7/2/15: GDT - Washington Nationals @ Atlanta Braves

[cajunrevenge]

8 innings 1 run with 0 walks wasn't good enough to get Wisler's name on Baseball Tonight in his debut. Just watched the recap on ESPN.com and good news, its the Baseball Tonight spotlight game. Whoppee. Did you know Scherzer was good? So good that he pitched for both sides then hit a solo home run off himself to win the game in the bottom of the 9th. No word on if Banuelos was even in the stadium to witness Scherzer"s impressive feats.

[thethe]

No, they kept Freeman because he is our new Chipper. Freeman doesn't have bad months and he hits well with RISP. He doesn't hit .150 for months like Heywood and Upton. He also torches our 2 main division rivals.

Freeman is one of the best hitters in the major leagues and was willing to sign an extension without milking every last dollar out of the team. There was no way he was going to be traded.

[thethe]

Too bad Freeman got hurt or else the Braves might be in first place right now.

[thewupk]

Too bad Freeman got hurt or else the Braves might be in first place right now.

Or if we had a better bullpen and among other things.

[thethe]

Or if we had a better bullpen and among other things.

Yeah...but the BP is actually decent right now. Just needed a few tweaks. The Freeman loss to me has made the difference in 3 games at least So far.

[KB21]

Freeman is one of the best hitters in the major leagues and was willing to sign an extension without milking every last dollar out of the team. There was no way he was going to be traded.

Agree. Freeman, Simmons, and Teheran were all not going to be traded. Those extensions were done AFTER John Hart came on as a consultant. Those deals were done with the idea that they would be building blocks for the team in the future. I think you would be naive to believe that there wasn't some idea that they would be making a change at the top at the end of the season when those extensions were done. I also believe Hart genuinely wanted to get a deal done with Jason Heyward, but they were not going to give him more than Freddie Freeman because Freeman is the better, more consistent hitter.

[KB21]

Look, Hart has made a lot of good moves for the future but his mandate is different than Wren's. Wren's was win now with what you already have. Hart's was, unload what major league value you have to set us up for 2017. We had a good run under Wren from 2010-2013.

2014 was pretty much his last stand with the 2010 core and it didn't work out.

We've gone over the Wren vs. Hart thing hundreds of times. Hart was only able to stock our a lot of our system with impact quality pitching recently because he used big pieces like Heyward, Justin, Kimbrel, to move them over. These were established talented major leaguers. I give full credit to Hart for maximizing the trade value of Justin and Heyward whom only had 1 year left before free agency.

It's too early to know how this year's draft will pan out in the future. What we do know is Hart has been aggressive in getting international slot money. We'll never know if Wren would've done the same since he was in a win-now mode not rebuild for 2017. The front office has already given up on actually competing this year and next year whereas Wren was about "How can I get us to the playoffs this year". Who knows maybe some of our baby Braves will have matured enough for us to make some noise in 2016, but it appears 2017 is what they're aiming for and they've hinted as much.

What I know is that Frank Wren gave out bad contracts to free agents, and the farm system went from being a top 10 system in baseball to a bottom 5 system in baseball under his watch.