{"id":8724,"date":"2010-08-02T07:01:19","date_gmt":"2010-08-02T06:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=8724"},"modified":"2010-08-03T07:03:44","modified_gmt":"2010-08-03T06:03:44","slug":"weekly-hit-ground-ball-troubled-by-the-trade-deadline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=8724","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Troubled by the trade deadline"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"WhgbHlSq\"Waking up on Saturday, it struck me that the non-waiver trade deadline is a special event for baseball fans in Britain.\u00c2\u00a0 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because it is one of those rare moments in the baseball season when we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to sacrifice sleep to follow the action.\u00c2\u00a0 Normally we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 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.<\/p>\n

Yet the trade deadline is set at a convenient time for us; 21.00 on a Saturday evening this year.\u00c2\u00a0 We can follow the build up, the actual deadline and the immediate reaction with ease.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcIsn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that great?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, I thought to myself on Saturday morning.\u00c2\u00a0 By Saturday night, I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite so sure.<\/p>\n

The trade deadline cannot help but underwhelm, even when it produces a fair amount of important deals such as it has this year,\u00c2\u00a0simply because there are so many rumours of potential deals leading up to it.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Any rumour, however slight or half-baked, can be published instantly and disseminated widely in a short space of time.\u00c2\u00a0 In many ways that is a great development, but it offers plenty of scope for things to get out of hand.\u00c2\u00a0 ESPN\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Heard this: \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d,\u00c2\u00a0 leading to many people getting a bit fed up and responding with their own \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Heard this \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d parodies, which naturally soon became just as irritating.\u00c2\u00a0 Quickness and quantity over quality seems to be the order of the day and I’m no great fan of that approach.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the end of it.\u00c2\u00a0 All deals are done and everyone knows where they stand in regards to those deals.<\/p>\n

But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the case at all.<\/p>\n

Firstly, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnon-waiver\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 trade deadline, not an outright deadline for all trades.\u00c2\u00a0 You can still acquire players via a trade, but there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an added layer of complexity to the process in that other teams get the opportunity to claim the player before the deal is finalized.\u00c2\u00a0 August 2009 showed that notable deals can be consummated during this period.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcName\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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.<\/p>\n

Secondly, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also far from easy to judge a trade when it takes place.\u00c2\u00a0 In football, the vast majority of deals are cash transactions.\u00c2\u00a0 Fans have a decent idea of the player\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ability, what he will bring to the team he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s joining and the price paid (although nowadays it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s almost always listed officially as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcundisclosed\u00e2\u20ac\u2122) so you have all the factors in place to make a reasonable evaluation of the deal soon after it has happened.<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 It can take years before you really know whether a trade worked out for the best and opinions can change over time.\u00c2\u00a0 When looked at two years ago, the Mets\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 decision to trade away Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano at the 2004 deadline was generally derided as one of the worst, if not the<\/em> worst, of all time.\u00c2\u00a0 Now Kazmir is struggling and some people are starting to change their tune.<\/p>\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing inherently wrong with this, in fact the lack of certainty is part of the enjoyment. General Managers are rolling the dice and we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re left waiting to see how they will fall, reassessing the decisions as the years go by.\u00c2\u00a0 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t turn into much, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll conveniently forget they ever said anything about it.<\/p>\n

Yes, the trade deadline produces much that ends up annoying me.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 In retrospect many of my troubles with the trade deadline are of the irrational, fan-based variety.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

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’.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Roll on the offseason Hot Stove!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The MLB non-waiver trade deadline came and went on Saturday. It was annoying and captivating in equal measure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-8724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-hit-ground-ball","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8724"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8756,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8724\/revisions\/8756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}