I think the Braves did fine with their trades of the rentals. It's the guys who were under control that they miscalculated their value.
If you have a lease on a beach house that has one year left should you move to the beach house for a year to get "value" from it or sell it off the remaining year of the lease to reap value off a depleted asset.
Sure you could live in the house and get value out of it, but your business isn't at the beach and after a year you won't have a house and your business would have suffered.
So seems like the better plan is to put your remaining lease on the market and take the best deal. Not I'm sure that folks around here are experts in the market value of a beach house lease and would have in their own head have totally gotten more for the asset than the seller ended up getting. But that's why he have FSBO. People that think their things are more valuable than they actually are.
First, the one option you know you always have is to not make the deal. In the case of the Miller trade, we know the D-Backs would have been wise to simply not make that trade. However, the Braves weren't in that position with a lot of guys. With guys like Upton and Heyward it was trade them now or get very little when they leave via free agency. However, with guys like Kimbrel and Simmons, not trading them was a more valid option.
With that being said, not knowing what other offers are on the table doesn't mean we always have to simply trust our front office. However, it's also why it's hard to judge a GM by one trade. We don't know the other offers or how the market viewed guys. So it's difficult to say we made the wrong choice. This is why you don't view trades in a vacuum. You have to look at what a GM does over the course of a lot of moves to see patterns that develop. If we're consistently ending up on the short end, we have a problem.
I just wish we would have followed the genius white soxs. I mean they traded Sale for.. quick look at stats.. well they traded Sale for Moncada and hopefully a reliever one day.. But they cleaned up on Eaton.. look at that haul.. wait.. 2 walk artists and a 22 year old A baller.. Well don't worry.. when they trade Big Q, they will have the best system evar!!! Hope Coppy took some notes.
/that was my short sample size over reaction for the day.. feel better now..
I just can't agree.
We won the Heyward deal. We were not going to win. We traded one year of a mostly defense RF for multiple years of solid starting pitcher who pitched like a legit 2 for us. We also got Jenkins who did not do well for us but we turned into Luke Jackson who will be a good pen arm IMO. Clearly we didn't know the DBacks were going to be idiots at the time but I think we did very well in the deal as it is. I do not care for adding WAR in this way, no context.
Upton deal is a huge win for the braves. 1 year of JUp for full service time control of Fried, Mallex and Peterson. I know most haven't played yet. But I think Fried is going to be TOR. Mallex was a good 4th OF. Peterson I think is going to be a 2 WAR player at a corner.
The others I agree w/ the verdicts.
That's the thing...they are prospects. They don't "Make it" all the time. Pass the crystal ball to the Braves FO if you got one!
Ivermectin Man
And you can't be objective about anything. Attaching Melvin with Kimbrel was a mistake. A lot of people saw that at the time and it only got worse when the market for elite relievers exploded the following year. Selling Simmons off for what we did was a mistake as well. Those were bad trades. Luckily there has been enough good in other other trades and through the draft to counter that.
Nobody is going to be right 100% of the time. The one area where I would say the FO has had issues with is valuing the players they traded that still had years of control. Even Gattis was short changed as a player that couldn't stick at catcher and he's shown to be a 2 WAR player there when he's not pretending to be a left fielder. T
I think only two of the trades were truly bad: Kimbrel and Olivera. We have seen the type of talent Kimbrel should have gotten in return, and we all know how bad the Olivera deal was (and then compounded with the subsequent bad Kemp acquisition).
Only one of the trades was truly good, which is obviously the Swanson/Inciarte deal. That one trade made up for the lost value the Braves suffered in the Kimbrel and Olivera deals. So yes, thank God for Dave Stewart.
All the rest of the deals are nothing special. Any competent sports GM would have done about the same if given identical scenarios.
So 2 bad trades, 1 amazing trade (largely the result of luck) that largely covered up the 2 bad ones, and a bunch of average trades. Precisely why I rate Coppy as an average or slightly below average GM.
His inability to identify and fix the most obvious holes on the MLB roster with cost effective solutions is what makes him below average in my evaluations. 3B has been a black hole since Chipper retired, yet the Braves insist on going with guys like Garcia instead of signing below market guys like Freese. Corner OF has produced poorly, especially LF, and the solution was to acquire Markakis and Kemp during rebuilding years. There isn't a single viable starting catcher in the entire system, and they couldn't beat the Twins' $25M offer for Castro. The bench this year is absolutely putrid, and there were options for a legit 4th OFer all offseason, yet the Braves have Bonifacio on the roster.
The examples go on and on...
Last edited by Enscheff; 04-19-2017 at 11:18 AM.
Tapate50 (04-19-2017)
At the risk of going into another rant against WAR let me say that I doubt Miller would have imploded if he stayed with Atlanta nor do I think Heywood would have had such a great year if not with the Cardinals. They seem to have the magic dust Bobby Cox used to have to get the most out of players.
"Donald Trump will serve a second term as president of the United States.
It’s over."
Little Thethe Nov 19, 2020.
So if a trade is about the right value on both sides, then the deal is average, or nothing special. But if a team clearly wins a trade, then it's luck.
And we're going to render a verdict on all of this 1-2 years after the deals when a lot of our return was for prospects who weren't expected to make an impact within the first 1-2 years. Got it.
National writers are virtually unanimous in the assertion that our rebuild has been a clear success so far.
You project a guy who put up close to 4 WAR in the one season we had him, and about 10 WAR in the 3 seasons before the trade, to accumulate about 2 WAR over the next 3 years?
I would argue that his struggles last year were almost entirely caused by the pressure placed on him by being the other side of one of the most lopsided deals we've ever seen.
Having a successful rebuild doesn't make a GM above average. Literally every single team that has undergone a rebuild in the last decade has been able to construct a good farm system. Nothing special is happening in Atlanta. Coppy isn't weaving any voodoo magic.
Look, I know it's hard to admit Coppy isn't exceptional. Me calling him average isn't a knock...it's just calling someone average. Maybe you can relate to a squirrely bald white guy and that's why you love him so much, but it's not the worst thing to call a guy an average or below average MLB GM.
Except that those writers are all pretty much in unanimous agreement that they've never seen a system this deep in legitimate talent. So it's not quite right to say that this rebuild is just like any other. Yes, of course you will always receive young talent when selling off assets. But the speed with which we've rebuilt the system, and the extent to which we've used every method to continue to add high-upside talent, is not exactly 'normal' or 'nothing special'.
I'm not trying to say that it's unquestioned that Coppy is better than all other GMs in baseball. I'm not yet sold that he's clearly among the top handful or anything. But calling him below-average when we haven't even had enough time to see if his strategy to go after upside at all costs is going to work is asinine. Is trading a somewhat known commodity in Mallex for the pure upside of Gohara smart? Will taking upside over injury risk to get better talent in Fried play out to our benefit? Is taking so many HS arms at the top of the draft smart? Is going after a bunch of guys, especially pitchers, in the hopes that if enough hit, we're set, a good strategy? We don't really know yet. We can guess and use historical data and valuation estimates and whatnot to inform that guess...but we don't know.
Look, I know it's hard to admit that Coppy may be better than you give him credit for being. Me saying I agree with his overall strategy and a lot of the moves he's made isn't a glowing endorsement of everything he does or touches...it's just saying I agree with his overall strategy and a lot of the moves he's made. Maybe you can't relate to someone who doesn't talk sick, reality-altering trash at cornhole and that's why you can't stand the thought of him, but it's not the worst thing to say the GM of a team you're not particularly a fan of may be a good one.