Today’s Major League Trade deadline has been fun. Really fun.
Generally Twitter is a condemned septic tank. Today, I couldn’t stop pressing refresh to see the latest from all the baseball insiders. Today is the Super Bowl for people like Ken Rosenthal, Jon Heyman, Jeff Passan and many others.
Baseball needs as many eyes on the sport as possible and this is the time of year, as training camps are open, where people start shifting their gaze to football.
But not today. Today is all about the baseball trade deadline.
As recently as a couple years ago, there was a second trade deadline. If a player cleared waivers, they could be traded up until August 31st. The Brewers have been active at the August deadline. Players like Curtis Granderson and Gio Gonzalez came to the crew before that second deadline.
To be fair, today’s deadline has more importance as teams know they won’t be able to make more moves in August. Brewers President of Baseball Operations David Stearns alluded to that after the team acquired Eduardo Escobar. If you suffer a major injury, you don’t have the chance to supplement the roster in August so Stearns acquires Escobar to create what he calls redundancy at as many positions as possible. We can simply call it protection.
But as someone who wants the eyes of the sports world on baseball, I always thought it was good for the sport to have another news-making day right as the sport competed with football for as many eyeballs as possible.
But much like a college freshman away from home for the first time, Major League baseball is very good at making bad decisions. They previously had two separate deadlines that put a spotlight on the sport and they decided to get rid of one of them.
If they are going to stick with one deadline, Stearns has said he and many in baseball would like to see it pushed back to mid-August. The easier option would be to bring back the two-deadline system but as I mentioned, baseball is not great at making good decisions.