What’s it like for players dealt at baseball’s trade deadline? Three Phillies tell their stories.

NEW YORK — Brandon Marsh got drafted out of high school by the Angels in 2016. And for a few years, every July, he heard the same thing from his agents.

“It would be like, ‘Hey, you know’ — I’m just making a team up — ‘Pittsburgh’s interested. Look at the ticker. Watch the TV a little bit extra,’”Marsh recalled this week. “I was like, ‘OK, whatever,’ and it never happened, year in and year out.”

Until it did.

Baseball’s trade deadline is funny that way. After weeks of speculation — usually it begins around Memorial Day and escalates from idle chatter to informed gossip — many deals don’t come together until the waning days and even hours, with little smoke preceding the fire.

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So, there was Marsh, getting ready to step into the batting cage at Angel Stadium on deadline day in 2022, when he was summoned by manager Phil Nevin. The Phillies, in their seemingly unending search for a center fielder, beat the buzzer by about 2½ hours and made a deal for Marsh.

“I get brought into the office, shook hands,” he said, “and there it was.”

In an instant, everything changed. Marsh’s team. His coast. Even the trajectory of his career. Three years later, he maintains it was all for the better. But as much as his agents gave him a heads-up for even the possibility of a trade, it didn’t prepare him for the reality.

Because while everybody loves to put on their fantasy GM cap and talk … and talk, and talk, and talk … about the trade deadline, there’s seldom any discussion about the actual experience of getting traded — and the upheaval that it can cause players in a sport that is marked by its everyday routines.

“Let’s say you’re with a team for five years and that’s kind of all you know and then you get traded, it’s definitely a big adjustment,” shortstop Trea Turner said. “I don’t think it’s talked about enough, how hard it is on the player but then also, too, if they have families, kids.”

Eleven of the 26 players on the Phillies’ active roster have moved at a trade deadline, including pitchers Jesús Luzardo and Seth Johnson twice. The Nationals sent Kyle Schwarber and Turner packing one day apart in 2021. Zack Wheeler was a top prospect in 2011 when he got dealt straight up for nine-time All-Star Carlos Beltrán. Recently reacquired reliever David Robertson got transplanted at three deadlines.

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Last year, reliever Tanner Banks had “some hints” that the historically bad White Sox would trade him, though he didn’t find out where until deadline day. He flew from Chicago to Philadelphia for one game, then across the country to Seattle for a road trip.

“It was a really quick 24 hours of saying goodbye to teammates and staff and all that, packing my Airbnb [in Chicago], getting my wife and family shuttled out, and myself as well,” Banks said after the trade. “Early, early flight to Philly. Got to pitch in that [night’s] game. It was kind of a flurry of emotions.”

Each trade is its own story. Some were predictable, others materialized out of nowhere. In separate conversations this week, Turner, Marsh, and Robertson recalled the deadlines that shook up their careers.

The Nationals were in Philadelphia on July 27, 2021, when Turner singled and scored on a three-run homer in the first inning, then promptly left the game.

Hug watch?

“I got COVID that day,” Turner recalled.

Indeed, the team got the results of Turner’s COVID swab (MLB was still mandating regular testing) while he was on base and pulled him once he got back to the dugout.

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He didn’t play for the Nationals again.

Because although they were only 20 months removed from their only World Series championship, they held a deadline fire sale in which they unloaded Schwarber (to the Red Sox), relievers Brad Hand (Blue Jays) and Daniel Hudson (Padres), catcher Yan Gomes and utilityman Josh Harrison (A’s), and starter Jon Lester (Cardinals) — all in a span of two days.

The real blockbuster, though, came on the eve of the deadline.

Turner was quarantining at home in Washington when he learned he would be traded to the Dodgers with ace Max Scherzer. As a free agent after the season, Scherzer saw it coming. Turner, who was under control for another year, didn’t expect it.

“I saw the rumors come out about me that last week,” Turner said. “Didn’t hear anything or see anything before that. And even that last week, I didn’t really think I would get traded, just because of prior conversations I’d had. I was having extension talks earlier that year. To go from extension talks to traded was what threw me off. I was a little caught off guard.”

The Dodgers also had a star shortstop, with World Series MVP Corey Seager set to return from a broken hand. They acquired Turner to play second base.

