[SunDevil]

Your Team?s New Trade Asset | FanGraphs Baseball

There were three trades on Tuesday that involved international signing money, with the Cubs in on all of them. They gave up some money in their trade with the Dodgers, but they added to their pool by trading with both the Astros and the Orioles. To quickly recap:

Cubs <—> Orioles
Orioles get Scott Feldman, Steve Clevenger. Cubs get Jake Arrieta, Pedro Strop, $0.388 million for international spending.

Cubs <—> Astros
Astros get Ronald Torreyes. Cubs get $0.785 million for international spending.

Cubs <—> Dodgers
Dodgers get Carlos Marmol, cash considerations, $0.21 million for international spending. Cubs get Matt Guerrier.

They’re three different kinds of deals. In one, bonus money was given up to offset a big contract. In another, bonus money was picked up for a prospect. In the last, bonus money was picked up effectively as a prospect substitute. But what they all have in common is that teams exchanged bonus pool money, which we hadn’t before seen. Not that people didn’t know it was coming.