Originally posted on
MLB Trade Rumors
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By Tim Dierkes
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Last updated 2/16/21
Less than three months after their first-round playoff defeat to the Marlins, the Cubs traded second place NL Cy Young finisher Yu Darvish to the Padres. This occurred after the Cubs won their division with a .567 winning percentage, which would have extrapolated to about 92 wins in a full season. I looked back through the last 20 years, and this has never been done: winning teams simply do not trade top-two Cy Young finishers.
As you might expect, teams prefer not to trade top-two Cy Young finishers at all. In the past 20 years, it’s only been done twice in the offseason: the Mets traded 38-year-old R.A. Dickey to the Blue Jays after the 2012 season, and the Diamondbacks dealt 41-year-old Randy Johnson to the Yankees after Arizona’s abysmal 2004 campaign. Let’s see if the more recent Dickey trade bears any similarities to what the Cubs did.