This is what I mean by timing or "windage." When you rebuild you have to develop a realistic goal range of when you should begin to compete. When you get close to the "time to compete and stay competing" time, you need waves of talent lined up throughout the minors (which the Braves have, at least in a limited way - the lower waves are much smaller than they should be or could have been due to a number of issues mainly regarding the team breaking rules and/or flirting with the idiotic "reload" narrative for so long) and you need payroll space to feed the fire from available ML talent (mainly FA but possibly taking contract money on in a trade in effort to have a young player come as well that doesn't cost much).
The braves aren't exhibiting the payroll space necessary to really feed the fire right now. They got better ahead of schedule in enough areas to build the fan expectation that they are ready to compete, but still had a significant number of holes, holes that can't be filled, today, from within. That means that they need to compete, have holes but have no money to correctly address those holes which leads to a necessity of filling those holes through trade. Because of that necessity other teams see that and sense opportunity and ask for the best of the best of the minor league trading chips who are part of the close wave of young talent available. So far AA appears to be unwilling to give in to those demands or the temptation which leads to discussions about how Muk coming back on a short deal isn't so bad when in reality it is a move that says we aren't ready to compete.
If you take that a step further "we're not really ready to compete" then becomes a confession that they completely wasted the whatever trade value Teheran had (no question) and likely Freeman's value as well since his very good play will all likely occur during his peak years which fall into an overall area of a time when the team isn't ready to compete WHILE tieing up payroll space that could be better used elsewhere to actually drive the rebuild.
I've said many times: I have no problem with Freeman as a player, person or anything else. He's a very good baseball player who can occasionally show flashes of great. But keeping him around during the enactment and advancement of the rebuild was the equivalent of malpractice UNLESS there was going to be enough payroll space available in the future at some point (say, like now) to finish off the team to the point where young talent can be used in trades of desire as opposed to trades of necessity.
