One thing stands between the Phillies and a trade for Byron Buxton

One thing stands between the Phillies and a trade for Byron Buxton originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

>The Philadelphia Phillies would greatly benefit from a guy like Byron Buxton in their outfield.

>And just a year ago, the Phillies traded for their closer Jhoan Duran from the Minnesota Twins, the team that currently has Buxton.

>Philadelphia is one of the listed possible destinations in a new ESPN article about Buxton's trade potential, too.

>It all lines up, except for one problem.

>Buxton doesn't want to leave Minnesota.

>"I'm a Twin," he told reporters earlier this season, and not for the first time. He's spoken about wanting to spend his entire career playing for Minnesota, the organization that drafted him.

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>"We've dropped the (trade) odds from unlikely (30%) to extremely unlikely (10%), removing Buxton from the board altogether discounts the possibility of a team blowing away Minnesota with an offer that's too good to refuse," ESPN's Jeff Passan and Kiley McDaniel wrote in a new article on Monday.

>It's an odd situation that doesn't show up all that much in modern MLB operations anymore.

>The reality is that teams are very business-focused, and so if they believe the best move for their long-term viability is trading away a star to build for the future, they do it. There's not often much room for sentiment.

>But it seems that in Minnesota, both the Buxton side and the Twins side are feeling an affection for each other that they don't want to end.

>That's just unfortunate for teams like the Phillies. In most circumstances that look like this, Buxton would be available, and Philadelphia could use some promising prospects to bring him aboard.

>But in this specific instance, the reality that Buxton doesn't want to go anywhere may end up being too big a hump for the Phillies to get over.

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