Fans crowd the stands at the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, Ohio to watch the Cincinnati Reds compete against the Chicago Cubs. PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Ben Staker
Sports Editor
This year was the third trade deadline under Major League Baseball’s new playoff format and it left me wondering: has it lost its spark?
Prior to the 2022 MLB season, the league voted to expand the playoffs from ten to twelve teams. This playoff expansion added one more wild card team on both sides of the league. While this seemed insignificant at the time, it has made big changes to teams and their philosophy going into the trade deadline.
Before, there would be more teams looking to potentially trade star players because they were out of the playoff race by the end of July. However, under the new format, many teams feel that they can still turn their season around. There are still many trades happening, but the last few trade deadlines have seen far less blockbuster trades than years prior.
Now, a team that might be contending for a World Series either has to settle for a less talented player from a non-competitive team or they have to overpay for the player they want. If the team goes on to win the World Series, because of this, it doesn’t matter as much, but for other contending teams who fall short, they’re depleting their prospect pool year in and year out.
Just in the last three seasons since the changes have taken effect, we’ve seen teams’ inability to compete for multiple years in a row. At some point all great teams fall apart, but it seems to happen quicker these days.
Another issue this presents is that it lowers the parity in the league. While all teams are forced to trade better prospects for players now, this philosophy hurts the smaller market teams. While teams like the Yankees and Dodgers can just go and spend more money to supplement their prospect shortcomings, it’s not the same case for the smaller markets.
Since teams know that they’ll have to give up better prospects for a few months of a player, they’re starting to avoid trades. They don’t want to fall into the cycle of trading their top prospects away, not being able to pay their star players, and ultimately becoming a bottom-dwelling team for a few years.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. On the bright side, teams are still making a large amount of trades at the deadline. Their philosophy has just shifted from the idea that they need to be buyers to the idea that they might need to buy and sell players. We’re still only a few years into this new format, so it’s important that we don’t overreact to the early sample size of trade deadlines.
With all that being said, the MLB trade deadline has certainly lost a fair amount of its spark in the past few years. It’s created a better situation for the big market teams, but that just means the small markets are going to get more creative in their pursuit to future World Series.