Atlanta Braves Morning Chop: All you ever wanted to know about waiver trading

The ‘Gotchas’

There are several “gotchas” to the claiming process: you can impress your office-mates by knowing these!

The obvious one is that if your team puts in a claim, you must have both 40-man and 25-man roster spots available – or at least planned for – in case you win the claim… and the player. But we’ll get to all that.

1. The simple case: if no team chooses to put in an objection claim for a given player after the 48-hour window, that player may then be freely traded to any other team — just like the rules allowed before August.

i.e., When nobody objects, all trade restrictions are removed… except for a little detail that I’ll cover in Item #4 below.

2. The fun part: a waiver claim is made. Let’s use an example of Justin Verlander, since he could be an interesting case. His contract requires another $7 million payment this year, but $56 million guaranteed through 2019 (with a $22m vesting option and 10-and-5 no-trade rights).

It is exactly for that financial reason he will probably clear waivers unclaimed. But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that the LA Dodgers put in a claim.  What happens then?

Here are the options after a claim:

• a. Revocation of Waivers. The Tigers can choose to pull Verlander back to their side of the void… that’s the “revocable” part of revocable waivers. This is effectively a team saying “PSYCH – I wasn’t really trying to trade this guy.” He still belongs to the original squad…. but of course they still gotta pay him.
• b. A Trade. Detroit can try to negotiate a trade…. exclusively with the Dodgers, since they were the claimants (they asserted their right to object — and are rewarded with this right of exclusivity).
  • That trading opportunity window is limited — 48 more hours. If they cannot get together on a deal in that time frame, then the Tigers can still pull Verlander back to them… OR they can…
• c. Give the Player away. At the Tigers’ option, the claimed player can simply be given away — including the entire contract  — to the claiming team.  No compensation goes back… except for the salary relief.

This is why the higher-salaried players will often clear waivers: because of the risk that it’s simply a salary dump ploy.  So while the initial dinner date (the waiver claim) might be relatively cheap, you might regret it in the morning. See the ‘Nuclear Weapons’ section later.

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