William Hayes just finished his fifth season with the Rams, and is in the second year of a three year, $21 million contract. Friday, he was traded to the Dolphins along with a seventh round pick (#223) in this year’s draft for a sixth round pick (#206) in this year’s draft as part of a cap crunch and the constant churn of NFL players around this time of year. Hayes had a unique reaction to hearing not only that he was traded, but what he was traded for:
Along with the usual platitudes about thanking the team you just left, Hayes adds in that he “got traded today for a stapler and a coffee machine.” Hayes ends up coming around by saying he’ll get sweet tea in Miami and won’t have to deal with LA traffic anymore. Not so sure about the sweet tea, but leaving LA traffic isn’t a bad trade-off.
While Hayes wasn’t actually traded for a stapler and coffee machine, some players in other sports were actually traded for incredibly trivial things. In the wild west of the NASL, the Fort Lauderdale Strikers seriously traded Walter Restrepo to the San Antonio Scorpions for hotel reservations when they played in San Antonio. And thanks to the 1994 MLB Players Strike, Dave Winfield, who was traded from Minnesota to Cleveland for a PTBNL before the rest of the season was canned, ended up settling the trade by having Indians execs pay for dinner with Twins execs.
Maybe Hayes will struggle to find sweet tea in Miami, but I hear there are plenty of mermaids in South Beach though.
