This. And the fact that it always hurts to see the face of the franchise retire/be traded/sign somewhere else. Freddie has been the Braves since the start of the rebuild - before Acuna was Acuna, Ozzie was Ozzie, or Fried was Fried.
Not sure why everyone is so set on it being black or white. Was it the "right decision" from an organizational standpoint? Sure. That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt fans and even management deeply, and Alex' press scrum yesterday reflects that about as well as anything can. The organization and fans haven't seen a situation where doing the right thing hurt this bad since Murphy was traded away. Alex apparently was backed into a corner where he had to take this PR hit to try to keep the window open and he's going to be the bad guy for a while - that's his job. He probably felt he had to make the deal when he did or he was going to wind up with Rizzo because he thought Oakland was going to move him to someone else if he tried to delay any longer and meeting Freddie's demands (which weren't entirely unreasonable regardless of what some say) would more than likely insure that the window closed before the end of Acuna's tenure and would have forced him to possibly trade BOTH Ronald and Ozzie to start the next rebuild.
I think there are plenty of people that understand this was the likely (and probably best) outcome from the start, but there's nothing wrong with being someone who wished Freddie would have announced he was taking more money to go elsewhere BEFORE AA had to pull the trigger - it certainly would have hurt less.
Last edited:
