Time to rent a baseball player again.

Publication: Seattle Times (Seattle, WA)

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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Seattle Times

Byline: Larry Stone

SEATTLE _ The July 31 trade deadline, now eight days away _ tick, tick, tick _ seems to grow in perceived importance every year.

Four months into a six-month season, it has become an unavoidable day of reckoning for teams, a time to look deep into their collective souls and decide, once and for all, if they're a contender or a pretender.

The terms that are in vogue these days are "seller" or "buyer," which can be roughly interpreted thusly: Sellers try desperately to pawn off their overpriced and underperforming veterans on buyers, who manage, as the deadline ticks ever closer, to forget all their well-reasoned rhetoric about fiscal responsibility and building through the farm system.

Yet while trade-deadline pickups are often viewed as purely rent-a-player deals in which the acquiring team sells its future for a pennant run, they don't have to be. Jose Contreras, Scott Rolen,...

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