Frank Wren's Tenure

[sturg33]

A lot of discussion on this going on. We have the Wren haters, the Wren apologists, and the Wren realists.

What I find happening is that the Wren haters are so aggressive that many rational posters are forced to go out of their way to defend him, even though there was much to criticize. His overall tenure, in my opinion, was in between good and exceptional. He was put behind the 8-ball with the Tex trade and dug us out quite nicely over the years.

And while it's true our minor leagues were left barren toward the end, it's also true that our minor leaguers were used to fill the ML roster with good young talent (either by promotion or trades).

This may have been posted during the offseason, but I will post it again for the purpose of discussion. TalkingChop did a deep dive on his tenure.

LINK

Some highlights...

Bad decisions:

• Uggla’s extension

• Chris Johnson’s extension

• Releasing Juan Francisco

• Trading Teixeira for Casey Kotchman

• Signing Garret Anderson

Bad Outcomes:

• BJ Upton’s contract

• Derek Lowe’s contract

• Trading for Ryan Doumit

• DFA of Kelly Johnson

• Signing Chad Durbin

Good Decisions:

• Trading for Jair Jurrjens

• Trading for Omar Infante

• Signing Rafael Soriano

• Signing Matt Diaz

• Signing Eric O’Flaherty

• Signing David Ross

• Trading for Javier Vazquez

• Trading Javier Vazquez

• Trading for Adam LaRoche

• Signing Eric Hinske

• Trading for Rick Ankiel

• Signing Billy Wagner

• Trading for Derick Lee

• Trading for Dan Uggla

• Trading for Juan Francisco

• Trading for Paul Maholm and Reed Johnson

• Trading for Michael Bourn

• Trading for Justin Upton

• Extending core guys besides Johnson

• Signing Aaron Harang

• Signing Ervin Santana


Additionally, drafted/signed players included Simmons, Gattis, Wood, & Beachy. And current minor leaguers Davidson, Peraza, & Albies - whom I believe thethe referred to as all top 100 prospects. You can also remember that Gattis was responsible for Folty & Ruiz.

Lastly, he drafted many folks who were used in trades to improve our roster. Wren was exceptional with trades - and he used many minor league pieces to acquire folks who were overwhelming Major League upgrades.

Unfortunately, he missed badly on most first round picks.

So ignoring the "he was a dick" stuff... I believe looking at the overall picture of the Wren tenure, it's really difficult to say he didn't move the organization forward.

[zitothebrave]

T obe fair, based on grumblings. Moves like getting kotchman back for Tex and DFAing KJ were prompted primarily by Bobby. IIRC Bobby wanted a MLB first baseman. I believe the Rays offered us better players for Tex, And Cox wouldn't utilize KJ in any other capacity. Prado beat him out for 2B, that's true, but why wasn't KJ put in LF? We kepty trotting out Garrett Anderson. WE could have avoided the Melky Cabrera fiasco, so on so forth.

[smootness]

T obe fair, based on grumblings. Moves like getting kotchman back for Tex and DFAing KJ were prompted primarily by Bobby. IIRC Bobby wanted a MLB first baseman. I believe the Rays offered us better players for Tex, And Cox wouldn't utilize KJ in any other capacity. Prado beat him out for 2B, that's true, but why wasn't KJ put in LF? We kepty trotting out Garrett Anderson. WE could have avoided the Melky Cabrera fiasco, so on so forth.

This may be true, and that certainly hurt as well. I do think leaving Schuerholz and Bobby in charge doesn't necessarily mean everything will be better. But I like the strategy we're using right now - trade guys you probably won't re-sign, or guys who are flawed for as much high-ceiling talent as you can, then draft high-ceiling guys throughout the draft.

I like that strategy on principle much better than what we had been doing the last several years.

[sturg33]

This may be true, and that certainly hurt as well. I do think leaving Schuerholz and Bobby in charge doesn't necessarily mean everything will be better. But I like the strategy we're using right now - trade guys you probably won't re-sign, or guys who are flawed for as much high-ceiling talent as you can, then draft high-ceiling guys throughout the draft.

I like that strategy on principle much better than what we had been doing the last several years.

Did we do that this year? Obviously Allard, but that was a no brainer... it seemed we took a lot of "safer picks" in the next several rounds - but I haven't looked as hard as others

[zitothebrave]

In Wren's defense, he was left with a pretty bad system, late year JS did get some premium talent like Heyward, Freemna, Hanson, and a few others. But that was it. They also churned out a whole bunch of bums who didn't contribute to the minors leaving our upper minors bare. Wren's first job was addressing that issue. Look at Wren's last draft after finally we were restocked in A+ and higher, he used our first 2 picks on massively projectable high ceiling players in Davidson and Fulenchek.

