There have been teams that have traded for a player before the deadline and then lost some games, so they then traded that same player away and became a seller. I think worrying about 40 man roster spots that will occur months in the future, is a little deep in the woods for your run of the mill article on a player trade you are going to see online. So one would never know how much it may have dictated a trade. You have to be dorks like us to worry to level of detail. I don’t have any idea for their motivation for doing so, but in 2009 the Red Sox traded prospects for Adam LaRoche and then traded him away a week later at the deadline. They were a very good team at the time and all I remember was it seeming sort of strange. I was in Boston at the Red Sox game the day before he was traded (also known as the day the story broke about David Ortiz testing positive for performance enhancing drugs years earlier followed by him hitting the go ahead HR in the game).