For all of the hullabaloo it generates, the trade deadline sometimes seems engineered to disappoint.
Few things focus the angst and generate jitters like a deadline, so even if yesterday’s non-waiver trade cut-off point was unlikely to spawn much action from the Toronto Blue Jays, you can understand how both fans and players come away feeling somehow cheated when their team holds the line on acquisitions.
Such is the nature of the way that we perceive these abstract notions of what trades might have been available to our team when we measure them up against the quite tangible moves made by others, including our chief rivals. Look around at American League teams in the mix for the post-season, and you can easily argue that the New York Yankees, Seattle Mariners, Baltimore Orioles, Detroit Tigers and Oakland A’s all got better yesterday, while the Jays remain essentially unchanged.
You can see what those other teams did. You can measure it and assess it and you can imagine how it will play out. But what the Jays didn’t do is maddening in its mystery, and its elusiveness.
As a fan, you’re left to imagine what sorts of deals were available, and why general manager Alex Anthopoulos might have pushed himself back from the table when they were offered. (Unless you want to just assume that the front office is dumb and ownership is cheap, which seems like a lazily angry response).
A striking feature of many of yesterday’s trades were the number that included players from big league rosters being exchanged in both directions. These were not the salvage transactions where teams took a secondary prospect to get rid of a contract. They weren’t even looking for players who were close to "big-league ready." These were trades of established MLB-level players and even veterans exchanged in return for prized pieces.
If you follow that trend and accept Anthopoulos at face value when he talks about who teams were seeking in trade discussions, it follows that the Jays may have been faced with exchanging substantive pieces of their current roster in order to achieve the universally desired goal of "doing something." You can probably assume that Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion would not have been entertained as trade chips, but looking at the deals that moved Jon Lester and David Price, you’d have to assume that Drew Hutchison, Marcus Stroman, Brett Lawrie, and even Melky Cabrera would have been on the wish lists of other teams.
At a time when the Blue Jays’ roster remains depleted and their depth has been profoundly tested, giving up assets from the Major League roster in exchange for an upgrade to that same roster would have been a precarious feat.
Even the trade of someone like Martin Prado — whose acquisition by the Yankees seems to be the focus of the clubhouse angst — was likely to have caused problems for the Jays beyond this season with his $11 million salary, one which seems likely to have complicated the possible re-signings of Melky Cabrera or Casey Janssen in the off-season.
If the lack of acquisitions was no great surprise, I’ll confess to a certain level of disappointment in the Jays’ inability to land a bullpen arm to help shore up an aspect of the team that seems to be corroding before our eyes.
Having said that, it’s important to remember that there’s still another full and fascinating month of transactions yet to come. In some ways, the August waiver period has become increasingly compelling as teams begin sending chunks of their rosters through the waiver wire.
It bears remembering that some of the most important contributors to the past glories of this franchise were acquired in this period, including Cliff Johnson in 1985, Candy Maldonado in 1991 and David Cone in 1992. It’s also the period in which the Blue Jays swapped with the Pittsburgh Pirates for a spare-part utility guy who no one particularly wanted and that turned out alright.
The Blue Jays have three everyday players returning to the fold in the coming weeks and should have a better sense of the resilience of the young arms in their rotation and the state of the bullpen over that same time period. There will be opportunities to make the sort of small moves to improve the roster over the coming weeks and there might even be a big name pitcher or two available.
The Jays may be well-served by their patience when those players hit the wire.