You could also just sign a random 17 year old player, kind of irrelevant that a team would trade you one for a guy you are going to release anyway. I don't follow. How exactly is it irrelevant, that doesn't make any sense. The Brewers were going to let a big league player go, and instead of receiving nothing in return they got a lottery ticket player. Weird that you're creating fictional scenarios to argue that receiving a player instead of receiving nothing is a bad thing.