Ignoring the quantity of picks for a second. Braves in the first 10 rounds took 8 college players. Last year they took 7. Granted they drafted more HS kids as well this year from having more picks (5 vs 3) but it's not like we had a drastic change in draft strategy. We're still a very smart organization. Wren's tenure had some draft failures. BUt then again so did the later years of JS's reign.

[weso1]

I wasn't out on Wren till the CJ signing. That put me over the edge.

Now with that in mind, I wouldn't say he was good or exceptional. I would say he was decent, but certainly not worth vehemently defending. I mean in the end there we were with a bottom of the league minor league system and a team that finished .500 with very little starting pitching, no money and key guys in walk years. What he did up until that point has relevancy, but the future didn't look all that bright.

In the end as I've been saying for a while now, I think it just all came down to the team just needing to make some kind of major change. Sometimes you just need a change to liven things up a bit.

[Julio3000]

I wasn't out on Wren till the CJ signing. That put me over the edge.

Now with that in mind, I wouldn't say he was good or exceptional. I would say he was decent, but certainly not worth vehemently defending. I mean in the end there we were with a bottom of the league minor league system and a team that finished .500 with very little starting pitching, no money and key guys in walk years. What he did up until that point has relevancy, but the future didn't look all that bright.

In the end as I've been saying for a while now, I think it just all came down to the team just needing to make some kind of major change. Sometimes you just need a change to liven things up a bit.

The team that lost two good starters to TJ in ST? Otherwise the 2013 rotation is Medlen, Minor, Teheran + mix & match Beachy, Wood, Hale, whoever.

[nsacpi]

His record was mixed, probably a little better than average.

But if the stuff about his being a micromanager who drove away good people is true, then I'm fine with his firing.

I do object to the rationale given by the front office. The whole going back to the Braves way and rebuilding the farm system spiel. The farm system has been incredibly productive. It was at low ebb mainly due to the large number of graduates to the major leagues. Some of them whizzed through the minors very fast. I find it amusing that the state of the farm system only became an issue after the major league team stumbled.

When I have some time I plan to do a study of how productive our drafts have been over the years. There is more involved than just counting the number of players who reached the majors. You have to look at how valuable those players were during the pre-free agency years. You have to look at where we were picking and how many early picks we had. And you have to have some sort of expected value attached to each pick and see how well the team did relative to that expected value.

[smootness]

I wasn't out on Wren till the CJ signing. That put me over the edge.

Now with that in mind, I wouldn't say he was good or exceptional. I would say he was decent, but certainly not worth vehemently defending. I mean in the end there we were with a bottom of the league minor league system and a team that finished .500 with very little starting pitching, no money and key guys in walk years. What he did up until that point has relevancy, but the future didn't look all that bright.

In the end as I've been saying for a while now, I think it just all came down to the team just needing to make some kind of major change. Sometimes you just need a change to liven things up a bit.

This pretty well sums up my thoughts. I was all aboard the Wren train for a while. But he gave out some really bad contracts, and it became clear pretty quickly that our future wasn't all that bright.

I didn't turn on Wren after we got rid of him. I turned on him over a year period, and by the time we let him go, I was fully on board with it.

[smootness]

Wren does get some credit for having guys like Upton and Gattis to be able to trade, no doubt. And yes, the trade to get Upton was brilliant; we took advantage of the D-Backs's questionable philosophy.

But the status of the system was no longer simply a result of calling guys up. Heyward and Freeman were up by 2011; they would have been up by 2014 no matter what. Simmons was a JUCO pick; he didn't really come up super early. Wood was a college pick. The system was at a low point in terms of talent with very little ready to graduate but also very little talent at the lower levels, either.

And sure, that became more evident when the team struggled. Because when you win 96 games, it's easy to say, eh, we have time to build the system up. Once you win 79 games, you become much more reliant on the talent in your system, and especially after a year where guys didn't really elevate their prospect status, we looked at our system and realized it was barren. If you're in that position, especially if you have concerns on re-signing the major league talent, it's time to make some moves.

[smootness]

In Wren's defense, he was left with a pretty bad system, late year JS did get some premium talent like Heyward, Freemna, Hanson, and a few others. But that was it. They also churned out a whole bunch of bums who didn't contribute to the minors leaving our upper minors bare. Wren's first job was addressing that issue. Look at Wren's last draft after finally we were restocked in A+ and higher, he used our first 2 picks on massively projectable high ceiling players in Davidson and Fulenchek.

