Five Minutes with Frag - Perplexed by Prospects

The trade deadline represents one of two things to baseball fans. To some, it represents the assembly of the final piece of the puzzle, helping a contender become a favorite. Yet to others, it signifies the beginning of the end, where teams admit to themselves that they are done and start preparing for the years to come, by jettisoning the aforementioned puzzle pieces in exchange for highly regarded prospects.

And isn't that just the buzz word of the day; prospects.

Dictionary.com describes prospects as "anticipation; expectation; a looking forward," among other things. And isn't that really what a prospect is in sports, an expectation of something to come. While expectations are high by nature, they really are nothing more than a role of the dice, a chance taken on an investment, and most realities, a gamble with nothing more than a 10% payout.

So why is it that both sides of the battles fought at this time of the year put so much faith into the hope that they have the golden nugget? Teams have spent years and millions of dollars hoping for some players to shell out to what they expected them to be, only to become disenfranchised with the player and shipping him off in a package for the next great thing. Yet year after year, the buyers don't want to spend their vaunted youngsters, and the sellers want to keep picking from the same tree.

Let's face facts though, there is a reason there are so many minor league levels that a player needs to ascend before he reaches the big leagues. They are there to weed out the plethora players that will never see a pitch on the big stage, and they don't care how much potential you had when you were drafted or who you were supposed to be. They only care what you are and how quickly you are progressing.

This all being said, a team that is rich in prospects should have no qualms in surrendering one of them if they get a sound veteran, who would be under club control for the next year or so, or would at least be signable immediately after acquisition.

The other side of the coin also demands to know why some of the lower revenue teams continue to turn their rosters over in hopes of hitting the jackpot. Sure, you can't win the lottery unless you play, but you can also go broke trying, and at some point your fans become the casualties of forgotten trades. There is no winner when the expectation is that the fan base can't get behind a team that they don't recognize from year to year.

The long and short of it is this. Prospects are exactly what that, nothing more, nothing less. Holding your breath while waiting for your horse to come in is only going to suffocate the team in the end, cutting off the fans in the process.