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People seemed to get more upset over the Olivera deal, but the Swisher/Bourn deal made less sense to me even if those two are off the books after 2016. There's no way Swisher goes anywhere unless he's carrying a big wad of Woodrow Wilsons ($100,000 bill for those who didn't know that) in a briefcase along with him.
THe Swisher/Bourn trade makes sense if you think of things in the context of 2017. Basically this year and the next 2 years of Johnson are about equal. What this trade allows the braves to do is backload a lot of money this year that will then be off the books.
WHen you look at our estimated payroll, for this year in guaranteed money we're at about 73M, next year we're at about 59M, that is including the steep rise in salary from Freeman and slight rises from julio and SImmons. That's why the move is made so next year we can still suck but the following year we can take the money from Swisher/Johnson and invest that into a premium talent.
Now I think the failure to that strategy is that next year's free agents aren't as nice as this year. This yhear we have Heyward, Justin, Price, Greinke, ZImmerman, and though we don't need him, Chris Davis is on the market to draw heat from one of those higher rated players. and there's lots of non-star but solid players like Desmond, Zobrist, etc. 2017 has a few interesting players, Baultista, Beltran and a few other old free agents, pitchers have Strasburg and not much more.
I would personally have rather kept Johnson and used him as a buffer for 2017.