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My friend Rory sent me this little tidbit and I thought I’d share it with you to start off the blog.

Major League Baseball has been around 147 years, and there have been a little over 23,000 players who have played in a professional baseball game.

To put that in perspective the smallest stadium by capacity is Progressive Field at 37,830. Meaning is ever player who’s ever put on a big-league uniform from 1876 to 2023 sat in the stands, the stadium would only be at 61% capacity.

I just thought that was an interesting fact to start out with.

Now as we’ve went over a few times here the Major League Baseball trade deadline was August 1st. Now there are no more trades allowed like there used to be where if a player made it through waivers he could still be traded. Oddly there still seems to be a lot of player movement even though they are no trades allowed. So how is this happening?

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that teams would find a way to get around the trade deadline and to an extent they have. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there have been quite a few players that have been designated for assignment by their teams.

Now generally that would mean that the team that designated the player had 10 days to either trade or release him. Well since trades are no longer allowed these players are released and become free to sign with any team they choose to.

Obviously, this isn’t going to happen to any superstar type of players, but those kinds of players were rarely moved in waiver deals anyway.

What it ends up meaning is playoff contenders can add those extra pieces without having to give anything up to get them.

I guess a good example of this might be Ramon Laureano who was designated for assignment by the Oakland A’s this afternoon. The A’s made a series of roster moves leading up to Laureano being designated. Oakland activated Dany Jimenez and Esteury Ruiz from the IL, and the optioning of reliever Tayler Scott to Triple-A.

Laureano has struggled with injuries the last couple of seasons, and also served an 80-game suspension after testing positive for an anabolic steroid in 2021.

Laureano is just 29 years old and could be a very solid fourth outfielder on a playoff contending type of team.

Even though Laureano has struggled at the plate this season, he’s hitting just .213 in 64 games this season. He’s still a plus defender in the outfield. Laureano has 6 outfield assists this season.

Laureano is just an example there are quite a few players that have been designated for assignment and are the type of player that playoff contending teams can still add even though we’re past the trade deadline.

Like I mentioned I don’t think that any of these players would end up winning a World Series MVP for the team that might pick them up, but they can be more than suitable pinch hitters, defensive replacements and bench players.

I’m kind of on the fence if this is a good thing or a bad thing. There’s a reason that MLB put in the trade deadline and ended waiver trades, but this is a way around that rule. I’m not even sure if there would be a way to avoid this from happening. MLB really can’t tell teams how to manage their roster and if they want to designate a player no matter who that player is they’re allowed to.

I do wonder if anything would be said or possibly changed if one of these players that was designated for assignment signed with a playoff team and actually got the game winning hit in a playoff series. I haven’t heard anyone else mention this, but if something like a game winning hit happened someone might take notice.

I’m interested to know what you think about this.

Don’t forget to look me up on Twitter, I’m @Burketime.