Almost all trade deadline coverage is accounting, in one form or another. The center of every transaction grade and roundtable discussion is the same—an assessment of a player’s value, measured in dollars or wins or otherwise, stacked against the value of his return. But there’s another dimension to this process, one that can warp all those measurements and disrupt the whole formula, and that’s a certain moral accounting.
On Monday, Toronto sent reliever Roberto Osuna to Houston in exchange for former closer Ken Giles and a pair of pitching prospects, Hector Perez and David Paulino. The moral accounting is inescapable here, part of what set the groundwork that made the deal possible in the first place.