Taylor Rogers got traded twice last year — once right before the start of the season and again at the trade deadline.
Both times, the Giants reliever found out on Twitter.
“That’s just the way it is now,” Rogers, who went from San Diego to Milwaukee in a deadline blockbuster last August, said. “I don’t know what the mechanics of it are, but if both GMs decide to do the trade, somehow somebody else gets it before you do. I don’t know if they call somebody before they call you, which doesn’t seem right, so I don’t know how it works.”
Screen time on the social media app skyrockets in MLB clubhouses around the Aug. 1 trade deadline. Because Twitter — perhaps unbeknownst to many outside the sport — is where many players learn they’ve been traded.
Just like fans do.
“I have a lot of sympathy for players who find out not from the right source,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said.
The dynamic of players finding out their lives are being uprooted is multifaceted. It reflects a rapid news reporting apparatus that has been amplified by the proliferation of social media, along with an evolving relationship of players and the front office executives who hold power over personnel.
The phenomenon is far from unique to the Giants or to Major League Baseball. Players on any team, in any professional sport, can experience learning about their new team from Twitter. The only unique aspect to San Francisco is that the social media company’s headquarters is at 1355 Market Street — two miles from Oracle Park.
The trend isn’t new, either. When Alex Wood got traded from Atlanta to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2015, he found out from Twitter. Wood recalled that back then, players could use their cell phones during games, and one of his teammates at the time showed him that his name was floated on social media as the Braves were playing in Baltimore.
Wood, then 24 and in his pre-arbitration years, was “shell-shocked.” At first, he thought his teammate was joking and played it off. But his teammate insisted Wood check his phone, where he was “all over Twitter,” he said.
“So I went inside and called my agent,” Wood said. “He was like ‘nothing has happened, they’ve said nothing to us.’ Then you go on Twitter and see your name tossed around, ‘In serious trade talks.’ So the game ended, and they called us — it wasn’t just me, it was Jim Johnson, too — into the skipper’s office. I was pretty distraught. I did not want to get traded. And I still remember being like, they’re telling us nothing has happened, we’re not traded. I remember being like there has to be some truth to this, stuff like this doesn’t just get out.”
The next day, Wood got the official call from Fredi Gonzalez, his manager. He was heading to Los Angeles.
“I would say that in my experience, the majority of people hear it first on social media before they hear it from anyone in the organization,” Wood said. “The only time guys will know first is if the people in the front office, whether it’s the president or GM, has a deep respect and a good relationship with a certain player.”
That happened to Wood later in his career, when Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman informed Wood that LA had agreed to trade him to the Reds. Wood and Friedman have a close relationship, the veteran said, and he appreciated hearing the news first-hand.
A similar act of courtesy happened last year when J.D. Davis got traded at the deadline from New York to San Francisco. Mets general manager Billy Eppler called him and said “hey, this is what’s happening. This is where you’re going to be moved, I think it’s a great opportunity for you. I wish nothing but the best. You’ve been a great person, just go out there and have fun.”
That’s all a player wants, whether the conversation is 30 seconds or five minutes, Davis said.
“I think it speaks volumes to how Billy is,” Davis said. “He said that over the phone, that I’d rather you hear it from me than see it on Twitter or hear it from someone else’s mouth. I can’t speak for any of the other GMs, but at least in that regard, I have respect for Billy because he called me and let me know what’s going on. Yeah, there’s a lot of GMs that will not say anything, and they’ll treat the person like an asset or a belonging that’s just traded away. I think it’s that whole — if you’ve seen the movie “Moneyball” — there are just some GMs that don’t want to have a relationship with players. It’s part of the business of things and that’s just the way they navigate through their business dealings.”
What players wonder, then, is how the lines of communication during a trade can ever break down before reaching them.
Trades often move quickly, especially at the deadline. News can develop rapidly, too.
The chain of events for executing trades involves negotiating iterations of a deal, agreeing to terms, exchanging medical information, getting approval for the league office (and sometimes the player’s union), and informing the players.
Between the initial and final boxes to check, word of a developing deal can leak out to Twitter — the platform which sports journalists use to pump out time-sensitive news immediately — even before a deal is finalized. Teams typically prefer to wait until everything is finalized before informing a player, but that doesn’t always align with journalists who are responsible for obtaining and confirming accurate information and relaying it to the public. Sometimes in doing so, they alert players to a life-changing event before their bosses do.
During his time as the Dodgers’ farm director, Kapler remembers scrambling to get trade information to players before it leaked to the public. It was a “real challenge,” the manager said.
“Sometimes a story breaks and it’s not even official yet,” Kapler said. “I think teams are always looking to be out in front of even lots of speculation. But at the same time, I don’t think those are necessarily appropriate conversations to have with players to have until something actually happens. This is not about the Giants, this is about all teams.”
Bob Nightengale, a national MLB columnist for USA Today, is one of several reporters often breaking transactional news. Nightengale said that trade information that leaks before a deal is officially complete most often comes from agents. In that scenario, one side of a deal reaches social media before the other, implicating players who may have yet to be informed by their team.
“Yeah, you feel bad,” Nightengale said. “They should not find out that way. They should find out from the team or the agent. You should find out from the team or the agent. The team should contact the player or the player tells the agent right away. Sometimes, if a game’s going on or something, the team will tell the agent first. But yeah, you should not be reading about it online or having friends call, say ‘Hey, you got traded.’ That shouldn’t happen and that’s unfortunate, because it changes someone’s life.”
There are front office executives and reporters who would prefer for everything to move smoothly to avoid uncomfortable situations. But the reality is that players will spend much of the lead-up to the 3 p.m. deadline on Aug. 1 scrolling.
“It’s just the way it is nowadays: you find out on Twitter,” Rogers said.