Marco Estrada Claimed On Revocable Trade Waivers (But He Isn’t Going Anywhere)

It is an irrevocable truth that revocable confuse the hell out of people. They are, however, fairly straightforward — y’know, once you get past the confusion about why the hell the process exists in the first place. Or why the hell it’s called the same thing as another rather different process that the league uses for player movement.

Or maybe it doesn’t actually confuse people, and media types just can’t stop themselves from explaining it all anyway. Whatever the case, a quick review:

In order for a player to eligible be traded in the month of August, he must first go through the trade waiver process. His team “places the player on waivers,” which give other clubs 47 business-day hours to make a claim on him. If a claim is made, the player’s team then has 48.5 business-day hours to decide whether to let that club take him for nothing, to work out a trade, or to pull him off waivers (in other words, to revoke the waiver) and keep him.

Over the weekend it was reported that Estrada had been placed on waivers, meaning that clubs would have had until some time today to make a claim. Somebody, it turns out, did.

Gideon Turk of BP Toronto has a source in the front office that goes even farther, telling him that the team is in the AL East, “heavily implying” that it was the Yankees, and that the claiming team “showed no willingness to exchange names with the Blue Jays to discuss a trade,” as their intention was simply to block the Jays from moving him elsewhere.

Dick move, Yankees! And also… kind of a useless one?

I know it’s just a little run that they’ve been on lately, and one that probably only offers false-ish hope at best, but also… fuck that. Those teams ahead of the Jays are truly are garbage. And with Josh Donaldson looking like and MVP again, and Devon Travis and Aaron Sanchez perhaps not too far off, you don’t even have to pipe dream all that hard.

They can do this if they don’t suck quite as much as they have all season!

And even if they can’t, can you fucking imagine the way the wind would be taken out of the sails of the fan base if they’d traded Estrada at this very moment? Just as there is finally the faintest ripple of optimism? Or how about the reaction of the players in the clubhouse? Mark Shapiro would have to hide anytime Donaldson or Bautista came into the room. And for what? What kind of fringe prospect would they have even been able to land if they’d moved Estrada?

Thing is, that last question is actually the answer to the biggest one here. Why even put him on these waivers in the first place? To find out what kind of prospect they might be able to get if they’d moved him.

Plus, the Jays have likely played four games since Estrada was placed on waivers back on Friday, so it was entirely possible that the picture by now could have looked quite a bit more dire. And with Estrada due to pitch tonight, he would have had to have been claimed before his next start — which could have had a pretty significant impact on his value, were he to take a step backwards after the return to normalcy we’ve seen from him in his last few starts. Which is to say, I suppose it makes sense enough to have tried to get him through waivers at this point and at least keep open the option of trading him later in the month, if he’d cleared.

So… yeah. No harm, no foul, no real point writing even this much about these things.