Big deal
How the trading deadline became on event unto itself. And is it good for baseball?
I spotted this headline from mlb.com a couple of weeks ago:
How will division races impact deadline moves?
Gee, I always thought the point of the deadline moves was to impact the races for the postseason.
Apparently, I had it backwards. I guess I am well behind the times, remembering the days when the All-Star Game was the focus of baseball’s summer and when no one celebrated the end of hope for a good portion of fan bases.
The trade deadline period has become an event unto itself — especially if you are in sports media. This year’s event-unto-itself was a dull affair until the final two hours, when 24 trades were completed.
There were some “headline” names. Of course, these days, every deal makes headlines.
Mason Miller went from A’s closer to Padres closer. Infielder Carlos Correa, a player the Astros built around as they began a decade of success, is back in Houston.
Seattle acquired two sluggers from the D-backs, Eugenio Suarez and Josh Naylor. The D-backs also dispatched their best starting pitcher, Merrill Kelly, to the Rangers.
For gutting their team, the D-backs got back a lot of minor league pitchers. Mike Hazen, the guy who made the deals and built the horrible bullpen that made this sell-off necessary, assures D-backs fans that there is strength in numbers when it comes to prospective arms.
In the first of the post-deadline series at home, the D-backs showcased their new-look pen and blew two late-inning leads for their 35th and 36th come-from-ahead losses of the season.
The Twins traded away 10 players, then started playing better.
Why and how did this event that once generated a few headlines in late summer and a ton of small type under the transactions header of newspaper sports sections become a focal point of the baseball season?
First, nothing drives online traffic like potential trade news. No matter what format you're working in, anyone who makes a living or tries to make a living is dependent on getting eyes on their content, often through search and social media.
Secondly, with the rise of analytics, fans, executives, and media have become more aware that prospects can have significant value. Star players often have their best seasons before they become free agents. So the best way to build a team is with prospects. And it is the most economical way to build.
Finally, the media landscape has changed so much. Until 20 years ago, sports commentary revolved around columnists in local newspapers and guys who shouted a lot on local sports talk radio. Your local columnist, depending on their approach, might not be an out-and-out fan of the team, but the folks who read them sure were fans. Same with the shouters on sports talk radio.
Those people still exist, but they no longer drive the conversation. Many seem to take their lead from a conversation that involves national reporters and commentators, Internet sites, YouTube videos, podcasts, X.com, and Bluesky.
Local vs national perspectives
An overwhelming theme from that national conversation is that marginal contenders should give up on their season and ship desirable players to teams that are going to the postseason and hope they get some future stars in return.
The last thing the local media critters wanted back in the day was the local baseball team to be irrelevant during the summer.
Irrelevant meant something different in those days.
Irrelevant/relevant hinged on the perspective of the home market.
Now it means how good your chances are of making the playoffs from a national perspective.
If the Royals, for instance, have only a 10 percent chance of making the playoffs, they are irrelevant to most fans and commentators.
That same outside chance of 10 percent would keep the team relevant in Kansas City — and keep the sport of baseball relevant in Kansas City.
It doesn’t matter where national voices are based. Jeff Passan of ESPN lives in the Kansas City area. I don’t think he’d advocate for the Royals staying in the race rather than making deals at the deadline.
Two of the heavy hitters in baseball media, Bob Nightengale and Ken Rosenthal, live in the Phoenix area. But the Diamondbacks’ performance has almost no impact on their jobs. They will be covering the top teams and top stories, whether that means in Tampa, Phoenix, Cleveland, or New York.
And the national media critters wouldn’t mind seeing every star in baseball on the 12 postseason teams. Fans in the other market be damned.
Paul Skenes’ 2025 season has been frittered away, The Athletic writes, because he is pitching for the last-place Pirates. If the club would just trade Skenes, then The Athletic wouldn’t have to pay any attention to the Pirates, and their writers could see him doing dramatic things in the postseason.
National media critters were positively livid that Angels owner Arte Moreno wouldn’t ship Shohei Ohtani somewhere two years ago. Moreno felt his only chance to re-sign Ohtani was for a late-season miracle that would propel the team into the postseason, where the Halos would go for a prolonged run. (I am also guessing the contenders low-balled him.)
It was a long shot, but it was Moreno’s risk to take. The $42 million-plus that Moreno paid Ohtani (albeit a bargain for such a player) gave the Angels owner a bigger voice in the decision than some guy who wears a bowtie and stands in front of a dugout on TV once a week. Odd how that works.
