Mike Moustakas was traded by the Kansas City Royals to the Milwaukee Brewers for minor league players. The Royals are in New York playing the Yankees. Today at Yankee Stadium there is a day/night doubleheader and tomorrow a third game that the Royals will play the Yankees immediately after becoming a weaker team by their in season trade of Moustakas.
This is just a simple but obvious example of how trades during the regular season undermine the basic integrity of the major league. It's been going on for decades but has become increasingly insidious in the last decade. It's now OK for teams to schedule a tear down phase supposedly leading to a rebuild phase. It seems to work except, of course, when it doesn't.
Even if it did work, where's the integrity of THIS season for, in this case, the Royals, who have deliberately weakened their team NOW? In 2016 the Yankees, to their everlasting disgrace, did it, too. The 2016 Yankees traded their two best relief pitchers, Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman, and then traded their best hitter, Carlos Beltran. For those three the Yankees received about ten minor league players plus Adam Warren.
The weakened Yankees went on to win 84 games in 2016. Had the Yankees added talent, they might have qualified for the tournament. And what of the players received? So far only infielder Gleyber Torres has been impactful and Yankee general manager Brian Cashman stated in 2016 in announcing the trade that he had "swung and missed" in his failed effort to sign Torres as an international free agent years earlier. In other words, the Yankees could have traded Chapman for another prospect.
But this is handicapping, which has become bigger than even the trades themselves. We're all engaging in this incessant speculation about transactions that should occur only between seasons, not during.
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