Quote:
Originally Posted by Westheim
...also Reynaldo Lopez.
Reds took Renfroe and Bader (from Yanks).
Mariners snatched Dominic Leone.
Grichuk is currently Jake Harper waiting in the thunderstorm with his kite, because Alan has totally forgotten to pick him up.
That's as much as I could grasp off the Bally ticker at the bottom of the Yanks-Tigers game right now.
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So apparently the method to this madness is that all of these waiver cuts should push the Angels down below the luxury tax threshold, which in and of itself shouldn't be a big deal for a team like that but also means that when they extend Shohei Ohtani the QO and he refuses it to sign with the Dodgers (my guess, although hey, the Mariners have a pretty long history with Japanese players even before Ichiro), as a team under the tax they'd get a compensation pick before the 3rd round as opposed to one in between the 4th and 5th rounds. Plus, of course, they won't have to pay that onerous tax levied against this tiny small market team that only gets to play in the 2nd biggest market in the country...
That's still giving up an awwwwwful lot of capital just to get a slightly better pick in a draft that is well-known for its extreme volatility, and for that reason I feel like it's more of a one-off situation. Nevertheless, I am *sure* that MLB will pass some kind of rule preventing this lest a team like the A's just regularly dump all of their non-cost-controlled players into waivers at the end of August every season (which, yes, would be extremely dumb but this is the A's we're talking about).