A Quick Look at Midsummer Intradivisional Trades: AL Edition
As I was saying before the busiest trade deadline day on record — yes, my timing of this two-part series was impeccable — Monday’s trade of Jason Vargas to the Phillies was noteworthy as the rare intradivisional pre-deadline swap. Some might view in-season deals with direct rivals to be taboo, but they do occur, and as the July 31 trade deadline approached, it seemed like a fun idea to examine their recent history.
To keep this from becoming unruly, I’ve confined my focus to the 2012-19 period, the era of two Wild Cards in each league — a cutoff chosen because it expands not only the number of teams who make the playoffs, but also the group who can at least envision themselves as contenders. For this, I’m using the Baseball-Reference Trade Partners tool and counting only trades that occurred in June, July, or August, which we might more accurately call midsummer deals rather than deadline ones — though some of them were definitely of that variety. I’ve omitted straight purchases, which generally involve waiver bait, though I have counted deals in which cash changed hands instead of a player to be named later.
If you’re looking for a basis of comparison, in the companion piece to this, covering the National League, I found that the NL division with the most deals fitting the description within the period was the NL East, with 12, with five such deals taking place in the NL Central, and just three in the NL West, none of them involving the Dodgers; this year’s deadline didn’t change any of those tallies. The most notable NL deal in this class was a July 27, 2012 one that sent Marco Scutaro from the Rockies to the Giants, whom he not only helped win a World Series but earned NLCS MVP honors along the way. Since I worked from West to East in the NL edition to emphasize some of those points, we’ll take these divisions in the same order.
Team | Astros | Angels | Athletics | Mariners | Rangers | Total |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Astros | — | 2 | 1 | 0 (6/2010) | 1 | 4 |
Angels | 2 | — | 1 | 0 (12/2012) | 0 (6/2018) | 3 |
Athletics | 1 | 1 | — | 1 | 1 | 4 |
Mariners | 0 (6/2010) | 0 (12/2012) | 1 | — | 0 (4/2019) | 1 |
Rangers | 1 | 0 (6/2018) | 1 | 0 (4/2019) | — | 2 |