We are in the thick of Trade Deadline Week, and it is exciting. If you are like me, you have activated push notifications on your phone for trade-rumor tweets. There are a lot of moves made this week, specifically on July 31, the non-waiver trade deadline. While we are bogged down by the details and the rumors, I want to present the frequency of trades throughout the year.

Before diving into the graph, let’s look at a little history. Trades were rather restrictive until 1986 when the rules changed to establish the current trade deadline. The trade deadline didn’t have activity level we have come to expect until the 1990s. In 1994-1995, there was a players’ strike that halted play and subsequently many baseball personnel transactions, so I chose 1996 as the starting point for the data set — that is, the first full year of baseball after the strike. All of the trade data is from Pro Sports Transactions. This data set contains the full spectrum of trades, not just major trades. This also includes trades for international signing-bonus slots.

July 31 has an average of 8.3 trades with an exponentially growing lead up to the deadline. I’ve annotated a few time frames within which there are lot of different trades: Spring Training, the non-waiver trade deadline, the postseason roster deadline and the winter meetings.

This is a more detailed version of the graph above, focused on July and August exclusively. The light blue highlights indicate an average greater than one trade per day. July 2 sees a bump in trades, mainly due to international-prospect signings. The August 31 roster deadline has a significant bump, but it has a quarter of the number of trades compared to July 31.