Braves donate Justin Upton to Padres for prospects

thewupk said:
roll the dice with this group and do what the hobbit did. #onelasttime
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The same group that finished with a losing record, lost 2/5 of their rotation, and has holes at 2b, 3b, and CF?

Sounds lIke a piss poor plan to me. And we'd be in the exact same situation we are in right now next offseason, sans the improved farm and solid pitcher in Miller.

I guess Wren could have spent the money saved from Uggla, Heyward, and Upton and spent most of it on another mid tier talent on the market and we could watch the next crappy version of BJ or Uggla steal a paycheck for 5 years.
 
Heywood said:
Heyward was way more marketable than Freeman, and even the tv stations knew it. When they'd promote upcoming nationally televised Braves games on ESPN or whatever they'd say "Jason Heyward and the Braves take on _________"
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I'd agree with that. But that's not really relevant to the point I was making.
 
holden said:
Well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion. I just go with what my eyes and the numbers tell me.

I know it's easier to tell ourselves the best team wins every year, but I just don't believe that to be the case. Too many sure things fail in baseball. There is no consistent formula to winning the World Series - but there is consistency in getting to the playoffs. Once you're there, good pitching and good managing give you a small edge, but baseball is game that can be affected greatly by individual performances to such a degree that you're basically hoping for the best.
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Braves went to the WS 6 times in the 90's, backed mostly by a dominant pitching staff and a not so great offense (for the most part). Yankees made the WS at least 5 times from 96 to 2003. Cards and Giants have made the WS probably a combined what like 7 or 8 times over the last 9 years? Not mention, how many more LCS's have these teams played in over those spans? How the A's of the late 80s and early 90s? Or the Dodgers in the 80's? The Big Red Machine in the 70's?

That level consistency is more than a simple roll of the dice. Pretty much every decade in baseball history has been filled with multiple WS winners and multiple WS appearances from at least 1 or 2 teams. So there are most certainly ways to build your team for consistently deep playoff runs. History proves that.
 
Carp said:
The same group that finished with a losing record, lost 2/5 of their rotation, and has holes at 2b, 3b, and CF?

Sounds lIke a piss poor plan to me. And we'd be in the exact same situation we are in right now next offseason, sans the improved farm and solid pitcher in Miller.

I guess Wren could have spent the money saved from Uggla, Heyward, and Upton and spent most of it on another mid tier talent on the market and we could watch the next crappy version of BJ or Uggla steal a paycheck for 5 years.
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6 ****ty weeks doesn't outweight the previous 4 months and 2013. At least not to me. The Braves were applauded for not blowing the team up with a similar collapse a few years before that. Seems things turned out ok the following year. Also the Braves had a 2B in La Stella who was good enough to not be a black hole like Uggla was. And they just needed to find a platoon partner for Chris to make that a non ****ty position. So the only real hole the Braves had imo that was unfixable was BJ. Yes they lost 2 starters but pitching is the easiest thing to find right now.
 
Carp said:
Braves went to the WS 6 times in the 90's, backed mostly by a dominant pitching staff and a not so great offense (for the most part). Yankees made the WS at least 5 times from 96 to 2003. Cards and Giants have made the WS probably a combined what like 7 or 8 times over the last 9 years? Not mention, how many more LCS's have these teams played in over those spans? How the A's of the late 80s and early 90s? Or the Dodgers in the 80's? The Big Red Machine in the 70's?

That level consistency is more than a simple roll of the dice. Pretty much every decade in baseball history has been filled with multiple WS winners and multiple WS appearances from at least 1 or 2 teams. So there are most certainly ways to build your team for consistently deep playoff runs. History proves that.
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Mentioning playoffs before the introduction of the wild card is pointless. Shorter series and more teams means more randomness can happen. The Yankees of the late 90's and Giants or recent years seem to buck that trend but let's not act like luck is involved as well. There is no way to build a team for post season success. Any team can get hot at the right time. The Royals proved that this year.
 
thewupk said:
6 ****ty weeks doesn't outweight the previous 4 months and 2013. At least not to me. The Braves were applauded for not blowing the team up with a similar collapse a few years before that. Seems things turned out ok the following year. Also the Braves had a 2B in La Stella who was good enough to not be a black hole like Uggla was. And they just needed to find a platoon partner for Chris to make that a non ****ty position. So the only real hole the Braves had imo that was unfixable was BJ. Yes they lost 2 starters but pitching is the easiest thing to find right now.
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That's one tear. What happens afterwards?

I'm not going to put my eggs in one basket which has a small percentage chacne of success. This was the rebuilding process needed years ago. Sure, we were contenders the past few years but the floor was about to be pulled at underneath us. The farm was awful, we were saddled with awful contracts and two of our best three players were about to leave in free ag3ncy.
 
thewupk said:
6 ****ty weeks doesn't outweight the previous 4 months and 2013. At least not to me. The Braves were applauded for not blowing the team up with a similar collapse a few years before that. Seems things turned out ok the following year. Also the Braves had a 2B in La Stella who was good enough to not be a black hole like Uggla was. And they just needed to find a platoon partner for Chris to make that a non ****ty position. So the only real hole the Braves had imo that was unfixable was BJ. Yes they lost 2 starters but pitching is the easiest thing to find right now.
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We weren't a great team at any point this year. So I didn't find our finish all to surprising. And to this year's team was a lot different than 2013. No Mac. No Huddy. No Medlen.