When Ohtani hurt his arm shortly after the trade deadline, the Wall Street Journal whined that it was a waste, as if somehow such an injury would have been fine if only Ohtani suffered it while pitching for the Dodgers or Yankees or Braves.
Salary dump
Deadline deals have been around forever. Contending teams hoped to acquire veteran talent for a late-season run at the pennant or division title and the hoped-for postseason.
This often involved aging and fading stars, who it was believed might help with the pressures of such situations because of their experience.
With the advent of free agency in the late 1970s, teams that were out of the race often jettisoned players whose contracts were about to expire for cash and or for young players.
The first guy who tried this was Charles O. Finley, owner of the Oakland A’s, who sold the contracts of closer Rollie Fingers and left fielder Joe Rudi to the Boston Red Sox for $1 million each and sold the contract of Vida Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million. Finley claimed he intended to use the money to acquire new players.
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn voided the deals.
Yet, a similar practice soon became quite common — the salary dump. Once you were out of contention, you just dealt away any expensive talent as fast as you could.
And it was considered a terrible action, usually phrased as “yet another example” of a greedy team owner turning his back on the fans.
Which brings us to the most notorious salary dump, the so-called White Sox “white flag trade.”
The dishonorable deal
On July 31 1997, the White Sox traded Wilson Álvarez, left-handed starting pitcher, Danny Darwin, right-handed starting pitcher, and Roberto Hernández, right-handed relief pitcher to the Giants for ight-handed pitchers Keith Foulke, Bob Howry, Lorenzo Barceló, left-handed pitcher Ken Vining, shortstop Mike Caruso, and outfielder Brian Manning,
Wow, you’re probably saying. One deal that involved eight sure-fire future Hall-of-Famers, and another guy who was a future six-time All-Star?
I’m kidding, of course. If you’re under 40 and lack an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport, you probably have to look them up.
The Sox traded solid veteran pitchers for two promising relievers and some other prospects.
The deal would be entirely forgotten except that the White Sox were only 3 1/2 games behind Cleveland at the time, and club owner Jerry Reinsdorf told the Chicago Sun-Times: "Anyone who thinks we can catch Cleveland is crazy."
Basically, he admitted he was surrendering, hence “the white flag” nickname,
As it was, the White Sox finished with an 80-81 record, just six games behind Cleveland. The Giants won the 1997 NL West title and lost in the first round of the playoffs.
In 2000, Foulke had 34 saves, and Howry was a solid bullpen performer when the White Sox won the AL Central. The Giants also won their division title in 2000. By then, Darwin had retired, and Álvarez and Hernandez were with the Devil Rays.
What I remember best about the “white flag” trade came later. In 2001 and 2002, with the possibility of some sort of work stoppage looming, fans on message boards (remember those?) kept citing the deal as typifying owners’ indifference to their fan bases.
Even back then, some commenters defended the “white flag trade” because analytics, which were coming into fashion, showed the Sox only had a 1 in 3 chance of overtaking the Indians.
The unicorn trades
Today, a sizable portion of the public would be in favor of similar trade. I think it is because many fans, media types, and baseball executives overvalue prospects.
The result is we don’t have salary dumps anymore. Well, we don’t call them that.
These transactions are now pitched to the public as opportunities to build for the future. It is just a matter of judiciously assessing your needs and opportunities as July wears on and deciding whether to be a buyer or seller — or sometimes both if you are the Mariners’ Jerry DiPito.
Some of us see this as an excellent strategy; others see it as an example of putting lipstick on a pig.
The salary dump became more palatable becuase of what I call the unicorn trades.
One of the trades is the 1987 deadline deal in which the Tigers sent future Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz for veteran pitcher Doyle Alexander. The deal has been categorized as a major blunder by the Tigers but was lauded at the time.
I have agrued that it was a trade that helped both teams. Alexander pitched well for the Tigers, a team whose core was aging and was hoping to win another World Series after their 1984 triumph.
Smoltz had a great career, mostly with the Braves. By the time he became an effective major league pitcher, the Braves were beginning a long run of excellence. It is doubtful the Tigers would have contended in the early 1990s, even with Smoltz.
At the time of the deal, Smoltz was a struggling 20-year-old at Class AA. Baseball America ranked Smoltz as the Tigers’ No. 2 prospect.
But Baseball America and prospect rankings were a bit more obscure in those days, appealing only to a small subset of baseball nerds.
Heck, Braves GM at the time, Bobby Cox, didn’t know anything about Smoltz.
