A couple interesting pieces from Mike Chernoff on the August waivers and how they work
Meisel: How much of an advantage, then, is it to be sitting ahead of your American League postseason competition in terms of waiver priority?
Chernoff: The place where it’s an advantage is that, if you claim a guy, you can block all of those other teams. As soon as we claim a guy, no other team ahead of us in the standings in the American League has access to that player. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we wouldn’t trade for a guy. You put Lindor on waivers. We’re not going to trade him. But some team is going to claim him, potentially. The balancing act is that guys on big contracts who might not be a fit for us but are for the other contenders, we’re in a position to potentially block those teams from getting them, yet we could also get stuck with a guy who isn’t a fit for us, making a big salary. If that team just doesn’t pull him back and we get him, you potentially get stuck. And you see that happen every once in a while, where the other team lets him go and you’re stuck with a guy.
ZM: Do you think it will be an active August? Is that something you can tell ahead of time?
MC: It felt like there was a big flurry of deals that happened this year. Last year, it seemed like there were fewer impact deals and then there was a lot of August action. I don’t know if that will mean there’s less action in August this year, because there was that big flurry of impact deals. I couldn’t predict what’s going to happen. I think there’s a lot of action behind the scenes in August on the waiver wire. What that will actually translate to in terms of trades, I have no idea.
ZM: So when there’s a report that a marquee player is on waivers, that isn’t a big deal.
MC: It’s meaningless. Almost every player will go through waivers, just because, why wouldn’t you put the guy on and just revoke the claim? For the best players in the game, some of those guys will clear waivers and no one will claim them because they know there’s no chance that the team will trade them. So it’s hard to read into it when you start hearing whether guys are claimed or not, because it’s happening with basically every player.
ZM: How long do you have to work something out if you do claim a player?
MC: Seventy-two hours. Ninety-nine percent of the time you claim a guy, there’s not even a conversation. You can claim as many guys as you want. You have to be locked in, just because you could get stuck with a guy. You can’t take any claim you make for granted.
ZM: It does buy time for teams that can’t decide whether to buy or sell.
MC: Yeah. A guy like Jay Bruce, who’s on a somewhat big contract, but is in the last year of that contract, he didn’t get traded at the deadline. Often, that’s a player who — him or Coco Crisp the year before — will clear waivers, and if that team falls out of contention at some point in August, is a guy who would’ve been traded earlier, potentially, at the deadline if that team knew it would be in that position. But they can wait until August in that case. Jay Bruce cleared waivers and they could trade him in an unrestricted way. So it almost made no difference that there was a trade deadline.