Superpowers suck life out of trade deadline
Dodgers, Astros and Yankees control market
WASHINGTON The National League playoff picture is a beautiful, teeming mess, with eight of 15 teams entering this weekend either leading their division or within 3½ games of a playoff spot. In these last few days before Wednesday ’s 4 p.m. ET trade deadline, all of them should be climbing over each other to improve their rosters through deals. So why has this trade market been so slow to develop?
The answer could be the one team that sits above the fray: the Los Angeles Dodgers.
At 67-37 — a 104-win pace — entering their three-game series in Washington against the Nationals, the Dodgers are so formidable and so clearly better than anyone else in the league (14½ games up in their division, and 6½ games ahead of the league’s next best team, the Atlanta Braves), that they may be influencing the entire NL trade picture.
The thinking goes like this: If you’re a fringe contender that is considering sacrificing a big part of your future in prospects to acquire the pieces you need to win a wild card, is it really worth it just to sneak into the playoffs, maybe win the one-and-done wild card game — and having to use your best pitchers to do so — only to subsequently get annihilated by the Dodgers in the Division Series?
That seems to be what Arizona Diamondbacks general manager Mike Hazen was getting at when he told reporters this week, “The belief that a .500 team is going to get through the wild card format we have and win the World Series is, I don’t think, objectively, that’s a position we should be staking ourselves to.”
It is a similar calculation in the American League, where the New York Yankees (on a 105-win pace entering the weekend) and Houston Astros (103-win pace) are jockeying for the league’s top seed in the post-season, with the Minnesota Twins (98-win pace) not far behind.
This dynamic was also in evidence in both 2017 and 2018, each of which featured three 100-win teams. But this season has a chance to be the first in history with four.
In this age of extreme stratification in baseball — with a half-dozen bottom-feeders headed toward 95-loss seasons and another half-dozen superpowers within range of 95 wins (and four within range of 100) — the teams in the middle, even those within striking distance of a wild card, have to ask themselves whether the current one-and-done wild card format, instituted in 2012, is worth what it might cost to get there.
“It’s hard for us to make the judgment that we’re one trade away from the World Series,” Philadelphia Phillies president Andy Macphail said in discussing the team’s deadline approach. “We don’t believe that. I don’t believe that. So as a result, you’re going to have to be more judicious with your playing talent.”
Since baseball moved to the current post-season format, with the win-or-go-home wild card game, six of the 14 wild card game winners have gone on to beat their league’s No. 1 seed in the Division Series. Fans of the Nationals won’t need to be reminded that twice, with the 2012 St. Louis Cardinals and the 2014 San Francisco Giants, it came at their team’s expense.
But only twice have those teams advanced to the World Series — both in 2014, with the Giants and Kansas City Royals — and those 2014 Giants are the lone wild card team under this format to win the World Series. None of those wild card winners had to run a gauntlet like the one that will be facing this year’s entrants, with the path to the AL pennant running through some combination of the Yankees, Astros and Twins — all of whom could put up 100-plus wins — and the NL pennant running through the Dodgers, with their 104-win pace, and potentially a 95-win team out of the NL East.
When the wild card Giants won that World Series in 2014, by comparison, their playoff opponents were, in order, the 88-win Pittsburgh Pirates, the 96-win Nationals, the 90-win St. Louis Cardinals and the 89-win Royals. Baseball was a different game just five years ago.
This helps explain why most of the heat surrounding this trade deadline is being generated by the superpowers already virtually assured of winning their divisions (the Yankees, Astros and Dodgers) — for whom the primary focus is matching up against each other in October, or bolstering their deficiencies — and the teams with smaller division leads or those in pursuit of a division title, a group that includes the Twins, Cleveland Indians, Braves, Nationals, Cubs, Cardinals and Brewers.
There isn’t nearly as much chatter from the teams for whom the wild card is the likeliest, or only, point of entry.
“It’s always mattered to us to be a playoff-relevant team,” said Colorado Rockies GM Jeff Bridich, whose team entered this weekend 7½ games back in the wild card chase. “At the beginning of the season, that’s always our goal. Nobody knew for certain before this season that the Dodgers were going to go on this unbelievable tear. Even with the extra wild cards, it still takes a very special team effort all the way through to be one of the last teams standing.”
The Nationals, meantime, present an interesting case study in post-season entry ports, and an illustration of why winning the NL East is so critical to a team like theirs. To see it, ask yourself this: Which way into the post-season would you prefer? Finishing second to the Braves, earning a wild card, maybe winning the wild card game — but having to use ace Max Scherzer to do it — then heading into a five-game Division Series against the well-rested Dodgers, who would have both home-field advantage and their optimum rotation lined up to face you?
Or surging past the Braves for the East title and NL’S No. 2 seed, taking a couple of days off, then — with a more-or-less rested rotation — facing the NL Central champ (potentially diminished by a tough, three-way battle down the stretch), in the Division Series, with home-field advantage?
For the Nationals, the difference between those two scenarios makes it worth doing whatever it takes at the trade deadline to fix their bullpen issues. In the stratified, supercharged atmosphere of modern baseball, a wild card — even if winning one, at a fundamental level, is better than not — is a losing proposition.