#Dodgers put Yasiel Puig on waivers last week, sources say. But he was claimed & pulled back. So he won't be traded this month.
— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst) August 11, 2015
With rare exceptions teams don’t comment on waiver-wire transactions in August, which belies how common they are. As I noted above, everyone goes on waivers in August.
The reason is fairly simple.
The only way a player can be traded from one team to another is if he passes through waivers unclaimed. Let’s say the Dodgers wanted to trade Puig to the Texas Rangers for Cole Hamels. The Dodgers and Rangers would have to place the two players on waivers and hope no other team claims them, then submit the deal to MLB.
But then, if Hamels and Puig were the only two players on waivers, the other 28 teams would have a fairly good idea what was going on. Say the Angels and Mariners didn’t want to pitch to Puig over the final seven weeks of the season. One team could submit a waiver claim on Puig to block the deal. That would be the end of that.
The reason so many players go on waivers in August, then, is not because all these players are on the trading block. It’s because some players are on the trading block but teams don’t want other teams knowing which players they’re interested in trading, or to whom.
Puig is not anywhere close to the trading block. That’s been more or less true all season, but now it’s official.
As you were.