As we move deeper into the second week of August, we’ll be seeing a lot of stories about how a certain star player is on waivers and much tittering and shock will ensue. No one can believe it – how could he be on waivers? How stupid is his team? But it happens every August, you could set your calendar by it.
The thing is, pretty much every player in the major leagues (and a whole lot of the ones in the minors) will be placed on waivers at some point in the next two and a half weeks, if they haven’t been already. It’s the way Major League Baseball does business in between the non-waiver trade deadline and the August 31st playoff eligibility deadline.
The only way to make a trade now is to put the player you want to trade through recallable waivers. If he makes it through, you can trade him to any team. If he doesn’t make it through, you can trade him only to the team that has won the claim or you can pull him back from waivers. But once a player is pulled back from waivers, he can’t be placed on recallable waivers again.
Every player on a 40-man roster must be placed on recallable waivers in order to be traded.
Waiver priority is by win-loss record, worst to first, with the teams in the waiving team’s league getting the first shot before the other league can get in on the action. So when Edwin Encarnacion goes on waivers, for example, he would go through the American League first, starting with the Twins and going through to the Rangers. If no one was to claim him, the Braves would be next and the claiming rights would go through the National League all the way to the Cubs.
Now, if Encarnacion gets claimed, the Blue Jays will almost definitely pull him back off waivers. So why put him on in the first place? Teams will often flood the waiver wire, throwing seven guys on at a time, hoping that someone they might want to sneak through gets lost in the mass of names.
Big-contract players are the most likely to get through waivers, since teams are afraid that the waiving team will just let them go and stick the claiming team with the money. The Blue Jays were involved in such a move in 2009 when they dumped the almost $60 million remaining on Alex Rios’ contract on the Chicago White Sox. Chicago put a claim in hoping to start a conversation with the Jays about a potential trade, and then-GM J.P. Ricciardi basically said, “Thank you for taking him off our hands.”
In days gone by, teams in pennant races used to make claims on players simply to prevent the teams ahead of them from being able to do so. That doesn’t happen as much anymore because pulling back a player who has been claimed is no longer a guarantee, so teams can’t claim players in whom they’re not really interested with impunity anymore.
The Blue Jays had a hand in that changing, as well. Back in 1998, the San Diego Padres thought that Atlanta, the best team in the NL, was going to try to deal for Jays’ closer Randy Myers, so they put in a claim for Myers to try to block a trade. The Blue Jays were thrilled to get the opportunity to shed themselves of their ill-fated closer.
The playoff eligibility deadline is on August 31, so in order for a player to be able to play in the post-season, he must be acquired by that date. Any player that a team has in its organization before September 1, on the 40-man roster or otherwise, can potentially play in the playoffs.
Waiver trades aren’t incredibly common, but they do happen a lot. The Blue Jays picked up Mike Flanagan right before the deadline in 1987, Candy Maldonado in August of 1991, David Cone in ‘92, and of course, Jose Bautista in 2008. There will be opportunities to improve this month, as well, and Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins have three weeks to bring in help that would be able to suit up for the Blue Jays in the playoffs.