AA and snit, if this happens to be minor, consider it a warning shot... you two stupid SOBs tell Acuna to hit the baseball in the 2-hole and forget about trying to be Vince Coleman
What the injury is, or how it happened, is not the point. The point is the most valuable offensive player in the sport has a surgically repaired knee, and is still being allowed to run around like a 2 win speedster with no attention paid to regular rest.
Now we all get to sit here and speculate what the OF would look like without Acuna, and the options are pretty awful. The complete inability of Snit to competently manage a bench, which includes giving regular rest to everyday players, means the Braves will have had Eli White in RF if Acuna’s knee isn’t ready because the lack of playing bench players means no quality options will sign with the Braves.
These are all symptoms of a single problem…a dinosaur manager who is supposedly “good at managing people”, and nothing else.
I prefer spending limited resources on things other than a deep bench in the DH era.
Pretty obvious that bullpen is more important.
I agree that Snitker is the main course in this restaurant review, but Anthopoulos is the side dish and his failure to construct a decent bench is worthy of some level of criticism. There's a chicken-and-egg aspect to this argument in that Snitker doesn't provide enough rest to regulars (very true and should be harshly criticized), but when he looks at the bench, who is he going to replace the regulars with? Outside of which catcher is sitting, the bench is basically a bunch of AAAA guys. Presence of the DH mitigates that to some extent, but for all of the outside-the-box thinking Anthopoulos has displayed in other aspects of roster-building, he seems to lack that when it comes to the bench.
Game is different now. There are no more 6- or 7-man benches so running multiple platoons is difficult, but bench quality is still important. I would hope that even if Acuna's injury only sidelines him briefly that the Braves are looking hard at the waiver wire come the end of spring training.
That may be the weakest argument I’ve ever seen on this board. By that logic, why trade for Olson if any random 1b addition would allow them to win enough games? Why sign Lopez if any random arm would still let them win 90 games? Why bother making additions around the edge of the 40 man roster if any random replacement player would fill in just as well?
The goal is to make the best team possible to give the best chances of winning a championship. Having a terrible 4th OFer decreases those chances. Anyone claiming it doesn’t matter is assigning an arbitrary line to when making the roster better no longer matters.
I prefer spending limited resources on things other than a deep bench in the DH era.
Pretty obvious that bullpen is more important.