Last edited by Enscheff; 10-10-2019 at 02:06 PM.
The thing that really smart teams actually do is to identify the next Cole and fine tune their pitches instead of paying for the work a team did.
Aggression with prospects is fine, but being stupid is not. There should be a way to find a happy medium between a Pirates like idea of being overly cautious with prospects and going stupidly fast with prospects.
I'm not quite sure what opening day payroll is going to look like, but if they just run everyone back they're sitting at about 100m right now. If that opening day payroll is something like 125m, then Grandal might be (like Donaldson) the only major move the Braves make in free agency. So I'm not sure you have a whole lot of opportunity to add that bigger piece at 3B.
You'd basically be hoping for that production to emerge organically.
I still would like for them to explore trading some pitching for controllable position player talent.
Do we have much evidence that the Braves are an organization that is particularly good at doing that?
That's what we hoped would happen with Gausman and not much changed with him. (Not that Gausman was anywhere near as good as Cole).
These things sound nice in theory but until you have actual evidence of it happening in reality, then there isn't much reason to expect it.
So I know this is outside the box but if we re-sign Donaldson and add Grandal would it then make sense to move on from Freeman. I feel like we could get a lot of value back in a trade and could use Grandal at 1st to keep his bat in the lineup on days he’s not catching. Maybe look to sign Kendrick to split time with Grendal there.
So you are looking at
Acuna
Albies
Freeman
Donaldson
Grandal
Markakis
Swanson
Inciarte
(Duvall, Riley, Pache?)
Yeah, that probably works from a hitting standpoint.
Soroka
Fried
Folty
?
?
Melancon
Greene
Jackson
....
Solid start of a pitching staff, but the devil is in the details. Braves got very little out of the internal options to fill it out last year. And of course they Braves also had awful luck. If it repeated season go
Yeah those ?? in the rotation are really big question marks. As I posted earlier we could fill them a number of ways:
1) 2 young uns
2) a scrap heap project like Anibal
3) Newk given another shot in the rotation
4) Trade for a pitcher who is controlled at a low salary
"I am a victim, I will tell you. I am a victim."
"I am your retribution."