It's obviously not about "trying to please a few fans in the short-term" - name a team that currently needs any of those veterans you (and others) have mentioned that ANY team needs badly enough today that they'll trade you any prospect that would come close to cracking our current Top 30 prospects.
Pretty interesting timing really - they just finished an interview with DMGM on XM, and he made the same point. He said (paraphrasing) "you don't trade productive players just to be trading. I've been presented plenty of offers for our guys, but no one has offered anything other than what I consider to be duplicates of what we have in our system so far. You never know when someone has a couple key injuries, and we're all well aware that you can get back in this thing in a hurry at this time of year".
If someone offers you another Rio Ruiz for Colon or Phillips or whoever now, why not just wait to see if somebody has an injury in a month that makes them willing to give you something better? After all, we already have one Rio Ruiz - where's another one going to play?
You asked earlier "what are the chances..." - sure, they're not great. The thing is, you just never know this early in the season. All the Mutts' injuries seemed to pop up within a week. While it's not likely, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Scherzer and Strasburg go down in consecutive starts (Medlen and Beachy did not so long ago), and suddenly the Gnats are human too. Some of us just don't see much of a reason to trade away MLB players until you're completely out of it or until someone gives you something that will make you better in the long run. When someone offers that, of course you pounce.
