We think about the MLB trade deadline in all the wrong terms
Ted Berg writes the Morning Win newsletter for For The Win. Yell at him on Twitter at @OGTedBerg or via email at AskTedBerg@gmail.com.
Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET marks the last time during the 2019 baseball season that MLB teams will be able to make trades. Unlike past years, when waiver rules allowed clubs to hammer out swaps until August 31 and still carry the newly acquired players on their postseason rosters, this year's trade deadline is truly a deadline.
But almost every bit of MLB trade deadline analysis everywhere - mine certainly included - uses the terms "buyers" and "sellers" to define MLB teams. And they can make useful shorthands for estimating a club's deadline approach: Clubs chasing a pennant are expected to be "buyers," meaning they'll be looking to add established talent from the "sellers" - those teams without hope of immediate contention, looking to move veterans for prospects who might help them in the future.
Only it doesn't seem to be shaking out that way this year at all. The Mets, despite being well below .500 and boasting little real hope of a postseason berth, went out and traded a pair of prospects for Marcus Stroman. There's talk they're going to deal away Noah Syndergaard. The Mets are trying to be buyers and sellers.
And wait! It gets weirder. The Indians are sitting in a wild-card spot and breathing down the Twins' necks in the AL Central. The Reds are seven games below .500 entering play Wednesday. And yet late Tuesday night, the Indians reportedly agreed to send ace starter Trevor Bauer to the Reds in a three-team deal involving the Padres that will net them Yasiel Puig from Cincinnati and slugging young outfielder Franmil Reyes from San Diego.
The move wildly improves Cleveland's weak outfield, but by traditional MLB logic, the Indians aren't supposed to be selling veteran starters like Bauer when they're chasing the pennant. The Reds aren't supposed to be buying veteran players when they're out of it. That's backwards!
Oh, and the 50-57 Padres are - or were - one of the teams supposedly pursuing Syndergaard. Come to think of it, the biggest name dealt at last year's deadline, Chris Archer, went to a Pirates team that could not and would not catch up with the Cubs and Brewers in the NL Central.
So what gives?
For one thing - and this is a big thing - the smartly run clubs that perennially contend these days don't seem so eager to mortgage the future to get slightly better in years they're already destined for the postseason. The Yankees, Astros and Dodgers might not be in their enviable situations now if they'd been knee-jerk deadline "buyers" in the recent past, because hanging onto their most prized prospects has allowed them to create sustainable winners.
And all those organizations, like most others in 2019, are smart enough to understand that short postseason series are more or less crapshoots, with so much randomness in play that it'd take a 269-game series to conclusively determine the better of two good teams. The best way to ensure you win the World Series is to get to the playoffs as often as possible, and no single player acquired at the deadline ever guarantees you a ring.
And if that's your mentality, why are you going to give up your prospects for a couple months' worth of a rental player who's about to flee in free agency?
On top of that, players dealt mid-season aren't eligible to receive qualifying offers, meaning teams that acquire them cannot get compensatory draft picks when they opt for the open market. So the calculus is off: If my team has an elite veteran player who's bound for free agency, you need to trade me something better than the fairly high draft pick I'd get if I just hold on to the guy, but you'd be imprudent to trade something better than a high draft pick for a guy who might play for you for two and a half months and net nothing of substance.
If you really want to get back value in prospects, you need to dangle a guy like Stroman, Syndergaard or Bauer - established Major Leaguers who are still under team control at relatively reasonable costs for at least the season beyond this one. But when players like that become available, they appeal not just to the current contenders but to any team with designs on making a run at next year's pennant. That's why the Mets traded for Stroman. That's why the Reds are trading for Bauer.
And the situation is further complicated this season by the huge number of teams with shots at October and the elimination of those confusing but often useful post-deadline waiver deals.
The bottom line is, it's clearly wrong to keep dividing up MLB teams into buyers and sellers come deadline time. No one's buying and no one's selling; they're all just trading. It's not called the "buying and selling deadline," folks.
Tuesday's big winner: Damian Lillard
Just for being a cool guy. Not only is Lillard about the only guy in the NBA who seems willing to embrace an underdog role instead of forcing a trade to the overdogs, but he's apparently launching a campaign to get free-agent Carmelo Anthony a farewell season in the league. I'm not hip to the newfangled basketball numbers, but I feel like there's got to be a team somewhere that can give 'Melo some deep-rotation minutes and closure. It's cool that Lillard cares.
Quick hits: NASCAR feud, Hobbs and Shaw
- Michelle Martinelli is back with some more NASCAR feuds, and the one between Kurt Busch and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. does seem awfully petty. As Michelle points out, if you're tweeting to the world that you're taking "the high road," you are not on the high road. I still prefer the NASCAR feud wherein a guy called Stenhouse "Ricky Stankhouse," but this one plays nonetheless.
- The PGA Tour is adjusting its rules for next season so that fewer players make the cut, meaning elite players will benefit from slightly larger shares of the prize pool but fewer golfers in general will get paid. Classic 2019.
- Wrestler guy Roman Reigns has a small part in the new Fast and Furious spin-off, Hobbs and Shaw, and a behind-the-scenes video revealed that he accidentally knocked out a cameraman with a hammer in an action sequence. In the video, you can hear Reigns telling the camera guy that he's welcome to punch him in the face in retaliation.
As promotional clips go, it's extremely entertaining. But my thing is, who decided to call this movie "Hobbs and Shaw?" That sounds like a legal thriller. It's a movie about Jason Statham and the Rock tracking down and fighting a superhuman Idris Elba, which is to say it's about as up my alley as any movie has ever been. And yet I might have missed it entirely if I didn't work with Fast and Furious expert Hemal Jhaveri.