NEWSLETTER
OK, so even though the August trade period isn’t a thing anymore in Major League Baseball, that doesn’t mean there can’t still be some player movement. Maybe even significant player movement.
Because the Angels are having a giveaway garage sale:
You probably have questions …
Are the Angels trying to trade these guys? No. There are no more waiver trades in August (if you even remember that era). These are just straight up waivers. If you claim a guy and you have waiver priority, you get him.
Ah, OK, so who has waiver priority? It’s just straight reverse winning percentage now. And if there is a tie, it’s based on your winning percentage in the regular season the previous year. Worse teams get dibs.
Why are the Angels even doing this? Money!
Can you be more specific? If a player is claimed, the Angels will save a month’s worth of that player’s salary, plus any buyouts or bonuses due after the season (and they are close enough to the luxury tax threshold that maybe it changes their standing there, too). So it’s not exactly “free,” it’s just that you don’t have to trade for the guy. And they’re doing it today so that the players clear waivers in time to be playoff-eligible on their new teams.
Is this as crazy as it seems? Well, I think the answer is only “kinda.” In this new era of no waiver trades, we HAVE seen this before – players made available at the end of August, before playoff roster rules would kick in – but I don’t know that we’ve seen it to quite this scale, with this many useful “rental” players. It’s possible it has happened and just hasn’t been reported before – the waiver wire is not public, and if the players go unclaimed, you wouldn’t really hear about it – but I really doubt it’s been THIS many useful players from one team.
What about the whole Angels-trying-to-win thing? Yeah, they are giving up. Clearly. They’ve decided that any money they save is worth the trade of kinda looking like losers. I’m not even being jerky or cheeky – that’s the calculus here. They look like losers (which, arguably, they already were, because they’ve done too much losing since the Trade Deadline). I wonder what Shohei Ohtani is thinking right about now.
OK, now you talk about the Cubs. Well, it’s not at all hard to imagine some of these guys being a boost to the Cubs. Lucus Giolito has been terrible with the Angels, but you’d kinda love to have a crack at him being depth in your rotation if you’re dealing with injuries/underperformance like the Cubs. But the problem is (1) I doubt he makes it to the Cubs in waiver priority, and (2) even if he did, he’s owed over $1 million the rest of the way, and the Cubs have pretty clearly been signaling that they can’t take on much more salary for fear of going over the luxury tax (which they don’t want to do this year, I suspect, because they DO want to go over in 2024, and don’t want that to be their second consecutive year).
All that applies to Matt Moore (would love to have him) and Reynaldo Lopez (meh, ok sure), too. I just don’t think the Cubs are going to even have a crack at them anyway. I’ll be over here secretly hoping, though.
A final question for which I don’t have an answer: are more teams going to do the same thing today? We’ll see.
