Baseball Mid-Season Trading

It hasn't been all that easy for me to get to know the different major league baseball teams I've decided to follow this year. Naturally, the ones whose games are shown the most in Gainesville (Florida Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays, Chicago Cubs, and Chicago White Sox) have been the easiest, with me becoming familiar with many of the names in their lineups. But now the tradition in this sport of teams making major trades in mid-season has turned over some of which I've been trying to do.

Take the last Cubs game I saw. Suddenly they have this player who just came over from Pittsburgh and that one who just arrived from Colorado. And I don't know what players they gave up to get these new ones. What saddened me though, was the Cleveland Indians trading their ace pitcher Cliff Lee (and my favorite player on the team) to Philadelphia for some future prospects.

The reasoning is this: teams who are still in the hunt for post-season glory want to strengthen their lineups with as much talent as they can get. So they seek stars from teams who are already essentially out of the race this year. Those teams usually receive a number of lesser stars and younger, less developed talent that they feel can help them to rebuild and come back the next year. Also, unloading expensive star players can free those losing teams up financially to sign up other players that they feel will better help them to win. But it can get to be confusing, though, keeping up with who's playing for whom.

And Cliff Lee going over to the Philadelphia Phillies? Oh, no! I'm rooting for the Florida Marlins to overtake them in the standings, and now ol' Cliff has gone over to the "dark side"! But there is some good news: the trading deadline for the season has passed, so now the various teams are stuck with their players, like them or not. And to me, even if a team is having a losing season, part of the fun in watching them is seeing the same players going up to bat and being in the field at their positions. Now if they can just stop spitting all the time!