Daugherty: Trade deadline is baseball at its worst,
It took three tries, but the Cincinnati Reds on Monday finally dumped Jay Bruce’s salary.
What’s that, you say? It wasn’t a salary dump. It was a necessary move in the ongoing rebuild. It will help the Reds become contenders again.
The Reds didn’t dump a $12.5 million salary this year, and $13 million next. They “acquired two quality players who better fit the direction our organization is heading,” president of baseball operations Walt Jocketty noted, without a trace of irony. Nah, it was a salary dump. The Reds didn’t trade a popular, productive player in his prime because they couldn’t live without Dilson Herrera and Max Wotell, the two kids they got in return from the New York Mets.
Bruce was ballast tossed from the balloon. He was their best hitter for much of this season, yet he was no more valuable to them than a 19-year-old pitcher barely a year out of high school, and a kid with 90 major league at-bats.
No worries. That only makes the offseason that much more fun. We can all sit around waiting for the Reds to disintegrate further then collectively gather with our copies of Baseball America, wonking our way through the winter, wondering if Amir Garrett “projects” to the Reds’ 2017 rotation. That’ll be great. Know what else will be fabulous?
Watching Joey Votto hit absolutely everything the rest of this year, then laughing with delight at the notion that maybe, just maybe, he’ll finish strongly enough that the Reds might be able to trade him, too.
Arguably the best pure hitter the Reds have ever had, dealt for some highly promising bus riders.
The trade deadline free-for-all is better than buy-one, get-one packs of tube socks at Wal-Mart. Even the media love it.
“This is why baseball’s trade deadline is the best,” wrote Fox’s Ken Rosenthal.
Here’s a different way of looking at the glorious and thrilling trade deadline. It’s baseball at its worst. It’s the game being run by money. Lock, stock and bank vault.
Baseball can pitch its product to the inner cities, it can align with gambling websites to lure a younger crowd. Baseball can mess with its baseballs, so they fly bigger distances, and it can convene to discuss more useless ways to speed itself up.
It can do all this. None of it matters so much as the influence that dollars have on the product. In baseball, trading good players for bus riders is considered sound business strategy.
In baseball, trading Bruce — a popular player who has spent his whole career with one team (nine years, 1,220 games) and who leads the league in RBI and is having the best season of his life — is seen as smart.
In baseball, losing isn’t just OK. It’s incentivized. Teams that can’t win 90 games would rather win 65 than 75 or 85. Better draft position, more players they can control from a salary standpoint. It doesn’t pay to be middle class in baseball.
How would Cincinnati fans feel if the Bengals started 4-6 and began shopping Andy Dalton and A.J. Green? They figure they can’t make the playoffs, so they might as well deal contracts.
And make no mistake. In baseball, it’s all about contracts. The game is polluted with service time and arbitration eligibles and walk years. The Reds will not be better without Bruce. They’re not better without Johnny Cueto, Todd Frazier, et al. The Reds are pawns in the king’s ransom game.
We can’t assess blame or award favor for the deals they’ve had to make, in the name of Ball-onomics. It’s too soon to say the trade for Adam Duvall was brilliant, or the trade for John Lamb, Brandon Finnegan and Cody Reed was dimwitted. Anyone who thinks he can declare wins and losses on those deals today, please place my bets at the Bellagio sports book ASAP.
The larger point, mostly ignored, is that trading a satchel of 24-karat diamonds for interest in an unexplored mine is bad business almost everywhere except within baseball. But the heck with that. Boot up those computers, kids. Check out the upsides of those cost-controlled 20-year-olds. It’s time to wish on stars that might never shine. Baseball at its best.