7 compelling August storylines to watch

The Trade Deadline is behind us. The rosters, save for some Minor League machinations and the occasional waiver claim, are set. These teams are what they will be. Which leaves us just August and September -- and some spirited playoff chases -- to go.

We’ll know so much more in a month. So what are the big questions August will answer? Let’s take a look.

• What we learned from a wild Trade Deadline

1. Which Deadline acquisition will make an immediate impression?
CC Sabathia. Randy Johnson. César Cedeño. Will Clark. Jorge Soler. Joc Pederson! Sometimes they’re big names, sometimes they’re under-the-radar pickups, but baseball history is speckled with guys who came in at the Deadline and led their teams to regular-season -- and postseason -- glory.

A lot of these deals won’t make a significant difference in the long run. But if everything lines up exactly right, like it did with CC in Milwaukee in 2008 or Soler and Pederson in Atlanta in 2021, two months with a team is enough to make you a legend.

2. Can Judge’s return get the Yankees going?
The Yankees are hopeful, even optimistic, that they’ll be able to activate Aaron Judge from the IL when he’s officially eligible on Aug. 5. They better hope so. The Yankees were starting to falter before Judge got hurt -- remember, they fell out of first place with him still ripping the ball -- and their lineup looks downright thin without him.

The Yankees have not only fallen out of first place over the last few weeks; they’ve fallen into a real race for an American League Wild Card spot and are in a little bit of danger of missing the playoffs entirely. (Particularly if those bullpen additions don’t start pitching better than they did in their debuts.) They think Aaron Judge should be back this week -- though he’ll still be at DH, which causes all sorts of lineup headaches for Aaron Boone -- but they better hope he’s not rushing back too early: If anything else goes wrong with him, this thing could go up in smoke fast.

3. Will the Dodgers get their rotation back in order?
If you asked anyone involved with the Dodgers about their pitching shortage for most of the first half of the season, they tended not to look too worried: Our guys are coming back. Things have been tough for this team lately, but August is the month that may finally happen. Tyler Glasnow returned in July. Blake Snell just made his first start since April on Saturday, and Roki Sasaki isn’t far behind him. And, of course, Shohei Ohtani is slowly working his way back to full strength, as well, pitching 15 innings over seven starts. If Snell, Sasaki and a closer-to-full-strength Ohtani join forces with Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Clayton Kershaw, that could look pretty good.

The Dodgers won’t end up setting any single-season win records this year, like many predicted before the season, but that has never been what’s important to them. Winning the World Series is. Their rotation is starting to look like something that might just make that happen. We’ll know their chances far better at the end of this month.

4. Can Cal Raleigh get to 50 or 55 home runs?
Mark McGwire, during his home run chase with Sammy Sosa in 1998, begged off questions about Roger Maris’ single-season record for most of the year, saying, “Talk to me if I’ve got 50 by September.” (He ended up reaching 50 before the month arrived and, of course, went on to pass Maris.)

It sure looks like Raleigh is going to make it to September with 50, no problem, doesn’t it? He entered August with 42, six behind Salvador Perez’s record of 48 homers by a primary catcher, and on pace for 62. With Judge’s injury, Raleigh has passed him to move to the top of most AL MVP leaderboards -- and it should be said: Judge has never hit more than 62 homers in a season. Is Raleigh about to pass him there, too? August will tell us if he’s still got a shot.

5. Can the Astros hang on in the AL West?
When all those Astros pitchers went down at the beginning of the season, and then Yordan Alvarez, their best hitter, followed them, you wondered if this was maybe the end of the Astros’ dominance of the AL West. (They had, after all, already said goodbye to Alex Bregman and Kyle Tucker in the offseason.)

It sure didn’t turn out that way: The Astros were terrific for two months while the rest of the division sputtered; at one point, Houston had a seven-game lead in the division. Their lead is, uh, no longer that large. The Astros have finally come back to earth just in time for the Mariners and Rangers to, at last, find themselves -- and all of a sudden, we’ve got a race. The last time someone other than the Astros won the AL West in a full season was, amazingly, 2016. Will the Astros still be atop this division on Sept. 1?

6. Can Skenes get his ERA back under 2.00?
Since 2016, only three pitchers -- Jacob deGrom and Snell in 2018 and Justin Verlander in 2022 -- have put up sub-2.00 ERAs over a full season. Skenes headed into August at 1.83 before giving up four runs in five innings at Coors Field on Saturday to raise it to 2.02. Still, he was particularly excellent in July, with a ridiculous 0.67 ERA in five starts. The Pirates have been keeping an eye on his innings count, but he should still have more than enough to qualify for the title, barring injury.

We’ll know whether he’s got a chance by the end of this month. And, for what it’s worth, the lowest full-season ERA in a season this century is the 1.66 Zack Greinke put up in 2015. That is on the table for Skenes, as well … especially if he has another month like he just did.

7. Uh, who actually IS the best team in baseball?
For most of the season, the Tigers and Dodgers were swapping position as the team with the best record in the sport. But July scrambled all that up, with nine teams all within five games of each other at month’s end.

There is considerable debate as to how much regular-season record matters in an age of expanded playoffs, but there’s no question that the difference between the No. 1 seed in a league and a No. 4 or No. 5 seed is quite substantial. The muddle at the top has been fascinating. But this month may well provide some separation.