One of my favorite things in baseball is when a guy who has no business making demands of his team makes demands of his team.
Maybe the most famous example of this was when Derek Bell told the Pirates in early 2002 that he was NOT a bench player and that if they didn’t start him he was going to go into “Operation Shutdown.” The Pirates eagerly took him up on that offer. As of this writing, Operation Shutdown is fifteen and a half years old and still going strong.
More often you see marginal guys demanding trades, as if they had some sort of leverage. Today over at Baseball Prospectus Ben Carsley chronicles some of the more notable recent examples of that dynamic. The most recent one being Asdrubal Cabrera. Carsley analyzes these instances to determine whether the player had a legit gripe and tells us what ended up happening with our presumptuous heroes.
Oh, and he leads with Operation Shutdown, which I must once again stress, is one of the best stories in baseball in the past quarter century.