Baseball, as many will remind us at first chance, is a game of traditions. This is a nice way of saying that many things are done in baseball simply because that’s the way they’ve always been done. It makes no sense that Challenger the Bald Eagle and Irish tenor Ronan Tynan should be constantly unleashed on terrified Yankees fans, but they are, and will be for a long time, because that’s the way things are done. That’s baseball.

Usually, even ridiculous traditions do no harm. There’s no good reason for elderly coaches and managers to strut around in uniforms with their paunches bulging and bunching in the seams, but no one is harmed by the ancient practice. This cannot be said for the non-waiver trading deadline, which passed yesterday and in so doing committed acts of violence on the sense and reason of all baseball fans. (If you think “violence” is too strong a word, you’ve obviously never watched Steve Phillips and John Kruk debating the merits of Scott Linebrink and Ty Wigginton on ESPN2.) This tradition needs to end.

As an exercise, try to think of one good reason why baseball teams should not be allowed to make trades without passing players through waivers after July 31. I can’t think of one. I can’t even think of any bad reasons. On the least reflection, the trading deadline is shown to be completely arbitrary, something that serves no real purpose other than providing a pretext for baseball Web sites to post legions of pundits at their keyboards providing real-time analysis of deals involving the likes of Kyle Lohse and Matt Morris. Who needs it?

Like many bad things, the trade deadline is a symptom, not a disease. The real problem is that there are just too many regulations on the market for baseball players.

In civilized nations, we accept the idea of regulation because we accept that there are principles that override self-interest. It may be in your interest to sell me your kidney, and it may be in my interest to buy it, but we as a society have decided that we don’t want our fellow citizens to be reduced to repositories of spare parts for the rich. Similarly, we don’t simply accept that self-interest is sufficient to protect our common interests. If there were no FDA, manufacturers of meat products would probably not ship disease-carrying beef to market, if for no other reason than that it would harm their reputations and thus their profits. Sensibly enough, we have enough interest in preventing outbreaks of mad cow disease that maintaining the FDA makes sense.

Baseball, seemingly confusing a sport with a developed economy, has adopted these general beliefs. It may be in the interests of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to sell Scott Kazmir’s contract to the Mets for $100 million, and it may be in the interest of the Mets to buy it, but baseball won’t allow this kind of deal, because of the belief that it would create a permanent underclass of teams that simply serve as repositories of spare parts for the rich. For the same reason, teams can’t trade draft picks.

None of this makes any sense, on two levels. The first is that regulation distorts markets, and so should be used only in proportion to the harm it’s meant to discourage. Corporations outright defrauding investors by lying about how much money they make is a great harm, so endowing a vast regulatory apparatus to prevent this harm makes sense. A team selling players or trading draft picks because it thinks this would be in its interest is, conversely, doing no harm to anyone at all. The Devil Rays, in our example, may be wrong or right about the wisdom of selling Kazmir to the Mets, but the mere fact that they’d be deliberately undermining the quality of the team to make money is no reason to think the deal would harm baseball. Teams make bad trades to save money all the time! By the logic that bars the selling of contracts, the Braves wouldn’t have been allowed to deal their farm system away for an overrated first baseman this week.

The second level is practical. Even if we acknowledge that baseball has a real interest in preventing any team from selling all its players, going 20–142, and depositing a lot of money in the bank, there’s no reason to think this is even possible. The 2003 Detroit Tigers, a team that deliberately played nothing but horribly washed-up veterans, green rookies, and others with no business in the major leagues, went 43–119, and for a variety of reasons that’s probably the upper limit of how bad a team can actually be.

Meanwhile, baseball’s interventions in the market allow situations like that of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who haven’t posted a winning season since George H.W. Bush was president. Would that team really have been worse off trading its draft picks and selling the odd decent player it managed to come up with for cash? They couldn’t possibly have done worse, certainly.

I don’t expect any of this to change, ever, any more than I expect to ever be spared the sight of Tony LaRussa in sanitary socks or the screechings of the famed Irish tenor. We still, though — all of us — can raise our voices and protest something that’s just plain stupid. Baseball’s pooh-bahs ought to act. Let the Mets buy players in exchange for draft picks and cold, hard cash! Let them do it during the playoffs! Steve Phillips did enough harm as a general manager—baseball doesn’t need to maintain a rule for the express purpose of encouraging him to discourse on Dan Wheeler. It needs to end the madness.