Baseball fans can be very amusing. Somewhere around July 2018, the coolest thing in the galaxy became Whit Merrifield . As a very good player on a fifth-place team, the fans of the better teams in the league found themselves perfectly comfortable with subscribing to their own version of the rip-off trades for the Kansas City second baseman. The line of thinking is: “Since he’s having MLB success, and he’s about ready to start getting paid, I might as well patch together a not-too-disgusting melange of inexpensive assets to mansplain Royals fans into why my fake-trade is best for them.