Trades!
Friday’s MLB trade deadline was the most exciting in memory, and the flurry of activity was certainly good for the game. Stars like Max Scherzer and Kris Bryant are now playing in serious division races, instead of toiling away on sub-.500 teams, doing little besides waiting to become free agents in the off-season. But all that player swapping is a reminder of the ethical challenges that trades bring up—because while the trade deadline is certainly good for baseball, it’s not completely clear that it’s good for players.
In a video of him getting the news that he’d been traded to San Francisco, Kris Bryant can be seen tearing up, overcome with emotion. The news couldn’t have been surprising: Rumors about a Bryant trade have been circulating since last season, and his relationship with the organization had been deteriorating for a while. It seemed unlikely that he would re-sign with the Cubs, and once teammates Anthony Rizzo and Javier Báez were traded, it was only a matter of time before Chicago found a new spot of Bryant as well.
But obviously that doesn’t make it less disappointing for Bryant to see his time with the Cubs come to an end. He’d become an icon in Chicago, winning Rookie of the Year, an MVP, and, of course, leading the team to its first World Series title in 108 years—a journey he finished by fielding the last out in 2016. If not for mistreatment by the owners, and a bullshit new “rebuilding” plan by the front office, Bryant and Cubs fans would have both been happy to stay together forever.
Not to mention the natural disruption of moving to a new team in a new city in the middle of the year. Such moves are part of sports, so we’re used to them, but it’s kind of a crazy phenomenon. Imagine going into work one day and being told your boss has traded you across the country for someone who might be as good at you in a couple of years. The lack of agency that players have in the process is disconcerting, to say the least.
Everyone remembers Curt Flood’s heroic stand against the reserve clause, which eventually brought free agency to the sport in the 1970s—but it was a trade that precipitated Flood’s stand. When St. Louis traded him to the Phillies after the 1969 season, he said “I didn't think that I was going to report to Philadelphia, mainly because I didn't want to pick up twelve years of my life and move to another city.” Fifty years later, and trades are not much different.
Of course, players today rarely complain. They often appreciate the opportunity to go to a winning team. The only guy who seemed really upset on Friday was the one guy who DIDN’T get traded. And in the NBA, players have asserted almost as much autonomy over the trade process as they have over free agency itself. So while there are likely some changes that baseball should make to ensure fairness for players—no-trade clauses should probably be more common, for one—the system itself doesn’t seem so bad.
But then you get to the minor leagues, and the whole thing starts to look much uglier. Guys like Scherzer and Báez don’t really get such a bad deal: They get to play in playoff race for a few months before they hit free agency, where they can finally cash in and pick their team. The guys they are traded for, on the other hand, don’t have it so good. Not only are they uprooted in the middle of a very fragile development process, but they are often heading to floundering organizations. In general, a team trading its star player for prospects is either bad or cheap, which are good reasons a prospect might not want to play there. Indeed, that prospect’s new team might have a totally different plan for him, in terms of his position or his development timeline, than he had at his old organization.
Even the way minor leaguers are discussed around the trade deadline has a creepy, dehumanizing vibe to it. While guys like Rizzo and Trea Turner are familiar players with known skill sets that teams need, the prospects are little more than a ranking and a brief description to the fans and media outlets following. For the teams acquiring them, these prospects are just raw materials, capital they are hoarding in the hopes that in a few years, a couple of them will generate value for their teams in excess of their rookie salaries. Then maybe they’ll get sold again and the process can start all over.
This gets at the fundamental mistreatment of minor leaguers in baseball. We already know that prospects are effectively paid below minimum wage, but they also have little say in their own development. They can be traded to a team that wants them to switch positions, or swing differently, or throw harder. If those changes don’t work, then the team can just move on to the next in a long line of low-cost talent that baseball has guaranteed for itself—but for the player it can mean the end of a career, and their dream of making the big leagues.
Alexander Canario was traded for Kris Bryant on Friday. If you know anything about him at all, it’s probably what you learned in a quick Google after you read about the trade: He’s a top 10-15 outfield prospect; he has shown a lot of power but strikes out too much; his arm looks good. In all likelihood, you’ll forget his name in a few days, unless you’re a Cubs fan or he turns into a star in a few years. But whatever his future is, it’s totally different than it looked just a few days, and he had no say in the matter. Is a system like that fair? Can it be made fair? I remain dubious.