Now that The Battery is complete and Kemp's contract will be off the books, the Braves will finally be able to have their Top 10 payroll. Taking into account 2017 MLB payrolls, and adjusting a bit for inflation, the Braves payroll in 2019 should be nearly $170M.
Projecting the 2019 roster:
C - Flowers or Grandall, 4 fWAR (including framing)
1B - Freeman, he will not decline like normal 1B because he is so athletic, 6 fWAR
2B - Albies, realistic comp of Altuve according to tehteh, 7 fWAR
3B - Machado, makes too much sense NOT to sign him, 6 fWAR
SS - Swanson, Larkin/Jeter comps, 5 fWAR
LF - Blackmon, he will LOVE playing for his hometown team, 6 fWAR
CF - Pache, declining Ender replaced by Kevin Pillar, 4 fWAR
RF - Acuna, Venezuelan Trout, 10 fWAR
SP1 - Folty, finally takes that next step to becoming Verlander, 6 fWAR
SP2 - Gohara, CC Sabathia clone, 6 fWAR
SP3 - Wright, some say Strasburg, some say Lackey, either way, 5 fWAR
SP4 - Newcomb, becomes that 5+ win pitcher tehteh projects, 5 fWAR
SP5 - Soroka, I think he's Derek Lowe, 4 fWAR
That rotation has good L/R balance, with Ian Anderson (the next Mike Mussina) and Allard (easy comp to Glavine since he doesn't throw very hard and "just knows how to pitch") waiting in AAA to back them up.
If my math is correct, that's 74 fWAR just from the lineup and rotation. Assuming the Braves can cobble together a decent BP and bench that produces ~5 fWAR, that's 79 total fWAR for the 25 man roster. Add that to 47 replacement level wins, and that's easily a 126 win team.
I'm sure 1-2 guys will slightly under-produce projections, and/or get hurt, so I'll revise the projected win total to 120 just to be safe.
That was one hell of a rebuild!!
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