The 2026 MLB trade deadline was almost six weeks ago, and as you may recall, the situation for the Texas Rangers was very fluid at the time. There were reports that the Rangers were saying that no one was off-limits and that they were listening on everybody after getting swept in Houston the weekend before the deadline. A complete seemed, if not likely, at least possible.
After a morning filled with angst, anxiety and uncertainty, news broke around 2 p.m. that Monday afternoon that Jacob deGrom would
not be waiving his no-trade clause. A couple of days later, I did a lengthy post-mortem on the trade deadline that talked about deGrom’s decision, among other things. Everyone pretty much moved on.
The Jacob deGrom non-trade is a topic of conversation again, however, thanks to a column by Mark Feinsand of MLB.com. Feinsand, in a piece that went up yesterday entitled “An early look at 11 intriguing offseason trade candidates,” detailed, well, 11 intriguing offseason trade candidates, one of whom was Braves’ starter Spencer Strider.
This is the Spencer Strider section, in toto:
Spencer Strider, RHP, Braves
The Braves discussed sending Strider to Texas in a contract swap trade for Jacob deGrom before the Trade Deadline, and although deGrom blocked the deal with his no-trade clause, it’s clear that Atlanta is open to moving its former ace. Strider has been out since mid-June with right elbow inflammation, and while it’s unlikely that he will return this season, there is an outside chance he could be available out of the bullpen during the postseason. Strider is owed $22 million in each of the next two seasons with a $22 million club option ($5 million buyout) for 2029, so if the Braves can find a team willing to bet he can return to his previous form, they could look to move him.
127 words. A heading and three sentences about Spencer Strider, one of 11 individuals who was the subject of the story. Only one portion of one of those sentences had to do with deGrom, who was mentioned more or less in passing.
That particularly snippet on deGrom is noteworthy, and does provide for an interesting footnote on the whole Jacob deGrom trade deadline drama. But because this is used to provide background for the inclusion of Strider on Feinsand’s list, and is not a story on, you know, the Jacob deGrom and his potentially being dealt at the deadline, it is lacking in the sort of details that would provide clarity in regards to the details of the discussions between the Rangers and the Braves.
Years ago, on Twitter, I broke down what I called the “Hierarchy of rumor stage descriptions”:
This is something I put together based on, at the time, a couple of decades of obsessing over online reports of rumors in the Big Four sports, dating all the way back to the turn of the century when MLB Trade Rumors would take ButtPirate69’s post on the ESPN Yankees message board* saying that the Yankees should trade Ricky Ledee to the Expos for Vlad Guerrero and turn it into a story with a headline like “Yankees, Expos rumored to be talking Guerrero trade!” There’s an element of tea leaf reading when digesting rumors being reported, something that became even more necessary when Twitter became the preferred medium for reporters to send little tidbits out in bite-sized form, leaving room for interpretation, or, at a minimum, requiring the reader to use context clues.
* 25 years ago today, I learned that what we now colloquially refer to as “9/11” happened by logging onto my laptop and going to the ESPN Rangers board right after waking up (I was in law school and had no morning classes) and seeing the board filled with replies on posts with subjects like “Second Tower Just Fell.”
Feinsand’s “discussed sending” would seem slot in around “engaged with” in the hierarchy above, though it could also be equivalent to as high as “advanced discussions with” at the top of the hierarchy pyramid (or at the bottom of the inverted ziggurat, as I structured the tweet). Again, because this is an aside in a piece that is only 9.09% about Spencer Strider, its hard to tell exactly where this fits in.
We do know, per reporting, that the Rangers apparently told deGrom that if he wanted to be traded to the Braves, the Rangers would make that happen. We don’t know whether there was a specific trade agreed to or in place between the Rangers and the Braves, or if the Rangers were simply at a point in the discussions where they felt that a deal was doable and they were letting their future Hall of Fame pitcher who is in the twilight years of his career know that they would facilitate such a move if that’s what he wanted.
