Just One Thing I Never Understood About Baseball

[Nathan Explosion]

Why do teams that are done for the season trade away their best players to winning teams before the trade deadline? I never understood why every year, a team that is perennially bad trades away its best talent year after year. Seems counterintuitive to building a winning team.

Also, what does that tell the fans, "We don't feel like building a team with our talent, we just want to give it away so we don't have to pay for it."

Imagine if this happened in basketball or football. The fans would riot.

[JamStone]

It's generally financially strapped teams in economically tough markets with unstable ownership who do this. It also for the most happens with players who are close to becoming free agents or are eligible for arbitration and the team knows they can't afford to pay them what they're worth in either scenario. So teams will sell them to get as much as they can instead of losing them for nothing.

And it does happen in basketball, but you're right about it not happening as much in the NFL. The NFL with players having such short career spans and the much higher risk of career ending injuries design their league that greatly favors owners and the ability to keep players much easier for ownership. The NFL even has the "franchise tag" that pretty much gives ownership the ultimate trump card. The NBA doesn't have anything close to that. The closest thing is having the right to match an offer with a restricted free agent. The MLB is more like the NBA in that regard in that it's a player's league and contracts are structured in favor of the players, almost all of them are fully guaranteed contracts. Arbitration somewhat helps ownership to keep the good players but it also favors players from being low balled without recourse.

Teams sell their best players because it's hard to keep them around if the team is losing, because that means the team is losing money and it will be hard to pay the best players what they're worth. Florida, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati are teams that annually sell their best players because they can't afford them. Sometimes the best course of action is to get as much as you can for those players before they walk away and leave the team for nothing but maybe a first round compensation pick.

[Nathan Explosion]

It happens more in baseball than it does in basketball though. Every year a team is selling off a high profile player/all-star whereas in the NBA it doesn't happen as frequently.

And I don't get the financially strapped thing because there are owners in baseball that just refuse to spend money so they can collect a check from the likes of the Yankees and Red Sox that spend so much money every year. There are teams like the Royals, Pirates, Reds and the like that will NEVER be good because the owners just don't want to spend money to make the team competitive, just spend as little money as possible to maximize the profit on the checks they receive from the big spenders.

Does baseball have a minimum spending limit? I know they have a very soft cap that allows teams to overspend and pay a penalty. If there's any interest in making teams like the Yankees go away (of which there isn't) there should be a hard cap like the NFL or at least a soft cap structured like the NBA where you can't sign any player you want when you're over, but only use exceptions to do so.

Then force the small market teams to pay at least 3/4ths of the cap (i.e. if the cap is $100 million the team has to spend at least $75 million) to field a competitive team at the very least. If a team chooses to spend less than the minimum, then they forfeit $1 for every $1 they are under the bottom line, kind of a reverse luxury tax. Obviously, I wouldn't make the cap that high because $75 million is a lot of money for a team that's in a small market. But you get the idea.

I mean, how crappy is it to be a Royals or Pirates fan right now, knowing your team is going to suck before the season even starts?

[gaKNOW!blee]

the main reason is because a team like the Indians knows they cant keep CC Sabathia when he is about to be a free agent and they are a losing team. So might as well get something