The Buhner.com Blog

WARNING - BASEBALL POST

The transaction rules of Major League Baseball aren’t the easiest things in the world to follow.  There’s a good reason for this; Major League Baseball doesn’t list them anywhere.  While the MLB website has a link for their rules regarding play (don’t run to third when you hit the ball, dumbass), some of the more complex rules regarding baseball and their handling of transactions can be lost.  While other sports have somewhat simpler rules, baseball’s can get confusing, especially around this time of year when the trade deadline comes and goes.

First off, most people see “deadline” and assume that it’s really a deadline.  It’s not.  It’s a deadline for trading at full capacity.  A player can be traded after July 31st or even August 31st.  There’s just different rules that come into play.  Trades made before July 31st don’t have many restrictions.  They still have to follow the restrictions set forth by the CBA and the player’s individual contract (such as 10/5 rules and no-trade clauses), but for the mostpart if team A wants to send a player to team B for another player and team B agrees, they can do it, up until the “trade deadline”, which is July 31st at 4PM each season.

Which brings us to waivers.  See, a team can still trade a player after the deadline - the issue is that the player(s) being traded have to “clear waivers”.  The waiver process is basically a procedural process; a team tells the league office of the palyer or playes that it wishes to place on waivers.  Then, the teams of the league get a list of all the players that have been placed on waivers.  The other teams in the league have 72 hours to contact the league office (not the team waiving - the league office) to let them know that they would be willing to take the waived player, contract and all, from the other team with no compensation for the waiving team.  As Jamey Newberg put it excellently, it’s like putting out your garbage a few days early.  If someone walks by before the garbage man picks it up, they can have it.

However, there are more than one type of waiver, and for the purposes of this example, the waiver being used here is a “major league waiver”.  The difference between a major league waiver and other waivers is that a major league waiver can be pulled back, meaning that if someone claimed the waived player (thereby letting the waiving team know that they’re going to take him off the other team’s hands for nothing except paying his salary), the waiving team can change their mind and say that they intend to keep the player and that the claiming team can’t have him for nothing.

It doesn’t cost a team anything to place a player on waivers, and as long as a GM knows what the hell they’re doing, they don’t run any risk in doing so.  If a player makes it through without being claimed, he’ll be eligible to be traded.  If a player does get claimed, the GM can just pull him back - no harm, no foul.  Generally, waivers are pretty hush-hush, especially the post-deadline waivers, since players that the team has absolutely no intention of trading are put on the wire, often to disguise or confuse other GMs so that they don’t end up claiming the player or players the GM really wants to get through.  After all, if you’re a GM and see that the Yankees waived Andy Phillips and Derek Jeter, Jeter’s the name that stands out to you.

However, even with this unbeatable defense of being able to pull the players back, there is a flaw; a player can only be pulled back off of major league waivers once a season.  It’s like sticking your hand out and teasing the dog - you can pull it back and not get bitten once, but do it twice and you’ll pull back one less hand.  This is important, as I’ll explain later.

A GM has an option instead of pulling a claimed player back too.  The GM can deal with the team that claimed the player, but only that team.  The reasoning there is that the team that claimed him still apparently wants him, but the waiving team has the leverage that if the claiming team doesn’t offer a good enough package, then the team will just pull back the player from waivers and they won’t get him.  A GM can also just let the player go and be claimed.  This works well for a team that’s trying to just dump a salary and doesn’t necessarily want to pay the player.  A team claiming a player on waivers just takes the player, contract and all, so if the team doesn’t want the player any more or that contract is just too much, then the team might let the player go.  This can sometimes screw a team that places a claim on a player to prevent him from being traded to a rival.  The best example of this took place in 1998, when Randy Myers, then of Toronto, was claimed by the San Diego Padres on waivers.  Toronto had put Myers on waivers and the belief was that the Atlanta Braves were very interested in obtaining the lefthander for their bullpen.  The Padres put in a claim on Myers without any interest in the player, with the assumption that the claim would squash the potential Braves/Jays deal.  Myers, who had pitched mediocre in the first year of a three year, $18 million dollar contract (which was backloaded, with only a little under $4.5 million of that due the first season) wasn’t that appealing to the Jays though, and the Jays informed the Padres that they could have Myers and pay him the remainder of his $18 million contract.  The Padres scrambled, eventually sending the Jays a minor league player in exchange for “Myers” and cash to pay the remainder of Myers’ contract for the ‘98 season, although the Pads were now on the hook for Myers in the 1999 and 2000 season.  He pitched 14.1 innings for the Padres that season and none in 1999 and 2000 due to a shoulder injury.

I’ve used a lot of words to say the basic principles of my point, which are:

• Players can get traded after the trade deadline, even if they get claimed on waivers
• Players get put on waivers all the time after the deadline, whether the team wants to trade them or not
• Players generally don’t know they’re on post-deadline waivers
• You can waive a player as many times as you wish, but you can only pull him back once

ESPN.com pretty much dropped the ball on all of these.  First (while not necessarily ESPN’s fault) word got out that Andruw Jones was placed on waivers.  This isn’t earth-shattering news when you realize that again, players are placed on waivers all the time during this post-deadline period, but considering players don’t generally know the process (Jones was reportedly upset to know that he was placed on waivers) and the team’s position (GM John Schuerholz stated that it wasn’t the team’s policy to “comment on waiver moves”, as the process is generally “secret”), this non-story may have caused some bad blood between Jones and the Braves.

The major issue that I had with ESPN.com though was the handling of the Javy Lopez trade between Boston and Baltimore (ESPN constantly referred to Lopez having to “clear waivers” where Lopez didn’t need to if Boston had claimed him), and more recently dropping the ball and announcing that Livan Hernandez was now officially off the market since he was claimed by a team, only to then announce an hour or so later that Hernandez had been traded to Arizona.  ESPN.com’s original story stated that he couldn’t be traded due to the claim, then corrected the “Dewey Defeats Truman” story by stating that Livan couldn’t be dealt because he was claimed “and a deal could not be worked out”.  The story (which I had linked on another board) is gone now, although Google cache still has the Truman story v.2 still saved for now.

This isn’t to say that the baseball writers don’t know their stuff at ESPN - Peter Gammons is still one of the most knowledgable baseball people out there, but still recovering from a brain aneurysm.  Buster Olney and Jayson Stark seem to know their transactions and rules, but they’re in the trenches while lower level employees write the website content.  With news moving so fast and online content always needing to be updated, there still has to be some level of editing upkeep with ESPN’s stories in order to maintain credibility.

LATE UPDATE: They’re at it again, announcing that Ricky Ledee was going to New York after having been claimed by the Mets after being waived Monday night.  With it being Tuesday afternoon that the story is out, there’s no way that Ledee could have been waived Monday night and the Mets know that he was awarded to them Tuesday afternoon, since waivers take 72 hours to process.  There are plenty of other teams that could claim Ledee that are higher on the waiver priority list than the Mets.  This isn’t to say that Ledee isn’t going to be a Met - just that he couldn’t have been waived on Monday night.