Waking up on Saturday, it struck me that the non-waiver trade deadline is a special event for baseball fans in Britain.  That’s because it is one of those rare moments in the baseball season when we don’t have to sacrifice sleep to follow the action.  Normally we’re up at all hours, making complicated arrangements so that we can listen or watch games at 3 a.m., stifling cheers or groans as best we can in an attempt to stop our popularity from plummeting even further.

Yet the trade deadline is set at a convenient time for us; 21.00 on a Saturday evening this year.  We can follow the build up, the actual deadline and the immediate reaction with ease.

‘Isn’t that great?’, I thought to myself on Saturday morning.  By Saturday night, I wasn’t quite so sure.

The trade deadline cannot help but underwhelm, even when it produces a fair amount of important deals such as it has this year, simply because there are so many rumours of potential deals leading up to it.  Maybe this was always the case, with whole forests being felled to provide enough paper for all the news stories and radio shows discussing potential deals at length, but it feels as though the internet was tailor made to fan the trade talk flames. 

Any rumour, however slight or half-baked, can be published instantly and disseminated widely in a short space of time.  In many ways that is a great development, but it offers plenty of scope for things to get out of hand.  ESPN’s Buster Olney, for example, is always a good source for the latest news and interesting talking points; however, he adopted the annoying habit of writing tweets starting with “Heard this: …”,  leading to many people getting a bit fed up and responding with their own “Heard this …” parodies, which naturally soon became just as irritating.  Quickness and quantity over quality seems to be the order of the day and I’m no great fan of that approach.

As the 21.00 deadline approached, I even started getting a bit annoyed about the deadline being a flawed premise. Calling it a trade deadline makes it sound like the shutters come down and that’s the end of it.  All deals are done and everyone knows where they stand in regards to those deals.

But that’s not the case at all.

Firstly, it’s only a ‘non-waiver’ trade deadline, not an outright deadline for all trades.  You can still acquire players via a trade, but there’s an added layer of complexity to the process in that other teams get the opportunity to claim the player before the deal is finalized.  August 2009 showed that notable deals can be consummated during this period.  ‘Name’ players like Billy Wagner, Scott Kazmir and Ivan Rodriguez passed through waivers to new teams, the Dodgers picked up Ronnie Belliard and Jon Garland and both made contributions down the stretch and in the playoffs for Joe Torre last year, while the Twins acquired pitchers Carl Pavano and Jon Rauch, both of whom have proved to be important performers not just at the end of 2009, but for 2010 as well.

Secondly, it’s also far from easy to judge a trade when it takes place.  In football, the vast majority of deals are cash transactions.  Fans have a decent idea of the player’s ability, what he will bring to the team he’s joining and the price paid (although nowadays it’s almost always listed officially as ‘undisclosed’) so you have all the factors in place to make a reasonable evaluation of the deal soon after it has happened.

In baseball, prospects are typically a key part of deadline trades and they make it very difficult to judge whether a team has made a steal of a deal or a stinker.  It can take years before you really know whether a trade worked out for the best and opinions can change over time.  When looked at two years ago, the Mets’ decision to trade away Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano at the 2004 deadline was generally derided as one of the worst, if not the worst, of all time.  Now Kazmir is struggling and some people are starting to change their tune.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, in fact the lack of certainty is part of the enjoyment. General Managers are rolling the dice and we’re left waiting to see how they will fall, reassessing the decisions as the years go by.  However that all seems to get lost in the immediate aftermath when people queue up to pass on their opinion, safe in the knowledge that if the prospect they blasted a General Manager for trading actually doesn’t turn into much, they’ll conveniently forget they ever said anything about it.

Yes, the trade deadline produces much that ends up annoying me.  But then again, I was hooked on finding out who would go where before 21.00 and the deals that were announced after the deadline had passed.  In retrospect many of my troubles with the trade deadline are of the irrational, fan-based variety.  Perhaps those rumours and overly confident judgements wouldn’t grate so much if just a few of them related to the A’s making a great trade or two.  Not that we’re really in a position to do that right now, but when has patience ever been part of a fan’s make-up?

A sprinkling of irrational thought or blind optimism doesn’t help when you’re running a ballclub or if you want to devote countless hours to sombre, calculated reflections on the ‘winners and losers’.  For those of us who, when it comes down to it, just love watching the games and hoping our chosen team does well, they’re an unavoidable and essential part of life.

Roll on the offseason Hot Stove!