The Padres needed to trade Drew Pomeranz, and the Red Sox needed to trade for him

The trade klaxons shrieked far and wide, echoing off the hills, frightening the children and livestock. The Boston Red Sox jumped the market, and they gave up their best pitching prospect to do so. The San Diego Padres turned Yonder Alonso into a golden arm using This One Weird Trick. It’s trade season, everyone.

It was the kind of deal that made some fans on both sides upset. It’s only natural to hold your prospects tight and your best prospects tighter, and the Red Sox just gave up one of the best, a top-20 arm attached to a teenager who’s talented beyond his years. The Padres fans were just getting used to an All-Star gift, a transaction that finally went their way, when they traded him for an 18-year-old pitcher, baseball’s version of a baby turtle hatchling trying to make it back to sea.

And like the best trades, it makes sense for both sides right now, while having the potential to look awfully silly in the future. I love those trades.

Here’s what both teams think they’re getting.

With an above-average pitching staff, the Red Sox would be seven games up on the rest of the AL East, rolling to the postseason behind one of the fiercest lineups we’ve ever seen. With an average pitching staff, the Red Sox are two games back, in a death match with two other teams, and in a position where keeping all of their best prospects wasn’t an option.

Everyone knew the Red Sox needed pitching.

Everyone knew there wasn’t a lot of pitching, and that it would only get worse by the offseason.

Everyone knew that it would take the best prospects to get anyone worth a dang, especially if they were young and under contract for a while.

Everyone knew that Dave Dombrowski likes to use his prospects like they’re beads at a Mardi Gras parade that only he can see.

This is just about the least surprising deal in history, then.

Except, it’s still surprising! Drew Pomeranz has been a good starting pitcher for, oh, three months now, and his road from top prospect to All-Star was long, winding and painful. He’s a risky acquisition at this price, even more so than the typical pitcher, which is already an awfully risky class of baseball player. There are reasons to believe the development is real, and all the fancy numbers suggest it’s not a mirage, either.

Still, before this season, Anderson Espinoza was one of the best prospects in baseball, and Pomeranz was the kind of pitcher a 74-88 team would take a flier on because they couldn’t afford a real upgrade. We haven’t had enough time to adjust to this new reality yet.

The options were limited, though. Assuming the Red Sox accepted the fact that they would need to trade Espinoza a long time ago, the options other than Pomeranz were something like ...

The full list is here, right down to Jered Weaver and Tim Lincecum, and none of it was especially appealing. The Red Sox could have waited until Aug. 1 to see if another team would wear down and deal one of their younger, surprisingly available pitchers, but they would have risked getting shut out entirely. The empty-handed scenario was far, far worse for the Red Sox than the SkyMall-prices scenario.

You can argue for Teheran if you prefer, or you can argue that a rental like Hill was preferable to giving up a top prospect for a cost-controlled pitcher, but Pomeranz will help the Red Sox more in 2016, 2017 and 2018 than Espinoza would have. In a vacuum, you would expect a little more cost certainty than Pomeranz for this kind of pitcher, but this isn’t a normal market. A trade for Hill would have put the Red Sox right back on the market in the offseason, and that market is an absolute wasteland.

It was either Teheran or Pomeranz, and it was always going to be expensive. There were more than two teams after those two, though, which meant a chance of nothing at all when the music stopped. The Red Sox couldn’t risk that, not when they knew they already had a championship lineup.

Ha ha ha ha ha, oh Padres, do you realize what you’ve just done, you magnificent beasts? You turned an average 29-year-old first baseman with a career-high of nine home runs into a golden prospect. You are the baseball equivalent of the cartoon about being more explicit in step two. After spending roughly $6 billion on the international market, you’re climbing out of the bottom-third of the prospect world, which is exactly what you need to do.

It’s possible to hate this deal from the Red Sox perspective. It’s impossible not to love this deal for the Padres if you think about it for more than five seconds.

Pomeranz could have been around for the next good Padres team. The Houston Astros went from 111 losses to the postseason in two seasons, which means there’s always a chance for any team, regardless of how decimated they are right now. Pomeranz would be, in theory, exactly the low-cost pitcher they would need in that scenario.

It’s more likely that between now and then, Pomeranz was going to stumble into the Andrew Cashner void of infinite sadness, or the Tyson Ross hole of unfortunate injuries, or the Mat Latos cave of diminishing velocity, or any of the other maladies that can befall a starting pitcher without warning. The Padres could have traded Ross before the season for a tremendous package of top prospects. Now they’re not sure what value he’ll have to anyone for a while. It would have been especially foolish to take that chance with an unexpected gift like Pomeranz.

The best way to put the balance of this trade in perspective is by peeking at the Futures Game. For a while, Yoan Moncada and Manuel Margot were both trending — Moncada because he hit a home run and stole a base, and Margot because he made an impossible catch. This is relevant here because a) Margot was acquired from the Red Sox for Craig Kimbrel and b) the Red Sox felt like they could give him up because they had all sorts of other youngsters at every position, including Moncada.

The Padres need to collect the Margots of the baseball world at every opportunity. The Red Sox feel confident that they can keep making new ones. This applies to both for pitching, too. The Red Sox have the combination of past success, confidence and money that the Padres are trying to build. Until they can, accumulating all of the raffle tickets they can is the only option.

Shortly after making the deal, the Red Sox announced they had signed their first-round pick, Jason Groome, widely believed to be one of the best prospects in the draft. Their day went like this:

The Red Sox are better Friday than they were on Wednesday. They’re still confident about their farm system in a way that most organizations can’t imagine.

The Padres’ farm system is much better Friday than it was on Wednesday. They’re not concerned with the 2016 season, which they absolutely should not have been.

It’s a painful trade on both sides — the Red Sox giving up the hope of a homegrown ace for a decade, and the Padres giving up the hope of the next season or two — but the best trades usually are. Here’s to July, and here’s to fans all over the world being mad about baseball trades. This was a pretty fantastic way to start the deadline.