Chip Scarinzi
Jul 27, 2017 · 4 min read

Surviving the MLB Trade Deadline When Your Team Trades Everyone Away

Sonny Gray may have thrown his last pitch for the Athletics. Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images.

For a broad cross-section of baseball fans, this is the hardest week of all. We are a few days away from the MLB trade deadline — a time when the rich get richer and the rest of us are left to hope and pray that the untested prospects our teams acquire have more in common with Jeff Bagwell (traded in 1990 by the Boston Red Sox to the Houston Astros, where he became a Hall of Famer) than Jason Donald (sorry, Jason).

My rooting interests rest with the Philadelphia Phillies and Oakland Athletics, so you can probably guess what kind of summer I’m having. Of course, even the deadline experience for fans of these two teams, both situated toward the bottom of the standings, carries different emotions — at least for me. The Phillies’ franchise icons are all long gone; traded to the Dodgers (Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, Carlos Ruiz, and Shane Victorino) and Rangers (Cole Hamels), respectively, during the roster purges of previous seasons. This is the first season in some time that the Phillies can’t hurt me anymore; I’m numb. With no Utley, Hamels or Rollins in sight, I am finally at peace with the rebuild. And in spite of the team’s won-loss record, I’ve grown an irrational attachment to fresh faces like Nick Williams, Aaron Nola, and Aaron Altherr, all of whom I hope will emerge as foundational pieces for the next great run in Philadelphia. Forget for a moment that the team is 30 games under .500: the kids are mostly alright, even if the sample size is small.

The Athletics, however, can still break my heart between now and next Tuesday. In fact, I’m quite certain that they will. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. It’s coming — I can feel it, and if you’re an Athletics fan, you can probably feel it coming too. Don’t get me wrong: the youth movement is underway in Oakland and it’s good fun. Against my better judgment, I can envision a future built around Franklin Barreto, Matt Chapman, and Ryon Healy. Against my better judgment because the Athletics don’t have a track record of keeping young players like the aforementioned trio together long enough to develop into franchise cornerstones. Maybe that’ll change when the team announces its new ballpark. Maybe it won’t.

During a season rife with disappointment, the biggest heartache is still just ahead for the diehard Athletics fan. You see, in all likelihood, the Athletics will soon part with Sonny Gray.

Gray is the closest thing to an ace in an inexperienced rotation. While he has endured his share of ups and downs in Oakland, he is still a young, underpaid, homegrown talent beloved by fans. My years of A’s fandom should have prepared me for the inevitable, but I’m still filled with anxiety and dread when I think about Gray — our Sonny Gray — pitching his home games in the Bronx, D.C. or wherever he ends up come Monday afternoon. And for what? A couple of lottery tickets in return? Varying degrees of potential aside, MLB’s top prospects list holds no sure things. Why do we put ourselves through this torture just to be tortured again when the next fan favorite is shepherded from the clubhouse and into a pennant race in another city?

If you haven’t had a taste of the joy that comes with an unexpected success story (like the 1993 Phillies or the 2012 Athletics), it’s easier to remove yourself from the emotional wear and tear of the seller’s trade deadline. If you haven’t felt euphoria caused by, of all things, a baseball game, it’s easier to turn off the TV and wait for football season to start.

But it’s a little different for those of us who have had a taste of the joy that baseball can deliver. Once we’ve had it, we want it again and again and again. That isn’t opinion, it’s science. I wrote about it in Diehards — once the brain experiences the joy of sport, it associates euphoria with sport. There’s an addictive element there and it’s hard to escape. And so, as the business of baseball reveals itself in these dog days of summer, it’s that much harder to remain unaffected when our team trades away everything of value that isn’t nailed to the floor. After all, while Sonny Gray alone isn’t going to take the Athletics to the Promised Land, the odds are better with him than without him. And for those of us that have been there before, we just want to get back again.

It’s all cyclical, of course. Some cycles are just a bit longer than others. A decade ago, the trade deadline was a time of great excitement in Philadelphia. Astros fans endured years of pain before this recent run on the other side of the negotiation table. At this time of year, rooting for the teams I love, that’s how I conjure just enough hope to get me through the worst of what’s coming. Someday, my teams will be buyers again. Someday, we’ll all celebrate when it’s their turn to pick up a Sonny Gray or a Cole Hamels at the deadline. Until then, I’ll hold out hope that the kids getting an opportunity on the diamond today start delivering on their promise and the pendulum swings back the other way next season.

Chip Scarinzi

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