A Braves scout, John Hagemann, had seen Smoltz pitch 2 2/3 innings and persuaded Cox to obtain the kid. At least that is how the story goes.
I don’t think that trade, with a team’s second-best prospect, would fly today. That is, unless . . . it was like the first Juan Soto deal.
The other unicorn deal
In 2022, the Nationals decided they would be unable to sign Juan Soto, a once-in-a-generation talent who had not reached his prime, to a long-term deal before he tested the open market after the 2025 season.
Even with Soto, the Nats were well out of contention. So they decided to package him with first baseman Josh Bell and send them to the Padres for Luke Voit, CJ Abrams, MacKenzie Gore, Robert Hassell III, James Wood, and Jarlin Susan.
Abrams, Wood, and Gore all look to be potential stars. That is quite a haul for the Nats.
But that was for Juan Freaking Soto. He had two and a half years of team control left. He was making $17.1 million that season. He made $23 million the next. For a player of his caliber, that is a bargain.
The Padres reached the NLCS in 2022, only the third time the team had gone that far. The franchise’s first season was 1969.
Toward the end of the 2023 season, it looked like the Padres would miss the postseason (they wound up finishing just two games behind the Marlins and Diamondbacks for the final wild card spots).
Soto would be due a hefty raise in 2024. The Padres decided to send Soto to the Yankees with Trent Grisham for Michael King, Jhony Brito, Randy Vasquez, Drew Thorpe, and Kyle Higashioka.
The Padres later used King in a deal with the White Sox for pitcher Dylan Cease. But overall, the Padres reduced the talent in the organization through the two deals. On the other hand, they got to the NLCS.
Much ado about nothing?
The Athletic took a look back at 2024 frenzy of deals and wrote this: “Nearly 70 trades were completed in the run-up to last July’s deadline, and although some were career-changing and franchise-altering — Randy Arozarena leaving Tampa Bay, Tommy Edman and Jack Flaherty going to L.A. to win a championship — most were about as memorable as the saga of reliever Mike Baumann, who was traded in May, sold in July, sold again in July, and claimed off waivers in August. The five teams he played for combined to appear in two playoff games and win none of them.”
It often takes years before we know the true impact of these deals.
Here is one that was a big deal at the time. In 2019, the D-backs decided to jettison Zack Greinke. He was 35 with a 10-4 record with a 2.90 ERA in 23 starts. He had two more seasons to go on his deal. He was owed more than $70 million for 2020 and 2021.
Greinke went to the Astros with $24 million for first baseman Seth Beer and right-handers JB Bukauskas and Corbin Martin, and infielder Josh Rojas.
Beer seemed like the prize in the deal for the D-backs. He was a power hitter who had succeeded at every level up through Class AA. He had a great last name. What’s more, he is a former youth swimming national record-holder, and the D-backs are the only team with a swimming pool in their home park.
Beer was a bust at the big league level. The four players combined netted less WAR, a combined -0.6, in their time with the D-backs than Greinke netted for Houston in the remainder of the 2019 season, 1.1.
Rojas, a local kid from Litchfield Park, was the least regarded of the four prospects. He became a serviceable third baseman, netting 3.3 WAR over five seasons in Arizona.
Rojas was part of a trade to the Mariners for closer Paul Sewald, who helped get the Snakes to the World Series. So Hazen can hang his hat on that.
And I am sure that Ken Kendrick and the D-backs ownership group appreciated saving $50 million or so.
It’s not my money, so I’d call the deal overall a push.
Good for the sport?
The possibility of a flurry of deadline deals brings attention to the sport, but is this good for baseball?
If you are a national media critter or a Yankees or a Dodgers fan (teams that seldom, if ever, are under pressure to sell), it’s great. Your team has an opportunity to patch up a few holes.
But if you are a fan of the Reds, or Royals, or D-backs, or Twins, among others, where contending for a postseason spot each season is not a given, you might not find it so scintillating.
The D-backs were averaging around 30,000 a game this season, on track for their best season at the gate since 2024. I expect that to fall off quite a bit.
The drumbeat for the possibility of liquidating the team begins in late May. Fans of teams that are just under around .500, five or six games behind for the last wild-card spot, should find the situation hopeful.
Instead, the sport’s insiders are offering a warning against emotionally committing too much to your team.
The NFL has sold the public on this BS since the early 1950s that every team has a chance every week s. And you’re not really out of it until you are mathematically out of it.
You don’t have to be a marketing wizard to see which approach works better.