No More Trading In Sports

Sometimes you have to make do with what you’ve got. A bum spine, a mediocre brain, a friend you don’t like but you’ve known ’em a long time. These are our lots in life, if they are, and we just have to live with them. This is how it should be with the people who are on the sports teams we like.

They are ours:

, yes?

According to Wikipedia, “In North American professional sports, a trade is a sports league transaction between sports clubs that involves an exchange of players from one club/team to another.” I bring this up now because I needed a paragraph before the next one for the flow. OK.

It is simply too sad when a player is traded. Life is hard enough. What if you liked that guy? (Guy in this case meaning a person of any gender.) Now what? They’re just gone? You don’t get to like them anymore? Or, what, you just have to like them in a respectful way because of sportsmanship? What if you already follow them on Instagram? Now you have to see them all the time in their new uniform, smiling? Breaking your heart over and over while you’re just trying to put the pieces back together? NO! It’s terrible. It’s cruel. It’s too sad. It’s too much. I hate it. It shouldn’t be the way things are done. It needs to stop.

Here should be the way things are done: You have your team and those are your players until they die or retire or quit or get fired because of unspeakable deeds. You can support them knowing they will never leave you. You can love them without fear of your heart being broken. You can share in their joys and sorrows and frustrations and excitements knowing that your emotional labor will not be for naught once they are traded to the despicable Los Angeles Dodgers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! When one of the guys dies or whatever you get a new guy.

There can still be intrigue. When the cast of “Vanderpump Rules” doesn’t like a new member of the waitstaff at SUR they are mean to them until they quit. This can happen on teams, too, maybe. And then maybe the guy comes back a few seasons later and dates Jax, or whatever, I don’t know, I can’t figure out everything and I already figured out the most important thing: no more trading.

What if the team is bad and one of the players wants to leave for a better team and actually it would work out pretty good for both sides of the deal? Too bad. What if the team is bad and the owner, or whatever, wants to make it a little better? Maybe work with the guys you already have—your FAMILY—and make them better; they’re professionals, I’m sure it’ll be fine. What if anything else? It doesn’t matter no more trading.

This way, with no more trading, you can feel connected to your main team. You know the guys. You love them. They’re your family. They’re not going to leave you. Maybe they are bad, but you love them anyway. Maybe they are good, and you get to enjoy that about them. You can cheer for them. You can watch them grow. You can count on them. They will not be “traded” away from you cruelly, as if they are pogs.

Of course, we’d have to pick a date for the “no more trading” rule to go into effect. I’d say a good date would be, hm, August 18. Any trades that were announced after August 18, 2017 are nullified and all of those players have to go back to the teams they were on before, and now those are just their teams forever the end thank you.

image: Andrew Malone/Kelly