Ignoring the quantity of picks for a second. Braves in the first 10 rounds took 8 college players. Last year they took 7. Granted they drafted more HS kids as well this year from having more picks (5 vs 3) but it's not like we had a drastic change in draft strategy. We're still a very smart organization. Wren's tenure had some draft failures. BUt then again so did the later years of JS's reign.

You bring up some good points. But part of the new strategy is stockpiling picks, which Wren never did. So obviously taking 8 college players in 10 picks is different than taking 7 in 12 picks.

We did take high-upside guys early this year. Our first 4 picks were high-upside HS picks, and our 5th was a high-upside college pick. They may have been considered reaches by some rankings, but they're still high-upside picks.

[zitothebrave]

You bring up some good points. But part of the new strategy is stockpiling picks, which Wren never did. So obviously taking 8 college players in 10 picks is different than taking 7 in 12 picks.

We did take high-upside guys early this year. Our first 4 picks were high-upside HS picks, and our 5th was a high-upside college pick. They may have been considered reaches by some rankings, but they're still high-upside picks.

Well the numbers were 7 out of 10 vs 8 out of 13 so basically one more HS kid picked on average. Not a drastic change. The thing I think that happened during Wren's tenure that we're seeing now is with draft slots we're seeing more college kids go early because you're not seeing teams able to go over slot to sign HS kids who may have 1st round talent in the 4th who really want to go to school.

[Knucksie]

WE could have avoided the Melky Cabrera fiasco, so on so forth.

If Melky had juiced up in Atlanta instead of SF, he maybe could've had an All Star season, and then that wouldn't have been Wren's fault.

[cajunrevenge]

I file Wrens tenure as could have been worse. There are a lot of worse GMs than Wren. If he didn't waste his first round picks on low ceiling college finesse pitchers he might have had a great run.

[yeezus]

Wren did a lot of good things. In the end though, we had a bunch of guys set to become FAs and get paid big money and absolutely nothing on the farm, at any level, to replace them. And there wasn't a lot of pitching, either. It could've gotten real bad if we didn't sell off assets that were about to (probably) walk.

[50PoundHead]

I'm one of the few who was skeptical on the Uggla trade from the get-go, but absolutely thought the extension was ridiculous. He also bid against himself for Melvin Upton, Jr., and went about $2 million per year above that market.

But those thoughts aside, I always found Wren too impulsive. I think the Chris Johnson contract is case in point. He made some very good trades, but I still think we were headed for a crossroads post-2015 and there was no contingency plan. I think a plausible case can be made that we should have patched things together as best we could have for 2015 and then let all the free agents walks and make a bunch of other trades in hopes of putting a core together early into the new stadium's life, but that doesn't allow us to escape the fact that big changes were in the offing.

I find it difficult to believe that trading for Rick Ankiel can be viewed as a good move.

[sturg33]

I'm one of the few who was skeptical on the Uggla trade from the get-go, but absolutely thought the extension was ridiculous. He also bid against himself for Melvin Upton, Jr., and went about $2 million per year above that market.

But those thoughts aside, I always found Wren too impulsive. I think the Chris Johnson contract is case in point. He made some very good trades, but I still think we were headed for a crossroads post-2015 and there was no contingency plan. I think a plausible case can be made that we should have patched things together as best we could have for 2015 and then let all the free agents walks and make a bunch of other trades in hopes of putting a core together early into the new stadium's life, but that doesn't allow us to escape the fact that big changes were in the offing.

I find it difficult to believe that trading for Rick Ankiel can be viewed as a good move.

I'll give it to you - you were always consistent in your criticism of Wren's apparent impulsiveness.

[Hawk]

He also bid against himself for Melvin Upton, Jr., and went about $2 million per year above that market..

Actually, significantly more than that. According to Jon Heyman the second best bid (from Philadelphia) was only $40MM, so basically $7MM per year ($35MM total) above what Philadelphia bid.

If that figure is indeed accurate, Wren got majorly skunked.

Of course, had Upton produced (at all) we would all probably be singing a very different tune. At the time, we needed a CF and Upton represented the best possible upgrade available.

[keithlaw]

I'm one of the few who was skeptical on the Uggla trade from the get-go, but absolutely thought the extension was ridiculous. He also bid against himself for Melvin Upton, Jr., and went about $2 million per year above that market.

