You know, through the Players Association. The union. At least some players traded in recent days showed outright distress. So, why wouldn't the players through their union negotiate an end to this disreputable practice?
Stop the madness. Outlaw trades during the season! Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Stop the ridiculous handicapping. Trades during the season undermine the fundamental and basic integrity of the game for reasons so obvious I won't bother to repeat them again.
Even if the notion that such trades somehow help teams to rebuild were correct, that's not nearly worth the negative impact.
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Yesterday during his MLB Now TV program host Brian Kenny said that it would have been great for baseball if Bryce Harper had been traded. Maybe this was just hyperbole or a combination of that and wishful thinking that he and the other talking heads would have a BIG juicy tabloid like story to dissect ad nauseam.
League management seems to be embracing the idea attributed correctly or not to P.T. Barnum, and also a favorite idea of the late Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Another Barnum attribution: “There's a sucker born every minute.”
There are probably two reasons that the practice continues:
1. It's been done for decades.
2. There's a current very conventional wisdom that it helps teams tear down and rebuild quickly.
Reason number two is one of those: it works, except when it doesn't.
Which still gets us back to the player's union, which lacks the imagination and leadership to demand or even ask for something a little different.
League management, of course, would want a concession from the union in return. Making this more difficult, in the last decade or so the league has gotten unilateral concessions from the players. The league has shown no indication to do the same.
Nevertheless, the players should consider making this an important issue, which would benefit them and the game.
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