Expos / Brewers

[Former Nationals GM (Alan)]

In a deal that should help both teams, a trade agreement has been reached.....

Expos send...
Jesse Biddle PP IND 300K
Danny Hultzen PP IND 500K
Carlos Marmol 9.8M for '13 and '14
Carlos Quentin 4.165M for '13 and '14
Rangers 1st round pick in the '14 MiLB draft

Brewers send...
Matt Kemp 18.2M for '13 and '14
Billy Hamilton PP IND 500K


Brewers to confirm. As always, best of luck to all involved.

[Brewers GM (Jordan)]

Confirmed. Thanks for working to make this work.

Hate to give up what I did, but our SP is so bad we have to start building somewhere.

[Astros GM (Kris)]

Approved. Please update your roster and salary cap information.

[BK Dodgers GM (Man)]

Brewers need to open up the needed roster spots to legally complete this trade. Thanks.

[BK Dodgers GM (Man)]

Hmmm... Let me get this straight.

So the Brewers dropped Quentin and Marmol for the purpose of meeting the roster limit requirement? Yet neither player was legally on the roster when that was done, so in effect, the Brewers were temprorarily allowed to have a 42-man roster to complete this deal before dropping players to get back under the limit.

I was not aware we allowed that...

[Astros GM (Kris)]

We have allowed teams to state up front that they plan to drop players acquired from a trade before. Brewers didn't specifically post it to the trade, but did let me know when the trade was posted.

[Brewers GM (Jordan)]

Sorry about the trouble. Kris had messaged me and asked my plans for making my roster compliant and told him i planned to immediately drop both upon trade approval.

My bad for not posting it in the trade details.

[BK Dodgers GM (Man)]

AFAIK, we have only allowed that for the purpose of meeting deadlines, satisfying other requirements and such, eg. signing deadlines (to avoid penalties), ability to bid in FA, making MiLB picks, etc, not to actually effectively expand roster size (or salary cap) so that the traded players would be dropped by the receiving team. IOW, the other cases only involved timing issue while the trade is being reviewed.

If we want to allow this kind of temp expansion, we should make that clear for everyone. IOW, we would be allowing temporary cap and/or roster expansion for this -- otherwise, you can't drop someone w/out legally completing the transaction to acquire him first.

[Astros GM (Kris)]

We have done it this way in the past - the only difference is that the player is normally called out as an immediate drop in the trade thread.

It's the same thing in FA signings. Yankees (sorry to drag you into this) just signed Dan Hudson and then dumped him before actually adding him to the roster. He took the cap hit, so I see no problem with it.

[Former Giants GM (Andrew)]

No worries, it's all good. For what it's worth, I think this kind of trade is cool; closest thing we have to trading salary, right?

[BK Dodgers GM (Man)]

We really should not allow that unless a rule change or some sort of clarification is made on it.

If this was always allowed, then I don't see why anyone should 've had a problem w/ the longstanding understanding I had about opening roster spots via pending trade around this time last year.

By allowing this, we are clearly bending the rostering (and cap) rules so teams don' t actually even need to open up roster spots in order to complete transactions at all (vs simply not having to wait for the trade to be officially reviewed).

AFAIK, we have never actually allowed this at least in trades before -- I've always checked trades for this aspect and don't recall any that actually did this w/out open roster spots.

Not saying we shouldn't adjust or clarify the rules to allow this at all, but it's definitely not something anyone should expect to be able to do w/out some sort of rule adjustment or similar.

[BK Dodgers GM (Man)]

Suppose somebody traded for a big $$$ at the trade deadline to be dumped immediately, but they never clear their cap to make the trade legal before dumping the player for 1/2 obligation in order to fit under their cap? Are we ok w/ something like that?

That's bound to happen if we allow this, so we should be aware where this will likely lead... Again, I'm not necessarily against allowing that specifically for the purpose of player drops -- just thought we should be clear about what we're allowing...

[Former Giants GM (Andrew)]

I actually thought it did work that way, to be honest...

[Astros GM (Kris)]

This situation isn't the same as the roster spot situation last year (or whenever it was). The reason everyone got upset over that one was because the player in question was being added on CBS and accumulating stats before there was a roster spot open. In this situation, that's never an issue.

This is how I've always approached trades where one of the teams stated that a player was an automatic drop. Granted, it wasn't posted on the trade thread this time, but Brewers did tell me before the trade was approved.

I don't care how we do it in the future - just saying this is how I've always approached these situations.

[Brewers GM (Jordan)]

So is the trade good? Or do I need to go back and drop a couple guys and then run it again?

[BK Dodgers GM (Man)]

Kris,

The Brewers never actually opens a roster spot (or 2 to be exact) for this trade. In some ways that's actually worse than allowing a roster spot to be used based on a pending trade that will open that spot -- this latter thing is basically done all the time w/ pick trades (to make use of the pick).

Accruing stats or not, rostering on CBS or not are both actually secondary to whether a transaction can even be legally completed as is, which was the question I raised here. It's a matter of procedure. If a transaction is completed legally, then the rest won't matter.

Anyway, as long as we're clear on allowing this -- and the rest of the league is fine w/ that -- I'm ok w/ it. But that was never allowed before to my knowledge, and I certainly never (knowingly anyway) allowed it when I processed trades in the past.