With the Major League Baseball lockout now in full force and with a small amount of time before it went into effect to make offseason moves, there were not many trades many among MLB teams before the league stopped.
In November, I made a video on my YouTube Channel, Eephus, where I provided trade pieces for every MLB team that is embedded in this article for you to see below. For this video, I looked over each team’s depth chart on FanGraphs and prospect list per MLB.com and came to some conclusions that these players could be traded this offseason for various reasons.
As a note, I do not have a preference on whether or not any of the players listed actually do get traded or if they don’t. I basically just cover every potential player that could be traded from each team. Whether they are traded or not will obviously be decided by the teams they play for as well as also the ones they don’t.
Some of the players included are older or on big contracts, or both such as Justin Upton or Jason Heyward, as I believe the Los Angeles Angels and Chicago Cubs would love to move on from these players to free up some money. However, there has to be a trade partner that is willing to take on the negative aspects for these types of players, whether it is just the bad contract or the player’s recent poor play.
This video was also made before teams had to meet the deadlines for arbitration players or contract renewals, so there are a few names on my list that are not with those teams anymore. Some examples of the names like this are Clint Frazier and Colin Moran. Frazier actually signed with the Chicago Cubs before the lockout started.
Some teams I had projected to go full rebuild mode like the Oakland Athletics and the Minnesota Twins. The A’s still seem likely to head into that direction as they let Bob Melvin move on to a contender in the San Diego Padres, and have not made even slight movements towards retaining their free agents like Starling Marte or Mark Canha or making other moves to stay in playoff contention.
For the Minnesota Twins, I was more uncertain of whether they would head into a full rebuild or not so I went into the video saying that they might because I wanted to mention all the players there that could be traded just in case that is the direction they went. But, after the Twins signed Byron Buxton to a contract extension, that does not appear to the be case as they also signed Dylan Bundy as well in an attempt to help one of the worst rotations in baseball from 2021.
For any of the prospects listed, I looked for guys who either do not fit because the teams have major leaguers blocking them (like Jake Burger of the Chicago White Sox), or an abundance of those types of players in their system like the Angels with Jo Adell, Brandon Marsh just graduating and Jordyn Adams and Orlando Martinez still in the system, or they could use a different situation, like Kyle Wright of the Braves who just hasn’t found his footing in the majors with Atlanta.
Lastly, there are also some players that I listed that have already managed to be traded before the lockout like Mike Brosseau and Jackie Bradley Jr.
Thoughts on potential trade pieces or which MLB team you think will make the biggest move after the lockout ends? Drop your comments below.