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But while Scherzer left immediately to meet the Dodgers for a series in Arizona, Turner had to remain in COVID protocol. It enabled him to not only get over the shock of the trade but also to find a place to live and plan for when his wife and son, then 6 months old, could join him in Los Angeles.

“You find a place to live, but it’s in a new city,” Turner said. “You don’t know what a good area is, what a bad area is, so you’re really relying on the traveling secretary and the team to help you out. A lot of players help out, too. There’s a lot of positivity to make you feel welcome, but just so much unknown.

“I kind of got lucky, I guess, that getting COVID bought me some time to figure out my life a little bit.”

Getting mentioned in trade rumors is par for the course for most top prospects. And Marsh was ranked 43rd and 38th in Baseball America’s top-100 rankings before the 2020 and 2021 seasons.

“I just feel like all the guys on the prospect lists in the minor leagues, they always get talked about, their names get tossed around,” Marsh said. “That’s why I’d always get a text or a call every year to be on the lookout.”

But the rumors tend to abate after a player gets to the majors, at least until his salary begins to rise or he gets closer to free agency. Until then, teams place a high value on players with multiple years of club control.

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Marsh made his major-league debut in July 2021. A year later, the Angels were resolute about not trading Shohei Ohtani, even though they were out of contention and he was a year from free agency.

Surely, then, they wouldn’t trade their young center fielder.

“I was like, ‘It’s just going to be another year where the deadline’s going to end and I’m going to stay here [with the Angels],’” Marsh said.

The Phillies were focused on getting a starting pitcher and talked with the Angels about Noah Syndergaard. But as the deadline drew nearer, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski became increasingly pessimistic.

In a deadline-day pivot, the Phillies bolstered the bullpen by acquiring Robertson from the Cubs for pitching prospect Ben Brown and the outfield by getting Marsh for touted catcher Logan O’Hoppe, who was blocked by J.T. Realmuto.

And that’s when things got hectic.

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Marsh flew across the country and met the Phillies at home two days after the deadline. He knew only one player in the clubhouse (Alec Bohm) and not particularly well. Hitting coach Kevin Long was waiting, with fresh ideas for how to unlock more from his swing and trim his high strikeout rate.

“Very overwhelming, but not in a bad, bad way,” Marsh said. “It’s just a lot of moving parts. I’ve got to move out of my place in Anaheim. Thank God the flights were taken care of. But I’ve got to find a place in Philly. I knew nothing about Philly before coming here, so it’s like throwing me into a pond that I had no knowledge of.

“But I love it here. I’m so happy it happened.”

A year ago, the Rangers were hovering around the .500 mark and committed to neither a win-now move nor an everything-must-go sale.

Just in case, Robertson braced for the latter.

“When the trade deadline came, my house was boxed up and ready to go,” he said on Phillies Extra, The Inquirer’s baseball show. “I was going to be ready for it this time if I’ve got to go. My wife was like, ‘Great, I guess we’ll figure out the van shipment, and we’ll make it work. It’ll just be another stressor on us, right?’”

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The Rangers held on to Robertson, sparing him a fourth deadline relocation. He expected it in 2023, when the Mets sent him to the Marlins, and 2022, when the Cubs dealt him to the Phillies. But he still had a year left on his contract in 2017 when the White Sox surprised him with a trade to the Yankees, his first organization.

“I really wasn’t paying attention to it, so I was kind of caught with that one,” Robertson said. “And we just had a baby a few weeks before. The only blessing about that was I went back to New York, where I happened to know everybody and walked into it a little bit more seamlessly than other places that I’ve been traded to. At least that was good.”

Otherwise, getting traded has always been a disruption for Robertson. He dislikes it so much that, in deciding to keep pitching at age 40 this season, he timed his return so that he didn’t risk getting traded again.

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“Midseason trades are just tough,” Robertson said. “You get settled into a routine and get that normalcy of going to the clubhouse and being with the same guys, and your family knows the route to the field and where the family room is and how to get to and from. And you start to make a life there.

“And then you have to uproot after 3½ months and just pack everything almost overnight and get on a plane and go join another team and immediately have to step in there and be as good as you were with the other team. That’s all they’re expecting you to do. It’s just a lot. It can stress your family out. It can stress you out.”