What is the debate?
Is it Heyward will get paid? Quick answer: He will. I'm guessing 8/$200 MM. Probably an opt out for him after 4 years, but the back end of contract will probably be richer. The market is what the market is and it is inflating. But don't use Melvin Upton as an example. Wren bid against himself and added about $2 MM AAV and a fifth guaranteed year to Upton's contract above what anyone else seemed to be offering. One can contend that's the market; I would contend Wren and McGuirk (and don't let Cox off the hook) created a distortion in the market. I think a more reliable indicator of the inflation in the market is the fact that Mike Minor won his arbitration case last year after totally stinking in 2014.
Is the debate that we should have found a way to keep Heyward? It would have been nice, but the lack of green eyeshades in the Braves' front office made that really difficult. If Heyward was viewed as an anchor player, they should have never signed Melvin Upton. Uggla's extension (which I didn't particularly agree with) was at least structured to end the year Heyward was scheduled to hit free agency. Melvin Upton's was not. Add to that the below market buyouts of free agency for Simmons, Teheran, Kimbrel, and Chris Johnson and a lot of money got soaked up. Other than the Melvin Upton deal (and thewupk can contend that wasn't a bad deal, but giving $15 MM per year to a non-anchor player is an iffy investment if your overall budget is constrained), other deals, while smaller in magnitude, still committed budget dollars that could have gone to Heyward. What gets lost in this--and I'm not pounding on Wren here because I think McGuirk is equally guilty--is that you can only spend a dollar once and a dollar spent on anyone else at any position was a dollar that couldn't be given to Heyward.
thethe is right. Heyward bet on himself and it appears that he was right to do that. Hart is the guy who traded Heyward so he's going to get beat up, but I think he's getting beat up for a near intractable situation that he inherited. In retrospect, I think the only thing that Hart should have been done differently is that the Kimbrel/Melvin deal should have led off the off-season. That could have created the budget space necessary to have serious negotiations with Heyward. It wouldn't have been a guarantee of anything and Heyward was (and is) going to be expensive. Hart gets grilled a bit for supposedly not meeting with Heyward and Close, but if Heyward turned down a Freeman-esque contract already, it was pretty easy to gauge what the overall bounds of Heyward's demands were going to be and they were going to exceed what the Braves could do. Hence, the only question that needs to be answered is what is worth more: trade or draft pick. I think what Hart could have realistically be done differently is unload other commitments and push resources toward Heyward.
Were we lucky or unlucky in 2013? Probably a bit of both. Lucky in the larger sense because Simmons, Chris Johnson, and maybe Freeman had career years (hard to tell on Freeman). Unlucky with Uggla's near total collapse in the second half of the season. Melvin stunk, but Schafer had his career months early in the season. Gattis came out of nowhere as well. Looking back, it was kind of a magical year.
