The Trade Deadline isn’t over. We’re only half-way there!

Huh? But what was all this July 31st Trade Deadline stuff that caused me to hit my refresh button so many times on July 31st? You’re telling me that my team could still make a move?

There are bunch of waiver rules in Major League Baseball, but we’ll focus in on the most common one involved for August 1-31. Here are the rules you need to understand so when you go to the bar and start talking about trading players this month you’ll look pretty smart.

Almost every player on the 40-man roster will be placed on waivers this month. So don’t be surprised when Albert Pujols or Tim Lincecum or C.C. Sabathia are placed on waivers. They’ve been on there before, and they’ll be on there again. Why do they do this? Two reasons:
– In the event that the team wants to trade the player and they clear waivers they can trade them
– GMs use this process to gauge which teams might be interested in their players for winter trades.

So now a player is placed on waivers. Any team now can place a claim on that player, but only one team is awarded the claim even if multiple claims were submitted. The waiver claim is awarded to the team based on reverse order of standings, starting with the same league the player is in. So let’s say the St. Louis Cardinals place Albert Pujols (let’s ignore his no-trade clause) on waivers and the New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles and San Diego Padres put a claim in. The Padres would win the claim despite the Orioles having a worse record. In this scenario, the Padres have priority because they are the only National League team to place a claim. If no NL team placed a claim, the Orioles would have priority over any American League by virtue of having the worse record in the AL.

Three things can now happen:
– The original team says they don’t want to trade him, so they pull the player back. The player can be placed on waivers again, but he cannot be recalled a second time.
– The team that was awarded the waiver claim has 48 hours to work out a trade with the originating team.
– The original team can let the player go to the team that made the waiver claim and the new team is responsible for the salary. (This is the reason why many players with high salaries will go unclaimed such as Barry Zito of the San Francisco Giants. Teams do not want to take the risk of being stuck with poor performing but high salaried player.)

Now here comes the chess match – blocking claims.

Let’s go back with Pujols. The Cardinals put Pujols on waivers and the Yankees knowing they could use the bat would submit a claim. The Red Sox and the Rays would likely place a claim in there since they don’t want the Yankees to get another bat. They have a worse record than the Yankees so they would be given priority to make a deal for Pujols. In this case, the Red Sox are awarded a claim. The Cardinals would likely pull Pujols back.

Let’s say that Pujols had years left on his contract with millions of dollars tied to it, and he was performing poorly. The Cardinals could give Pujols away, and the Red Sox would be responsible for the remainder of his contract. So there’s a risk involved when trying to block a claim especially for those competitive teams on a tight budget.

An example of this was when the Rays let Jose Canseco go via waivers in 2000. The Yankees blocked Canseco from going to the Toronto Blue Jays. The Yankees won the World Series, but Canseco mostly sat on the bench during his Yankees’ tenure.

That’s it in a nutshell. So take the knowledge and spread the word!

Information from Jayson Stark of ESPN and John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle was used in this article.

Image bydherrera_96 Under the Creative Commons License