Waiving Goodbye: Explaining the August 31 Not-Trade Deadline

Just so you know, the trade deadline was August 3. Tarik Skubal is on the Dodgers. Adley Rutschman is on the Red Sox. José Soriano is on the Blue Jays. Did you hear about this? Anyway, that was the last major opportunity for teams to revamp their 26-man rosters for a playoff push, but it was not the final chance to add players who can appear in October games. Enter the August 31 playoff eligibility deadline, which Ken Rosenthal just brought into the news with his report that the Reds put Eugenio Suárez and TJ Friedl on waivers. (Both have since cleared, will remain with the Reds, and can’t be placed on waivers again.)

The waiver trade deadline — the mechanism by which Justin Verlander joined the Astros from the Tigers in 2017 — is long gone, and in its absence over the last several years, the process has been streamlined. The waiver process for all players works the same as it does for a player who is designated for assignment, with two exceptions. The first is that, while on waivers, a non-DFA’d player can continue to play; both he and the public might not even know he’s on waivers. Only reporting like Rosenthal’s is guaranteed to give us knowledge without a claim.

The second wrinkle is that if a waived player goes unclaimed, he simply stays on the active roster, unlike players who are DFA’d. He also stays on the active roster during the waiver process, as Suárez and Friedl did. Everything else is identical: waiver priority order is worst-to-first by record at the time of the waiver placement, and waiver claims are irrevocable. No compensation may change hands besides the $50,000 waiver fee that every claiming team pays on every waiver claim throughout the season, and the entire remainder of the player’s contract is the responsibility of his new team. Players may be waived after August 31, but any player who joins a new organization in September is not eligible for postseason play, making Monday a meaningful deadline.

Now that I’ve run down all the rules and regulations, let’s get into who could be on the move. Of course, any player can be waived, but historically, pending free agents are the ones who get waived and claimed in August. We may hear about players with onerous long-term contracts hitting the waiver wire and going unclaimed (the Angels placed Tyler Anderson on waivers in year one of his three-year, $39 million contract, for example), but the same players will probably also be available in the offseason and can be acquired via trade with cash to offset some of their contract. Here’s a collection of rentals (plus those with options unlikely to be exercised) on teams with Playoff Odds below 10% who could get waived before Monday’s deadline:

I cast a pretty wide net within the sub-10% teams because there are so few of them, thanks to the jumbled mess of clubs contending for that last American League wild card spot. I also don’t actually anticipate that all of these teams will put players on waivers. The optics would be pretty bad if, after buying at the trade deadline, the Pirates decided to waive their rentals to shed salary from their insignificant payroll. But the definitely-going-nowhere teams like the Angels, Royals, Giants, and Rockies have a little bit to offer, and perhaps those players would even view the chance to compete for a championship down the stretch as a gesture of goodwill more than a disruption. There won’t be too many breaking news articles or headlines in huge type, but even if their current teams are out of it, some of these players could still have impact in September or October.