It’s not easy being traded. I was only traded one time in my entire career, and that year (with the Phillies in ’83) was the worst of my 22 seasons. Imagine one day you come in to your office in San Francisco and your boss says, “We’re sending you to Philadelphia. Pack your bags.” And then you go to Philadelphia where you have the same job but different coworkers and you’re expected to just keep on working like nothing has happened. It would be hard on anyone, but it’s especially hard on baseball players.

Baseball is all about chemistry, and when you’re thrown in with a new group of guys it can be tough. Especially for an infielder like myself because you need time to play with your shortstop and third baseman and first baseman because to play right you need that chemistry and that chemistry does not come overnight. It even applies to dealing with outfielders – how many folks remember Orlando Cabrera’s first game with the Red Sox, where he didn’t know where to go on a pickoff play and the ball ended up in the right field corner? You only get a first chance to make an impression, and sometimes that impression haunts you for the rest of your life, especially if it isn’t a good one.

Some teams realize how important chemistry is and other teams don’t realize it. Today with so much knowledge about the game out there most GMs are smart enough not to change their infields dramatically because what it can do to a team defensively, but some just don’t know the game well enough to pick up on that. And some GMs just treat their team like it’s a game of rotisserie, where players can be moved around like nothing. Like when the A’s traded for Ray Durham mid-season a few years ago. Billy Beane even thought about moving Durham into the outfield for a while to try and fix the chemistry problem, but it didn’t help them at all since they went nowhere in the postseason again, and Durham didn’t want to move, so good for him!

That’s the biggest reason why so many mid-season trades end up not having the effect that general managers want, because of chemistry. But GMs are in a tough spot, too, because they have to make it look like they’re working to help their teams even if the deals they make won’t jumpstart their teams the way they tell the press that they will. People that don’t make moves need to get more attention. It upsets me that wheelers and dealers like Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta get all the press for making moves that don’t help their team, while good GMs like Terry Ryan and Pat Gillick don’t make any moves and get lots of bad press despite how their teams do in the postseason. Because of the media, running a baseball team is about public relations and so I sympathize with those general managers even when they make mistakes but especially when they don’t.

Around this time everyone asks me what their teams should do to improve, and I have a hard time answering them. A good team shouldn’t need much – maybe a reliever or a fifth starter, or an extra outfielder, or sometimes a first and third baseman – and so the trade deadline just raises expectations for teams and ultimately disappoints fans. That’s bad for the game. Trades are bad for the game. You aren’t just moving players you are moving families too and baseball is a family game and the trade deadline disrespects that. So, yes, I am against trades.

One final note is that a lot of readers have been sending me a link to a website where someone is trying to hurt me and my family because of things I said. And so I’m against that, too, because you shouldn’t hate someone or their family because of what they said or what you think they said. I don’t hate Billy Beane or his family, even though I think he’s an egomaniac and a bad writer that’s killing the game of baseball and making it hard for good teams to compete fairly. If I did, I would go find him and make him pay for what he did to baseball, because he lives close to me and I can find him. But I won’t do that because I don’t want to and it’s against the law. And I don’t think anyone should hate me either because it’s against the law. And it’s wrong.