And how exactly is pitching easy to find? Especially with less than 20 million to spend. We needed 2 starters and had not much funds and basically no one to trade from the farm. And all this without mentioning the Marlins, Padres (even before Upton) and Cubs just got a helluva lot better, meaning more teams that we'll have to battle for the 2nd wild card.

Any way you dice it, the playoffs were a long shot. And we'd be in worse shape than we are right now next offseason.
 
Braves high water mark last year was 11 games over 500. Thats not a great team to be encouraged to go back to war with the following year.
 
I think we all get it that the Braves are trading from the present for the future.

There are a couple things that should be informing the discussion but do not seem to be. One is if you are trading for the future the expected return should be clearly higher than what you are giving up. One reason is the usual discounting of the future. The second is the greater uncertainty about the returns on prospects, especially an injured one like Fried.

Also there seems to be a lack of willingness/desire/ability to try to quantify how much we are giving up in wins in 2015 and how much we might be gaining in the future. I won't go through a step by step analysis, but roughly we are giving up an expected 7-8 wins this season for a similar amount of expected wins spread out over the next five to six years. My take on this years team is that (with Justin and Jason and Hale plus some mid-range veteran to fill out the rotation) would have been about an 82 win team, and now we are a 75 win team. In return we improve by say 1.5 or so wins per year for the next five. Now I understand some people think this is a tradeoff worth making and others don't. It seems that much of the debate is animated by that rather than a difference in assessment of what the moves this off-season imply for wins and losses in 2015 and beyond. If there is someone with a much different take on the impact on wins and losses, to me that would be a much more interesting discussion and I'd love to read their take on the effects on wins and losses in 2015 and beyond of the moves the front office has made.
 
Imo, how many wins we are giving up this yr are rather irrelevant if we weren't going to the playoffs anyways and we couldn't resign Heyward/Upton.

Also, you don't have to look at this as what these players will produce for us. If these players maintain their value, they could be flipped in a year or two for major league players if we felt the need to do that.
 
nsacpi said:
I think we all get it that the Braves are trading from the present for the future.

There are a couple things that should be informing the discussion but do not seem to be. One is if you are trading for the future the expected return should be clearly higher than what you are giving up. One reason is the usual discounting of the future. The second is the greater uncertainty about the returns on prospects, especially an injured one like Fried.

Also there seems to be a lack of willingness/desire/ability to try to quantify how much we are giving up in wins in 2015 and how much we might be gaining in the future. I won't go through a step by step analysis, but roughly we are giving up an expected 7-8 wins this season for a similar amount of expected wins spread out over the next five to six years. My take on this years team is that (with Justin and Jason and Hale plus some mid-range veteran to fill out the rotation) would have been about an 82 win team, and now we are a 75 win team. In return we improve by say 1.5 or so wins per year for the next five. Now I understand some people think this is a tradeoff worth making and others don't. It seems that much of the debate is animated by that rather than a difference in assessment of what the moves this off-season imply for wins and losses in 2015 and beyond. If there is someone with a much different take on the impact on wins and losses, to me that would be a much more interesting discussion and I'd love to read their take on the effects on wins and losses in 2015 and beyond of the moves the front office has made.
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I have no idea how many wins those players are worth, and untim those games are played, we won't know.

You act like this offseason and next years is already done. Like no more future moves can be made?

The market determines return (addressing what we recieved) and opposing GMs believe we won both trades. We have posters here that won't believe that if 2 of them go into Canton.
 
thethe said:
That's one tear. What happens afterwards?

I'm not going to put my eggs in one basket which has a small percentage chacne of success. This was the rebuilding process needed years ago. Sure, we were contenders the past few years but the floor was about to be pulled at underneath us. The farm was awful, we were saddled with awful contracts and two of our best three players were about to leave in free ag3ncy.
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Years ago? This revisionist history that this team sucks and needed to be rebuilt years ago just needs to stop. Last year we were coming off of a division title as one of the youngest teams in baseball. Many articles written about how the Braves were built for long time success with our young team and sudden cash flow into the team. And you were at the forefront championing this too. Now after a horrible 6 week collapse and the Braves front office tanking to rebuild for 2017 and beyond and now you think this is something that should have been done years ago? That's just ludicrous. The idea this team should have rebuilt and punted the cheap years of Heyward and Freeman instead of going for it like they did is as dumb as they come. And it's only something people have come up with to support the current front office because some think they do no wrong. Hart and JS have done a lot more wrong then right lately. Hart sucked major ass in Texas and JS screwed the Braves his last few years as GM. To act like they are some savior duo because of what they did 2 decades ago is pretty naive.
 
