Jake Peavy, the Trade Deadline, and my Second Favorite Day of the Season

I love the MLB Trade Deadline.

It's pretty consistently my second favorite day of every season.¹ The rumors are swirling, every player is going to be on a different team by 4:00 pm and it's going to be a whole new season! The 140 Club's Twitter updates should always be open, I constantly monitor my Twitter feed and I keep refreshing MLBTradeRumors.com just to make sure I don't miss anything.

If you root for a team that's, well, good, you probably don't find the trade deadline nearly as fun as I do. Your main baseball focus might be winning actual games instead of trying to exchange people who will help your team not be the worst in the league for other people who might have a chance to help your team win hypothetical games three years from now, but that would mean that you don't like having fun.

The Red Sox and Tigers detest your non-fun-loving tendencies. They just completed a seven-player, three-team deal with the White Sox that clearly changes everything for the rest of the season. Boston gets an injury prone, 32 year old pitcher with an ERA over four to go along with the rest of their injury prone starting rotation and a reliever with an ERA over 20 in seven appearances this year. Detroit gets a young prospect who wasn't starting every day in the first place and is hitting .205 in June. The White Sox got an outfielder with a ton of upside and a few other prospects that should help them out down the road.

What I described doesn't sound like a huge blockbuster but we don't know how much of an impact it's going to have. Peavy and Iglesias could be for their new teams what Manny Ramirez was for the Dodgers in 2008² or, to a lesser extent, what Hunter Pence was for the Giants last year. Either way, contenders try to obtain players that they hope will make them better, and considering adding major-league-capable talent for prospects is automatically a short-term upgrade, the intentions clearly make sense. 

The flip side is when  you root for a team like the Cubs. They were really bad last year. They're still not good this year (a little bit better, but still). They just lost three straight to the Brewers, blowing late leads in both games of yesterday's double header. Luckily for them, the trade deadline is here which means that they will only be getting worse this season. Right field, center field, closer, lefty-specialist and other backup positions could all be up for grabs by this afternoon for whatever scrubs decide that now is their time to take the reins.

July 31 can often signal new life for selling teams. As Grantland's Michael Baumann pointed out yesterday, Texas was 12 games under .500 at this time in 2007 and decided to sell Mark Teixeira to the Braves. The Rangers weren't going anywhere with the roster as it was constructed, so they decided to exile their best player for a bunch of mid-level prospects. Those guys ended up developing into Elvis Andrus, Matt Harrison, Neftali Feliz and Jarrod Saltalamacchia, three all-stars and guys who helped the Rangers win two AL pennants in the next five years. 

That's the key. Texas did in 2007 what every bad team is trying to do today. No one as productive as Teixeira is available, but not as many teams are selling. Texas may have put the Cubs in a similar situation when they acquired Matt Garza earlier. The haul the White Sox got for Jake Peavy could push them over the top and we could see an all-Chicago dynasty ravaging both leagues starting in 2015.³

 

Cubs color commentator Jim Deshaies highlighted what I love most. He said that he wanted to just start a ridiculous, completely unfounded rumor and see if anyone rolls with it. I thoroughly enjoy all the rumors, starts, stops, negotiations, bluffs and, ultimately, the deals. The general baseball landscape probably won't be all that different this year, but you never know which all star might have popped up in that seemingly innocuous trade from a few years back.

^{1. Second obviously to opening day. My least favorite is usually that one day in mid-April when the Cubs are eliminated from playoff contention.↩}

^{2. Still bitter about that. Ramirez wasn't the only reason the Cubs got swept by those Dodgers in that NLDS but he's certainly a big one.↩}

^{3. We almost definitely will not see such a dynasty, but a boy can dream, no? ↩}