A lot of people, including, for example, posters on the thread at this post on Dodger Thoughts, have mentioned that the A's can just trade Jason Kendall in the last year of his contract if any of the guys like Jeremy Brown or John Baker or whoever happen to be ready for the show at that time.

But can they? Kendall had to waive his no-trade clause to come to the A's, and I'd assume that what he did was temporarily waive the clause, not actually remove it from the contract. In other words, if the A's felt that Kendall needed to be traded, I'm assuming they'd have to get him to waive the no-trade again, which would probably be quite hard. Consider that he's already waived his no-trade very reluctantly the first time, and that was to go from a hopeless team (for the next two years or so, anyway) to a good one, and a good one in his home state, to boot. Now we are to suppose that he'd just blithely accept a trade from that same, hopefully still good, hometown team to somewhere else, maybe Washington, maybe Toronto, maybe who-knows-where?

Unless this is all moot because trading a player with a no-trade actually completely removes the no-trade clause from the contract, this is, I think, a perfect example of why the A's seem so resistant to handing out no-trades (see the Giambi bargaining, for example).