But those thoughts aside, I always found Wren too impulsive. I think the Chris Johnson contract is case in point. He made some very good trades, but I still think we were headed for a crossroads post-2015 and there was no contingency plan. I think a plausible case can be made that we should have patched things together as best we could have for 2015 and then let all the free agents walks and make a bunch of other trades in hopes of putting a core together early into the new stadium's life, but that doesn't allow us to escape the fact that big changes were in the offing.

I find it difficult to believe that trading for Rick Ankiel can be viewed as a good move.

The grading of those transactions is pretty bad. Signing Durbin, for example, was a questionable "process", but a great outcome (he had a 130 ERA+ over 60 IP for us).

[zitothebrave]

I'm one of the few who was skeptical on the Uggla trade from the get-go, but absolutely thought the extension was ridiculous. He also bid against himself for Melvin Upton, Jr., and went about $2 million per year above that market.

But those thoughts aside, I always found Wren too impulsive. I think the Chris Johnson contract is case in point. He made some very good trades, but I still think we were headed for a crossroads post-2015 and there was no contingency plan. I think a plausible case can be made that we should have patched things together as best we could have for 2015 and then let all the free agents walks and make a bunch of other trades in hopes of putting a core together early into the new stadium's life, but that doesn't allow us to escape the fact that big changes were in the offing.

I find it difficult to believe that trading for Rick Ankiel can be viewed as a good move.

The Uggla trade I was fine with, it was the immediate extension I was concerned with. I will give Wren credit, he was smart enough to stockpile right handed power before it became the highest premium in baseball. It's why we got such a big return for Gattis. But, Uggla was too risky, he was old and a 2B. 2B age fast (see Chase Utley, maybe the best 2B I've ever seen) ANd I don't think he bid against him self for the Beej. I think he overpaid to get him to sign. And I think the reason he did that was cause of the Lowe fiasco. If anyone forgets we wanted Burnett (I didn't want any of the starting pitchers from that FA, but the FO has money) and he was off the market so we went after Lowe and were forced to pay him 15M more than we wanted to because he preferred the Mets. After that fiasco Wren wanted to rush and get his guy. Of course he was burned becfause the Twins traded both Span and Revere and the CF market was oversaturated and Bourn signed for way less. It's a damned if you do damned if you don't kind of thing. If he waited and BOurn and Beej both signed. THe Twins could ask a fortune for Span. So on so forth. I don't hate him for the BJ signing. I didn't agree with it. I preferred Bourn or Span. But it made sense and wasn't a true massive overpay. 2M per year may be about right but when inflation and what not is factored in that's not really a big deal.

Chris Johnson extension I don't think was impulsive really. I think it was CJ wanted to stay a Brave and signed a contract that is below market for him. We basically traded our flexibility to cut him on a gamble that he would hit enough to make a ton on him or trade him for value. i'ts not a bad gamble.

I think we should have made a run for it in 2015. Traded CB and Sims for a pitcher, sign douchebag to backup Gattis, sign Rasmus, Keep Harang and go from there.

CF - Jason
RF - Justin
1B - Freddie
C - Gattis
LF - Rasmus (maybe switch him and Justin)
2B - TLS
SS - SImmons
3B - Johnson

What I like about that lineup is that you have 3 guys at the top who get on base, 2 of them have great power, then you have 2 pure mashers behind them, and then you hit the skids a bit. TLS should be a solid hitter. Simmons is a solid hitter, CJ when he's on is a solid hitter.

Rotation
Wood
Julio (though obviously this would stink this year)
Harang
Pitcher from trade
Perez

BTW I consider overall the positves we've seen from Perez to be better than the negatives from Julio in that scenario

So we clearly take a hit in a few areas. Obviously no Shelby hurts and Jace and Maybin have been pleasant surprises. But I do think that removing the scenery change, Jason would be performing better in ATL, Rasmus and Upton would be massive huge king kong upgrades over Mukaki and well Kelly Johnson and the turds we've been running out in LF. Gattis would smash our catcher production. So basically I see gains at LF (massive) RF (huge) and C (big enough) for maybe a slight loss in CF (Jason probably doesn't hit as well as Maybin has but is better in the field) and a big loss at 2B (TLS doesn't have the glove Peterson does) I think that more than overcomes our pitchign loss and that doesn't include the factoring in of keeping Kimbrel and Walden.

I do think we were a team who could have been in the playoffs with a few moves and ocne you're in the playoffs who knows what could happen. Wren probably would have been around this year too if he didn't make a move for Fredi's job. I think that stepped outside of JS and BObby's plan and for doing that he was ****canned.