Trades. Free agency. The June draft. Rule 5.
It doesn’t matter how you get them. Baseball is a game of acquisitions.
You can’t get to the World Series with players you don’t have.
Yes, it cost the Texas Rangers $51.7 million just for the right to negotiate a contract in 2012 with Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish.
It’s the cost of doing business in baseball. You can pay it in yen for posting fees, or you can hand over Dominican pesos to some teenaged shortstop.
In baseball, players are the inventory. You stock your warehouse any way you can.