Why did we move on from Fred McGriff to Andres galarraga?

[Mrs. Meta]

So Fred McGriff going into the hall with a blank cap kind of made me think that he would have gone in as a brave had we kept him through 1997 and beyond.

Given that Fred was / is 2 years younger than the big cat, I was wondering if any of y'all could give me a history lesson on this?

[bravesfanMatt]

probably his bad performance in game 5 of the NLCS

[MadduxFanII]

McGriff had a down year in 1997, while Galarraga was still putting up shiny numbers. The Braves probably couldn't have spelled OPS in 1997, and Galarraga had a reputation as a good defender, so Schuerholz's thought process probably wasn't more complicated than that. And hey, all things considered it worked out pretty well.

[CyYoung31]

McGriff had a down year in 97 and 98. Though he lost a year to cancer, Galaraaga cleared McGriff in the two years he played for us.

[chop2chip]

Fred McGriff was from Tampa and so I’m sure the Braves tried to do right by him to let him play with the expansion Rays.

[MadduxFanII]

Funny, I was just reading some 1997-1998 era Baseball Prospectus analysis on the Galarraga signing, and boy howdy, did they hate it. Every snarky comment you can imagine was directed at Schuerholz for that move.

Sort of a useful reminder of the value of intellectual humility.

[Carp]

He definitely was on a downward trajectory his last 2 years in Atlanta and at that time we were spending money like it was going out of style. So we probably saw an opportunity to improve and took it.

Also, 1998 was the expansion year and McGriff was the Rays most expensive player. Decent chance they paid him more than market value because they wanted a popular name to help sell seats.

Of course he is from Tampa too, so may be he just wanted to play for his hometown.

[mossy]

Was interested in this myself. I loved Fred, but couldn't remember why we had moved on to Andres. I was in College when all this was going on, and only had snippets of Braves news back then. The internet was still young by public standards, and I didn't have it in my dorm room and had to fight for access in the school library.

[GovClintonTyree]

Fred started to fade a little, as others have posted, and I remember thinking it was wise at the time because it looked like he was starting to trend down and I thought Schuerholz was following Branch Rickey's adage that it's better to trade a player a year too early than a year too late. But then Fred got a second wind and averaged 148 games. 30 HR, 104 RBI, .291/.379/.512/.891 for four years from age 35-38. To me, that's why he was a Hall of Famer and should have been a long time ago, especially since I'm pretty sure he was clean and a lot of guys (even ones who made it in), weren't.

And Galarraga didn't suck.

[VirginiaBrave]

I won't lie, the year Big Cat had to sit out I was wishing McGriff were still in Atlanta.

[WaitingFor2017]

I won't lie, the year Big Cat had to sit out I was wishing McGriff were still in Atlanta.

32 HR, 104 RBI, .957 OPS in 1999.