Padres Sabotaging The Matt Kemp Trade? We Don’t Know.

Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

Okay it’s almost midday and the Matt Kemp trade (which has a soft deadline of tonight) hasn’t been completed. People were wondering about Kemp’s physical, are the Padres nixing it, are the Padres trying to leverage the Dodgers into giving them more, are the Padres trying to delay everything to mess with the Dodgers acquiring Jimmy Rollins?

These are all questions we can only guess at, but lets look at what we do know:

• Somebody leaked information to Bob Nightengale, saying that Kemp has something wrong in his hip, calling it “severe arthritis”.
• The deal has not been agreed to as of 11:30.
• Ken Rostenthal reported that the Dodgers would react in the “strongest possible fashion” if the deal falls apart, whatever that means.
• Jon Heyman then reported that the Padres might drag this out past today

I know this feels like the most frustrating thing ever, I want to be done with the Matt Kemp saga, I just want to see baseball being played. However, lets be honest, the Padres are doing the “right thing” -maybe through faulty methods- but the Padres aren’t necessarily being stingy businessmen, they are simply doing what is best for the club.

Imagine this scenario:

Dodgers on the verge of acquiring Yadier Molina, they receive the physical of Molina, and reveal that Molina has a degenerative hip condition. The Dodgers, not wanting public outrage, take on the contract, execute the trade for an older player with a serious condition without seeking insurance or compensation if he somehow injures himself and that affects his production. April 17th rolls around, Molina collides with Juan Uribe running down the 3rd base line, falls on his side, and suffers a career threatening hip dislocation.

Would you not be upset?

Granted, this feels very, very shady that a team would back out of an agreement, or attempt to change it but how many times has a physical been scheduled 2 days before the “soft deadline” of the deal? How many times has information of said physical been leaked? How many times has a potential breach in health information privacy otherwise known “HIPPA” been invoked?

The “integrity” of AJ Preller and the Padres front office is being questioned, even though learning about a serious, chronic condition that would likely affect Kemp’s production is significant. That feels wrong to me. All we’ve heard is that the Padres are interested in this trade, even after learning about the condition.

There’s so much we don’t know, whether the Padres are still discussing the physical, whether the Padres have scheduled Kemp to meet with a hip specialist, whether the hip specialist is out of town, whether Kemp can’t make it to the specialist today, whether the hip condition is really as significant as it’s being presented, whether the Padres and Dodgers are looking over insurance issues, or compensation avenues to complete the deal, whether a “HIPPA” violation could even be invoked, because I never heard those words uttered when the O’s walked out on Grant Balfour, or when Mike Napoli‘s hip condition was revealed.

You or I have no idea what’s going on, other than the Padres found out about a chronic condition a player they are trying to acquire has. Whatever level of posturing is going on, one thing is for sure, I wouldn’t want the Dodgers taking on a potentially chronically hurt player without some kind of insurance from the team they are trading with.

My honest guess is that the Dodgers tack on another 20 million dollars or so, and the trade goes through despite all of the doomsday scenarios, but i’m not any more confident in that guess than anything else that’s been said about the Dodgers trying to trade an outfielder since 2013.

Right now, as much as it sucks, it’s the “wait and see” game. But we should be used to that by now.