NEARLY A WEEK after the trade deadline, executives around Major League Baseball are surveying the fallout from one of the most frenzied periods of trading in the game's history. And while the volume of moves at the deadline was incontrovertible, the lack of big names moving left those involved brainstorming how to make one of the best parts of the baseball calendar even better.
Everything, they said, comes back to incentive. What, in the era of expanded playoffs, can motivate teams to make deals? How, when team control over players is the guiding light for so much of their strategy, can organizations adding players find something valuable to subtract in return?
The answer, multiple executives said, becomes clear when considering the pool of available assets. In baseball, you can trade almost anything. Major league players. Minor league players. Managers. General managers. (Even wives.) There is one thing that is not available to be swapped, and it's worth around $1 billion in future value annually.
"When they let us trade draft picks," one general manager said, "that will be a game changer."