Trading Places

As baseball’s non-waiver trade deadline approaches, officials want to relax restrictions that hamper the free flow of players between teams.

"The system should make it easier for us to move players around,” said one team official. “Last season we wanted to bring in another left-handed bat for the last game of our September series with Oakland, but we were prevented from doing it by restrictive league rules.”

Of special interest are three-day trades between teams that are actually playing each other. “Many times a team will come in here to play, and have short-term needs that we can accommodate,” said a spokesman. “These deals are especially nice because at the end of the series you don’t have to fly the player home, you just send him over to the other locker room.”

Technological barriers to change have been overcome with the development of super small fonts that will allow a dramatic increase in the number of lines of team stats that can fit on the back of a baseball card.

Rules that effectively freeze rosters near the end of the season are the biggest target. “People used to love that old Blue-Gray Classic in college football,” opined one insider. “A lot of the best players from many different teams were thrown together for a late season game. Baseball’s playoffs should be more like that.”

Not all baseball executives are comfortable with the extent of the change being proposed. “I can see a player like Johnny Damon alternating between the Red Sox and the Yankees during the season,” said one, “but I’d hate to see him play for both teams in the same game.”

Much of the resistance to the new proposals comes from older front-office veterans who can still remember when players tended to spend their entire careers with a single team. “Look at that,” said one such warhorse, pointing to a team photo of the 1955 Dodgers, “the starters all spent their entire careers as Dodgers, except for a couple of guys who played a year or two at other teams right before they retired. Walt Alston was there for 23 years. The fans really knew those players, identified with them, they were like family. You knew they would still be Dodgers when you woke up in the morning.”

Asked to comment, an 18-year old assistant GM said “do you have any idea how badly we’d get hammered on jersey sales if the names of the players stayed the same year-after-year? The fans should know better than to get attached to any individual player. That’s why we have the mascot.”