We are roughly an 85 win team as constructed. While the loss on offense will be noticed, we should be a good bit better in the pitching department to help offset it. Phil's are better, but the Nats are significantly worse as of now. Mets are roughly the same.
I think 90 wins is still completely doable with the team as currently constructed, though it would be on the optimistic outcomes. We still should have an average offense and one of the better pitching staffs in the league.
I mean it's hard to know if Didi will rebound, but that's potentially a 2 win improvement. And Wheeler is a good bit better than any pitcher on their team other than Nola. If Cutch comes back and can be healthy, and everyone else only plays at last year's level, they've perhaps added 7+ wins from last year's team.
I think the Braves were a true win ~93-94 win team last year that overperformed a bit. Losing Donaldson loses us about 5 wins. Having a full year with our deadline bullpen acquisitions, plus Smith, plus Hamels should get us back at least 3 of those wins. I'm bullish on D'arnaud and think he'll be able to provide at least a 1 win improvement over Mccann. So if we were to sign someone like Brock Holt by himself I think we'd be fairly close to where we were last year. If we added him plus Ozuna/Castellanos, I think we would be substantially better. But if we just stand pat, I still think that this team has 90-92 win talent with room for more if we see some organic improvement from our young players.
Losing Donaldson sucks, but its not time to panic. This team is still really good. I just hope that by the end of the offseason we'll look better than we did last season, not the same or slightly worse.
The amount of 1 run games we won last year was crazy and surely we won’t get that lucky again. The pitching will be good but if we don’t score enough runs how will that help? I think some underestimate how much losing JD is gonna hurt. The only answer for it is to acquire somebody outside the organization.
Right now we appear, to me, to be a third place team contending for the second wild card. Whoever said above a mid-80s wins team hoping for good luck to carry us to the low-90s is absolutely correct. If we ended the offseason with that still being the case, it would absolutely 100% be a failure.
The current roster is a good bit better than an 85 win unit. Any competently built $130M roster with Albies/Acuna/Freeman/Soroka in it is essentially an 85 win roster with a puncher's chance at the WC. That should hold true for the next few years.
My earlier estimates had the current roster at 90+ wins, with an eye towards improvements at the deadline to boost that a couple wins (AA won't let cOF, SS, or SP suck all year). Adding JD in place of some 1-2 win frankenplayer is only a 2-3 win improvement.
I mean, last year we were about a 90-win talent team with all of those guys and Donaldson. Taking those 2-3 off drops us to 87-88 right there. We may well see guys like Acuna, et al grow and develop to help, but I think the much more sure thing is the continued decline of the guys like Flowers, Duvall, and Markakis bleeding off improvements elsewhere.
The Braves higher order win totals from last year were a 90 win team overall, but the roster was much better at the end of the season than at the beginning.
The projection systems have them at about 40 total WAR as currently constructed, which is roughly an 88-92 win team depending on what value you accept as the wins for a replacement level team. They are 3rd on paper behind the Mets and Nats, but they are most certainly a playoff contender.
So a rob Peter to pay Paul? We already had MM and Greene from the deadline and with Martin and O’Day back in the fold Smith should have only been a luxury if we knew we were gonna get a legit hitter. I know the offseason isn’t over but the thought of a lineup with what we have on the roster right now batting cleanup is pretty uninspiring.
Having a deeper better pen means the starters will be asked to face opposing hitters a third time less...which means the starters will have better stats...I'm just ming the point a deeper better pen should be 3-4 wins better than last year's pen, but there should also be a second order effect from reducing the need for starters to go through opposing lineups a third time
clvclv (01-19-2020)