Thinking further about the weird list of pitchers that the Diamondbacks supposedly asked for from the Yankees in the trade for Randy Johnson (just as a reminder: Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, Scott Kazmir, Edwin Jackson, A.J. Burnett, Ted Lilly, Jason Jennings, Kenny Rogers and Shawn Chacon), I was just reminded of the idea of in game theory that the optimal strategy may sometimes be to act in completely random or irrational ways. (Irrationality was, as Schelling put it, one of the tools underpinning nuclear deterrence, for instance.)
What if the D-Backs were truly using this list as a negotiating strategy? (I admit this is less likely than the possibilities that the list was wrong, or that the D-Backs just like to screw with the Yankees’ heads.) With the standard negotiations, you go: okay, I’m going to put my maximum demands on the table, you’re going to put your lowest offer, and we’ll meet in the middle. So if that list had said just Burnett and Lilly, you could see the Yankees going, “okay, they want decent young pitchers, maybe we can persuade them to get someone just a shade worse than those names”. And if that list had said just Hudson and Zito, the response might be “hmm, that’s too much, I’m completely dropping out”, when really the D-Backs might have been willing to accept a compromise candidate somewhere.
With a strategy of randomness, the D-Backs would be saying “well, ha, we control the rights to RJ, and frankly, we’re not giving any clues as to what we want for him”. In other words, it doesn’t set a ceiling for the deal in the same way that naming only players of the same calibre would - the Yankees’ response would (hopefully) be: “I have no idea what they’re looking for, let’s offer something high”. Of course, the Yankees could always drop out, as they seem to have already in the case of the RJ negotiations, but the D-Backs’ strategy is another way of trying to get more than you were hoping for.