nsacpi said:
The current team is about a 75 win team. We are 20M below payroll and we will presumably add another 30M or so by 2017. So 50M extra to play with, which in the 2017 market will get you 5 wins. That takes you up to 80. Then an extra 5 from the maturation of near-major league talent (Bethancourt, Peraza, Sims). Most likely outcome is an 85 win team, but obviously there is a significant range of uncertainty. We could do the reverse of this off-season and cannibalize the farm system for major league talent for example. I suspect some of that will happen.
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I agree. Currently I think this team is a 75-80 win team. We still can't overlook the top 4 in our rotation though. They will keep us competitive. With continued development from Teheran/Wood/Shelby/Minor and some luck offensively we could still compete for the 2nd wild card spot. Once in a playoff series our pitching would translate well.

I have zero confidence in Fredi actually managing a team well but we have some decent options that we could still grind out some runs. John Hart also seems to be pretty high on Dian Toscano. He might be first in line for CF when BJ is finally benched.
 
Tapate50 said:
I have no idea how many wins those players are worth, and untim those games are played, we won't know.

You act like this offseason and next years is already done. Like no more future moves can be made?

The market determines return (addressing what we recieved) and opposing GMs believe we won both trades. We have posters here that won't believe that if 2 of them go into Canton.
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I didn't mean to imply I knew how many wins each player will be worth in 2015 and beyond. But I do think that any discussion worth having about the Heyward and Justin Upton trades has to involve expectations about how they affect wins and losses.

Now not every discussion worth having is about forecasts or expectations. One person might like blue because it reminds him of the ocean and another might prefer red because it reminds her of the sunset. And those two can have an interesting conversation.

I suppose it could be some people like Hart's trades because they like his suits and other disagree because they hate his ties. But my impression had been that the basis for the debates around here centered more about the impact on wins and losses of his moves.
 
Carp said:
Imo, how many wins we are giving up this yr are rather irrelevant if we weren't going to the playoffs anyways and we couldn't resign Heyward/Upton.

Also, you don't have to look at this as what these players will produce for us. If these players maintain their value, they could be flipped in a year or two for major league players if we felt the need to do that.
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None of us (not even me) is capable of knowing whether the team with Heyward/Upton would have made the playoffs. So I would not use that as an assumption for deciding whether or not a particular trade was a good move.

I think the issue of whether we could have re-signed Heyward/Upton is fair game for a discussion. There is a range of opinion here. Some say no. Others say we could have fit one but not two in the budget. Some may argue that both could be signed with back-loaded deals. But all of these scenarios are actually worth analyzing. For example a scenario where we keep Upton and/or Heyward for 2015 and then lose the via free agency has to be analyzed as the "autopilot option" and then you ask whether this or that departure from autopilot would be a good idea.
 
thewupk said:
Years ago? This revisionist history that this team sucks and needed to be rebuilt years ago just needs to stop. Last year we were coming off of a division title as one of the youngest teams in baseball. Many articles written about how the Braves were built for long time success with our young team and sudden cash flow into the team. And you were at the forefront championing this too. Now after a horrible 6 week collapse and the Braves front office tanking to rebuild for 2017 and beyond and now you think this is something that should have been done years ago? That's just ludicrous. The idea this team should have rebuilt and punted the cheap years of Heyward and Freeman instead of going for it like they did is as dumb as they come. And it's only something people have come up with to support the current front office because some think they do no wrong. Hart and JS have done a lot more wrong then right lately. Hart sucked major ass in Texas and JS screwed the Braves his last few years as GM. To act like they are some savior duo because of what they did 2 decades ago is pretty naive.
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preach brother
 
thewupk said:
Years ago? This revisionist history that this team sucks and needed to be rebuilt years ago just needs to stop. Last year we were coming off of a division title as one of the youngest teams in baseball. Many articles written about how the Braves were built for long time success with our young team and sudden cash flow into the team. And you were at the forefront championing this too. Now after a horrible 6 week collapse and the Braves front office tanking to rebuild for 2017 and beyond and now you think this is something that should have been done years ago? That's just ludicrous. The idea this team should have rebuilt and punted the cheap years of Heyward and Freeman instead of going for it like they did is as dumb as they come. And it's only something people have come up with to support the current front office because some think they do no wrong. Hart and JS have done a lot more wrong then right lately. Hart sucked major ass in Texas and JS screwed the Braves his last few years as GM. To act like they are some savior duo because of what they did 2 decades ago is pretty naive.
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Last year at this time, I was in favor of going all in for the next 2 seasons, bringing in guys like Price and/or a hitter like CarGo. But instead, we stood firm and didn't add anyone of note until Meds and Beachy got hurt in ST. And then we traded more semi valuable pieces throughout the year for spare parts instead trading for impact players.

After the season, we lacked the funds and the prospects needed to add the necessary players to make a serious run at a title. I'd rather not watch the Braves struggle for a playoff spot next year and then end up in the same position we are now, and have no prospects to show for it. I hate punting as much as the next guy, but the alternative could set this team back even further than 2017.
 
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