To protest a trade or not? Hmmm… How about, do you have a vagina or not? I keed. I’ve protested trades in the past, but I’m a convert. Now I believe everyone is entitled to manage their teams any way they’d like. If someone wants to trade Prince Fielder for Nomar, that should be protested, but only because the Fielder owner is obviously a drunk and needs a Dylan McKay-like intervention. But 99% of trades should be allowed with protests simply used to protect the integrity of a league. When someone makes a trade you don’t agree with, you can bitch and moan, but it’s their team. What else are you going to do? Tell them to drop Matt Morris for Scherzer? Tell them Cristian Guzman may not be the best utility guy? You can’t manage their team for them, so why should you be allowed to tell them who to trade?
I’ve never traded Asdrubal Cabrera for Matt Holliday to a foreign exchange student who thought fantasy baseball in some way involved girls. Yet I’ve been on the veto side of quite a few trades. It sucks, especially when you know you’re getting vetoed simply because you’re in first place and you’ve just made your team better with a completely fair trade. Last year when I got Reyes for Vlad, protest flags flew immediately. Was the trade in my favor? Well, I try not to do too many trades that aren’t, so, yeah. Was it completely lopsided and shouldn’t have been allowed? The guy needed an OF and I needed steals. When I traded Vlad, he had 11 home runs, 46 RBIs and was batting .355 through two months. Unfortunately (for the other guy), Vlad ended up hitting just 16 home runs the rest of the way, but that’s not my fault. That’s my good fortune. The trade went through and I won the league partly because of it.
In related news in the life of Grey (cuz you care!), there was a trade in my ‘pert league that sent Johan Santana to a team for Granderson and Ervin Santana. I was the first person to post a message on the board. I wrote, “Seriously? No… Wait. Seriously?” My “Seriously” soliloquy sparked a controversy, or I was simply the first person to see the trade and comment. Either way, the ‘perts came out blazing. I don’t think it’s my place to list the parties involved or what was said exactly, but I’ll give you the gist:
“This is collusion!”
“How dare you, sir? Collusion would take me actually knowing someone else in this league!”
“Collusion – delusion. It shouldn’t be allowed.”
“My good man, I made the trade and I think it’s fair.”
I chimed in again, “I just thought it was a bad trade on (the team owner who gave away Johan)’s part, but I never thought collusion. Honestly, I don’t even think there should be a protest option. If someone wants to do trade, they should be allowed.”
“Yeah, the trade sucks. But I guess there was no collusion.”
“Yeah, no collusion. Just a bad trade.”
“I still think the trade should be overruled because the trade sucks.”
This last part I will post directly what was written because it made me laugh, but I won’t mention the owner (but he’s free to chime in the comments). “I will weigh in a say that the trade is lopsided, but every deal is. Hey, if (the owner who got Johan) thinks he got a good deal and is happy with that crap for Johan Santana, then (the other owner) needs to be a car salesman! I’ll go on record right now and say Ervin Santana and Curtis Granderson are not going to be the answer (the new Granderson owner) is looking for. And, when it is all over, he will have traded the top pitcher in all of baseball for a SP with a 3-year average of a 4.84 ERA and a .263 OPP BA and a hitter that nets you about a .280/.344/.496 line with 35 steals. Hardly worth it! Oh, just because your child wants to walk into on coming traffic, doesn’t mean you let him for the betterment of society. Trades have a veto button for a reason. Most of the time people need to be protected from themselves more than they want to believe.”
So there’s the gist and a decent argument in favor of the protest button. I disagree with most protests (this crappy trade included), but there ya go. You can accuse us ‘perts of a lot of things, but dispassionate should not be one of them.
