Trades & FAAB

Photo: Amtec Photos, CC BY-SA 2.0 · source file

The trade market and the free-agent budget, which in a league of this shape are the same subject. Every deal in the league’s history is on file here — 74 of them, both sides listed — which makes it possible to ask the useful questions instead of the loud ones.

Those questions are: who actually trades in season rather than talking about it, what a bench piece really returns, and when a FAAB bid stops being value. The budget is separate per sport and per season: $100 each, minimum bid zero, ties broken by reverse order of the standings on the day the claim runs. Baseball and basketball claims process once a week on Sunday night; football runs daily from Thursday to Sunday morning. Budget is tradeable, which turns it into an asset with a price rather than a wallet.

Comparing value across sports is the part with no clean answer, and this section does not pretend otherwise. What it does instead is look at what the ledger records: which positions changed hands more than once, which managers were on the buying side of three deals in a row, and how often a trade made in one sport was paid for out of another sport’s budget. The deals are printed in the order they were filed, so a busy fortnight reads as a busy fortnight.