RE: Is MLB’s Non-Waiver Trade Deadline Too Early?

Another great post my friend - of course being "thesportsguy" I too love baseball amongst the other sports that you list at the beginning of the article. I love the trade deadline as well. I have a unique perspective of it - my team is the Milwaukee Brewers - a small-market club, that throughout the 90's and early 2000's always kept a tiny payroll and never really were close to contention when the trade deadline would roll around. So for all those years when I was a kid, I hated the trade deadline as it approached, because it meant that we were once again going to trade away our good players for a bunch of scraps (the perception when you are young - why did we just trade our only All-Star for a bunch of guys I've never heard of! ugh! lol). Of course, as I've gotten older, luckily the Brewers have actually had a couple of competitive seasons and this year, in particular, has given the fan-base much hope. So it was a very exciting and entertaining trade deadline as we had an opportunity to be one of the busier "buyers" in all of baseball.

As for the Giants, I completely agree with you. They made some moves in the off-season and acquired more large-contract, aging talent like you talked about (Andrew McCutchen from the Pirates). They were unable to take advantage of the incredibly slow-start by the Dodgers and when the Diamondbacks had a three-week stretch of awful baseball back in May. They've been a .500 team basically for the majority of the season and probably should have known by now that if they couldn't take advantage of the woes by the rest of the division early in the season, they aren't going to be able to catch them now and should just have sold, sold, sold. I think the Nationals just weren't prepared at all for the trade deadline and found themselves still not believing they were in the position they were in (talented-team with high expectations, under-performing and battling to get to .500) and couldn't decide to be 'buyers' or 'sellers' and the trade deadline kind of just happened to them, instead of them making something happen at the deadline. Great, great article!