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A "player to be named later" is a concept, most often associated with Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball (MLB) trades, whereby the terms of a trade are not finalized until a later date, most often following the conclusion of the season.
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David ortiz best player to be named later in mlb history
Description
The player to be named later (PTBNL) is generally used to postpone a trade's final conditions or terms.
This is often done for several reasons. First, the team receiving the PTBNL might not be certain which position they want to fill, so this type of deal gives them more time to figure it out. Second, this type of arrangement gives the team receiving the PTBNL more time to evaluate the available talent on the other team. Also, when a trade takes place during August, a player must clear waivers before he can be traded; the PTBNL concept allows the player's original team to make an attempt to have him clear waivers then finalize the deal, or (if the player cannot clear waivers) wait until the end of the season to trade him.
When a PTBNL transaction occurs, the negotiating teams usually agree on a list of five to ten players that the PTBNL will ultimately be chosen from.
The deal must close within six months of the conclusion of the rest of the trade. If the teams can't agree on who the player will be, then they will agree on a price to be paid instead of a player. It is possible that a player could end up being traded for himself; this has happened four times (see below).
The PTBNL is generally a minor league player or a journeyman major leaguer; very few PTBNLs are of known star quality at the time of trade. However, some minor league PTBNLs have turned out to be productive in the majors: such players include Michael Brantley, Jeremy Bonderman, Scott Podsednik, Coco Crisp, Moisés Alou, Jason Schmidt, and David Ortiz.
Players traded for themselves
Four players in MLB history were traded for a PTBNL, then subsequently traded back to their original teams, thus being players that were traded for themselves:
Dave Winfield and the 1994 strike
Dave Winfield, a Baseball Hall of Famer, near the end of his career, was included in a PTBNL trade complicated by the 1994 strike.
While a member of the Minnesota Twins, Winfield was traded on August 31, 1994 to the Cleveland Indians for a PTBNL. Under the terms and conditions of the trade, if Winfield appeared in 16 or more games with the Indians, the Twins would receive a Class AA-level PTBNL, but if he played between one and 15 games the PTBNL would be Class A-level.
However, the strike was taking place at the time of the trade, and the season was eventually cancelled with no further games played. To settle the trade, Cleveland paid Minnesota a token sum of $100, and the Indians' general manager took the Twins' general manager out to dinner and picked up the dinner tab (official sources list the transaction as Winfield having been sold by the Twins to the Indians).
In popular culture
In the movie Bull Durham, Kevin Costner's well-traveled Crash Davis introduces himself to his new manager as "I’m the player to be named later."
In other sports
In the National Hockey League, future considerations work in a similar fashion to PTBNLs, except that, because the NHL allows teams to trade draft picks, but does not allow teams to trade players or draft picks for cash, draft picks can be traded instead of cash.