JABO: MLB’s Hidden Cold Wars

When it comes to trading, almost every team plays favorites. Perhaps a former co-worker is now running another club, making conversations easy and player valuations similar. Or perhaps two GMs just happen to get along well, and when one needs to make a minor deal to round out his roster, he’s comfortable asking his friend for help before polling the rest of the league. There are plenty of reasons why some organizations just fit as better trade partners than others.

This goes the other direction as well. Many teams are hesitant to make trades with their division rivals, not wanting the player they gave up on to come back and haunt them for 19 games per season, or in the case of trading a young prospect, for years into the future. Shipping a player across the country, or even to the other league, minimizes the chances that your home town fans will be regularly reminded that not every trade works out in your favor.

Of course, for a few teams that share a large market, there is another franchise in the other league that happens to also be a challenging trade partner. If you want to avoid your fans seeing the traded player turn into a star, having him play for the in-town rival is probably the worst case scenario, which is why trades between market sharing teams are pretty rare. The Cubs and White Sox, for instance, haven’t made a trade since 2006 — the Neal Cotts for David Aardsma blockbuster — and hadn’t made a deal before that one since 1998. The A’s and Giants haven’t made a deal since 2004, when Oakland bought Adam Pettyjohn from the Giants for cash; they last made a deal with players going both directions back in 1990. The Mets and Yankees last swapped players in 2004, when they exchanged Mike Stanton for Felix Heredia.

But beyond those easily explainable barriers to making a deal, I was curious which other franchises have engaged in long cold wars. Whether for philosophical reasons or just because they haven’t ever matched up, which teams just don’t make trades? Thanks to the particularly nifty Trade Partner tool from Baseball-Reference, we can highlight the teams who seem least likely to make deals with each other, even without the in-division or in-market explanations.

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