The Padres’ first trades in more than 4½ years to acquire players expected to make immediate and significant contributions to the major league roster were also something of a rarity in baseball these days.
“Need for need,” said Dave Littlefield, vice president of player development for the Detroit Tigers. “Sometimes it depends on one team having needs and some teams having excesses in a certain area. When those match up, that’s where these trades happen.”
Like all trades, those the Padres executed in the last two weeks cannot be accurately assessed at this point.
“The difficulty in evaluating trades sometimes is they have different lifespans,” said Los Angeles Angels General Manager Billy Eppler.