Your math in this thread is seriously flawed. As someone else mentioned, the $25M the Mariners owed to Silva was a sunk cost. What the M's were willing to do was pay an extra $5M over two years to have Bradley instead. No different than a free agent offer of 2/$5M, except that it also provided the M's an out from their horrible Silva contract. If another team came in with an offer that would've netted the Cubs more than $5M in savings, then they'd probably have Bradley on their roster right now. Apparently none did. That's not necessarily true. If Ricketts truly put a limit on the amount of money the Cubs could send with Bradley (which is just a terrible way to do business, and paints a grim picture of the future) then some team could've been willing to pay 2Y/10M but didn't have an awful, negative value contract to send back in return.