers describe packing up and saying goodbye in the hours after getting the news.
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Connelly Early was getting ready for bed. Yovanny Cruz was leaving Wrigley Field. Jake Bird was pitching the ninth inning for the Scranton RailRiders in Des Moines. Will Dion was on a bus from Columbus to Syracuse.
Then came the news. They had been traded to the Washington Nationals, they were told, their lives upended with the snap of the fingers.
That’s the business of the sport. Players who aren’t on long-term contracts with no trade clauses know, especially leading up to the MLB midseason deadline, that who they play for and where they live is beyond their control. And what comes after the moves are made can be more jarring than receiving the news itself. They have just mere hours to pack up their bags, move out of their living quarters and, if they are lucky, say goodbye to their teammates.
For Early, the news that he had been traded to the Nationals on July 25 came as a surprise. It was a Saturday night, and he was about to go to bed when he noticed he had a missed call from Red Sox general manager Craig Breslow. Then came a text: “Call me back,” it read.
There was still over a week until the deadline, and the market was still fairly quiet. So when Early connected with Breslow and learned the news, he was shocked.
But he didn’t have much time to process it. More calls quickly followed, with his parents, Nationals President of Baseball Operations Paul Toboni, Red Sox manager Chad Tracy, Red Sox pitching coach Andrew Bailey and pitcher Payton Tolle, Early’s close friend, all checking in.
“It was one of the longest days of phone calls,” he said.
The next day, Early raced over to Fenway Park to clear out his locker and hug his teammates, especially Tolle.
“I feel like baseball brings so much more than just the game,” Early said. “It brings so many relationships that you can’t really get anywhere else.”
He didn’t have much time to linger, though. He had to get his entire apartment packed, a task that was harder than he anticipated. While baseball players get used to packing up quickly when they are in the minors, Early had settled in Boston.
“I’m not very good at packing up, so it was like little bits and pieces at a time,” he said. “More like at the start, ‘where am I packing certain things in certain boxes? What do I want to keep? Is there stuff I can just throw away that I’m not using anymore or stuff that I can give away?’ It took a little bit.”
Eventually he figured it out, despite the interruptions of more phone calls from people like Nationals’ pitching coach Simon Mathews. On that Monday morning, he drove his truck to Fenway Park to get it shipped to Washington, D.C., then hopped in an Uber to the airport to fly to meet his new team.
The Nationals stayed quiet until the following weekend, when Luis García Jr. was traded to the New York Yankees for four right-handed pitchers, including Cruz and Bird.
Cruz was in Chicago, where the Yankees were wrapping up a three-game series against the Cubs. He had only been back in the majors for 24 hours when he was told on Aug. 2 that he had been traded. There was a lot going through his mind, he said.
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He hasn’t had a straightforward career. The 26-year-old from the Dominican Republic signed with the Cubs in 2016 as an international free agent, but he didn’t make it above Class High-A with the team and elected free agency in 2023. He spent 2024 in the San Diego Padres, then 2025 with the Red Sox.
Cruz signed a minor league deal with the Yankees in November, and finally made his debut in May. He had played in just four major league games when he was traded.
His family, accustomed to helping him overcome the hardships of the sport, thought he had bad news when he unexpectedly called them. But news of the trade was exciting — it meant that a team wanted him enough that they were willing to let one of their best players go to acquire him.
“When I called my mom, she actually thought there was something wrong, that it wasn’t good news,” Cruz said through a team interpreter. “Just really happy.”
Cruz traveled back to the Bronx with the Yankees, then met the team in Philadelphia on Aug. 3. Bird didn’t have as easy of a travel day. He thought he was just being removed from the game on Aug. 2 when Scranton’s manager came out to the mound in Des Moines.
For the second deadline in a row, Bird had been traded, he was told. Instead of traveling with his RailRiders teammates, he woke up at 3:30 a.m. on Aug. 3 and flew to Philadelphia. He was not being activated, but with Class AAA Rochester beginning a series the next day in Scranton, the Nationals wanted him to come meet the team and coaching staff before making the two-hour journey to Scranton on Aug. 4.
And while Bird was getting acquainted with his new organization in Philadelphia, Dion was on a bus with the Columbus Clippers, the Class AAA affiliate of the Cleveland Guardians, when he received the call from Cleveland’s assistant general manager Eric Forman that he had been included as part of the Foster Griffin trade.
After they hung up, Dion looked around the bus, the thought that he may never see some of the people sitting around him hitting him hard. He had not expected to be moved. He made his debut on May 26, coincidentally against his new team, and had been optioned the day before being traded.
With four and a half hours left of the journey to Syracuse, Dion was stuck on the bus with nothing but time to think. To pass the hours, he called his family and friends, attempted to watch a movie and soaked in the last few moments with his teammates.
“It’s pretty weird because I’m looking at all my teammates in Columbus, guys I’ve played with for a few years now, and it was weird just saying bye to them,” Dion said.
The next morning, with no flights from Syracuse that would get him to Citizens Bank Park on time, he rented a car and drove the four hours through the back roads of central New York to Philadelphia. It was foggy and treacherous conditions, he said, but he made it safely.
With the craziness of the deadline behind them, Dion and the three other recent acquisitions are already putting in work for the Nationals.
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“We’re here. It’s just the same job, different team,” Dion said.
