What In The World Will A Trade Deadline Look Like In 2020?

The trade deadline has been the backbone of in-season improvements for teams for years now. Every season the trade deadline forces teams to admit their problems and fix them with additions or surrender the rest of the season. You, the reader and baseball fan who wasn’t born yesterday, already knew this, so how will it be different this season?

The timing of the old trade deadline was essentially perfect. It sits at just over 100 games into the season which provides each franchise with ample time to diagnose where their team is and scout which players they want to target. The competitors can get a feel for which player will best help them going forward and the bottom-feeders can target the prospects they want. A shortened season throws all of this out of the window.

If Plouffe is correct, then the start of the season and the old trade deadline would both exist in the same month. This would be an incredibly small sample size that doesn’t give enough time to evaluate talent. Want an example? The ERA leader in MLB last season before May was Zach Davies. Yeah, for real. Cody Bellinger was hitting .431 before May. Small samples can get funky.

Or even consider the Twins last season. Michael Pineda had an ERA of 6.21 going into May and Marwin González had an OBP of .244. Both players eventually turned it around and had fine seasons but if the trade deadline was early, then the Twins might have traded for replacements for those players.

That sample size would just be far too small to be fair for anyone. Instead, they could push the deadline back a month so that it would be on the last day of August. Doing this allows for slightly more breathing room and the opportunity for a fairer evaluation. There were still some ridiculous numbers last year over a similar sample size like how Jorge Polanco was 10th in baseball in slugging % going into June. But there were also some numbers that remained fairly accurate such as the Twins’ team wRC+ going into June being 120 and their end-of-season wRC+ being 116.

It isn’t unrealistic to have MLB cancel the trade deadline altogether. Along with the sample size problems, forcing a player to move to an entirely different city while the pandemic remains to exist seems like an unwise decision. It would make the season less dramatic but MLB appears to be taking a “we take what we can get” method to having baseball in 2020. If that includes eliminating the trade deadline for a season, then so be it. It will just be another factor that makes this year unlike any other MLB season.

The long and short of it is that we’re going to see some weird stuff this season. If that includes a trade deadline that would barely be after 1/3 of the season in any other year, then that will have to be the reality. If that includes there being no trade deadline, then that will have to be the reality as well. The trade deadline is just a small part of what makes the baseball season great so it may be subdued, delayed, or abandoned for the betterment of major league baseball and its participants.

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