“Discussed” has a wide range of possible implications, which gets us back to the lack of clarity surrounding reporting of rumors in general. One would think that if the Braves and Rangers had a deal worked out to swap deGrom for Spencer, Feinsand would have said “agreed to” such a swap. Of course, its possible there was such an agreement, and Feinsand couldn’t get it confirmed, or his source didn’t want him to acknowledge something that definitive (which, given the fact that Strider is still a member of the Braves, and the Braves presumably don’t want Strider thinking they had agreed to get rid of him, would be understandable). It could be that there were various permutations of a deal being discussed, with Strider going to the Rangers in some scenarios but not others. There is a lot of inherent uncertainty, given we are working off of less than a sentence in Feinsand’s report.
That hasn’t, however, kept folks from re-packing Feinsand’s story in more definitive and clickbaity ways.
Go do an internet search for Jacob deGrom and Spencer Strider and one of the first things you’ll see is a New York Post article with the headline “Jacob deGrom nearly traded for Spencer Strider in failed deadline blockbuster.” The article starts off thusly:
Add this one to the long list of blockbuster baseball trades that nearly happened.
Before this year’s trade deadline, Jacob deGrom nearly became a Brave.
Instead, the ex-Met declined to waive his no-trade clause, citing his desire to remain in Texas.
The Post’s Jon Heyman reported the potential deal at the time, but the return Atlanta discussed is only now coming to light.
The headline and opening paragraphs lead one to suppose that the New York Post is breaking some news here and not just aggregating the aside in the Feinsand story, right?
Wrong:
MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand revealed Thursday that Spencer Strider was discussed as part of a possible “contract swap” for deGrom.
The article then just goes on to talk about deGrom and Strider, and what the ramifications would have been had such a deal gone down.
I probably could have figured out that there’s no new independent scoop here from the outset if I’d looked a little more closely. The byline indicates the author of the piece is Dylan Svoboda, whose New York Post page describes him as “a sports gambling editor and producer for the New York Post,” rather than someone like Jon Heyman or Joel Sherman.
You’ll also see a headline from “theScore.com” stating: “Report: Braves tried to trade Strider to Rangers for deGrom.” Here’s the lede:
The Atlanta Braves attempted to deal right-hander Spencer Strider to the Texas Rangers for two-time Cy Young winner Jacob deGrom before the trade deadline, according to Mark Feinsand of MLB.com.
Credit to the score for putting “Report” in their headline, indicating that they were simply relaying another journalist’s reporting, unlike the Post’s framing. Negative one million, though, for saying that “according to Mark Feinsand” “[t]he Atlanta Braves attempted to deal” Strider for deGrom.
Feinsand didn’t say that! That’s not true!
We get a similar treatment from Barstool Sports, with contributor “Big Tennessee” running a story with the headline “The Braves Were Reportedly Going To Include Spencer Strider in a Trade for Jacob deGrom.” Not that anyone expects original reporting from Barstool anyway, but if you were under the impression they were breaking a scoop, your misconceptions are put to rest immediately, since the very beginning of the story itself is an embed of a tweet from something called “SleeperBraves” with a 25 words or less summary that ends with “Per @Feinsand.”
And that’s before we get the myriad of social media aggregators that don’t even blog or do a story, but just choose to repackage whatever someone else reported in a Facebook or Twitter post with an exaggerated, misleading summary.
To be clear, there are plenty of folks who reported on this the right way. The SBN Braves blog Battery Power had a headline with “discussed” in quotes. MLB Trade Rumors used “discussed” in the headline of their story discussing the Strider, and even links to a Mark Bowman MLB.com piece from early August that said the Rangers “didn’t show initial interest in Strider,” further undermining the overly-excited “we almost had a deGrom/Strider swap” framing we see elsewhere.
But those more nuanced, and more accurate, headlines and pieces don’t catch the eyeballs that the clickbait does. The ones that
