As we approach yet another quiet
July 31 Trading Deadline, fans and media are all asking the multi-million-dollar
question? Where are the deals?
What's becoming apparent over the
past few years is that we're very likely seeing the end of the deals - at least
the Deadline Deals that we got so used to in the late 1990's and early
2000's.
There are several reasons for this:
1. The bottom-tier
teams have gotten tired of serving as, essentially, minor-league taxi squads for
the richer teams.
2. With the cost of major-league talent continuing to
skyrocket (anybody over the three-year mark is virtually guaranteed over a
million a season; anyone over six years is virtually guaranteed $5-7 million;
any starting pitcher capable of throwing 180 innings a year (doesn't matter
whether they're any good or not) is going to make $10 million), teams are
beginning to hold onto their kids a bit more.
As an aside, one effect of
this is that we're seeing an increasing number of teams that have maybe four or
five high-salaried guys and about 12-15 lower salaried guys - with only a
handful of medium-salaried guys; it's the medium-salaried guys - the guys who
aren't good enough to command megabucks salaries or multi-year deals, but who
are either too good or have too much service time for a team to get away with
paying them under $1 million - who are getting squeezed out.
This is nothing new; we see it
every winter when the medium-tier guys get non-tendered rather than the team
letting them take advantage of their arbitration rights. This is one of the
biggest criticisms of the Players’ Union, the fact that the current
structure really only benefits the star players and not the veteran
rank-and-filers.
3. The wild card. Too many teams still feel, at the end
of July, that they are still in the race. You remember the flak the White Sox
took when they "gave up" on their season when they were only 3 1/2 games out.
Even Friday night, on the Padres' postgame show, the announcers were talking
about Randy Johnson's pending back surgery (he's going to be out the rest of the
season) and how the D'backs are now in a position of having to "demonstrate
their commitment to winning" to their fans, by
picking up a pitcher to
replace Johnson.
4. The luxury tax or whatever it's called currently -
the lower-tier teams now have some extra money with which to hang on to their
veterans; they no longer have to sell off their players, as if they were Bill
Veeck's Browns, to survive the season.
As a result of all of these
factors, we've seen a decrease in the trading-deadline deals, especially the
salary-dump kind of deals which I think were bad for baseball anyway - I was
getting tired of the rich getting richer and the poor staying poor, even though
the Cards benefited mightily from such deals (McGwire, Clark, Rolen, Finley, to
a lesser extent Timlin and Hitchcock).
However, MLB likes the buzz that
trades create, and I suspect they want very much to see more deadline deals.
Thus, what will probably eventually happen is that the non-waiver trading
deadline (which used to be June 15, you'll recall) will be pushed back even
further, perhaps to August 15 - or, possibly, eliminated altogether and combined
with the August 31 eligible-for-postseason play deadline. By that later date,
more teams will have fallen enough out of the race to avoid being criticized
for "giving up".
This, of course, would represent nearly a full reversal
from 1922, when the trading deadline was first instituted anyway. That season,
the Browns were in a tight pennant race with the Yankees, and in August and
September, the Yankees went out and bought a couple of key players and managed
to hold off the Browns for the pennant. The Browns, with Branch Rickey (their
former president but by then, of course, running the Cardinals) riding point for
them, filed a formal complaint with the commissioner that off-season and
Judge Landis, agreeing with them, instituted the June 15 trading deadline that
we all grew up to know and love.
At any rate, until things change, we're
not likely to see any more deadline blockbuster deals; all we're going to see is
spare parts (Lofton, Hairston) or emergency replacements (Iguchi) being dealt;
we're not going to see Izzy going anywhere in a McGwire-type deal for kids who
may or may not pan out. We might see a talent-for-talent deal, a-la
Lankford-for-Williams, and I must say I prefer those kind of trades
anyway.
So we'll see.
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