On deadline eve, the trade market beneath the Tarik Skubal watch took shape: Freddy Peralta has suitors, and Cincinnati's sell-off spans five named players — Brady Singer, Robert Stephenson, Eugenio Suárez, Brock Burke, and JJ Bleday — per MLB.com's July 30 tracker. [1]

The frame remains the one this paper set when Skubal's final Tigers start turned the deadline into a balance question: every price in the market waits on the biggest one. The Reds' five-man ledger and Peralta's market exist in the shadow of an unresolved Skubal decision, and Thursday's record contains no accepted offer for any of them. [1]

That last clause is the discipline. Markets are not deals. A named suitor is not a trade, a player "available" is not a player moved, and nothing on the July 30 page is completed. The tracker records who might go, not who has gone. A deadline scroll flattens this — every name presented at the same urgency — but the structure underneath matters more: Cincinnati is the day's clearest seller, Peralta the clearest non-Skubal pitching prize, and both wait on the same resolution.

Which of Cincinnati's five actually moves, at what return, and whether the Skubal resolution reprices Peralta up or down — those are deadline day's questions. Thursday's answer is a market, fully shaped and entirely unexecuted.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London