McGuirk: Coppella Exit Like Cutting ‘Cancer’ To Move Ahead

thewupk said:
Saying they weren't good players to start with is extreme revisionist history.

They Braves produced and lost due to injury Hanson, Minor, Beachy, Medlen, and Jurrjens over a 5 year period. Some of them they got more use of than others but that's a huge group of pitchers to actually make it and perform and then get nothing out of. Only Julio has escaped the injury bug from that era. Similarly if the Braves produce 5 quality starters out of the current group of prospects and then they all get hurt relatively early in their careers we will be saying the same thing now. Not many teams can overcome that. The Braves almost did but lost Medlen in 2014 and Minor had a hurt dick and both haven't been quality starters since. That would put a different spin going into 2015 with Medlen, Minor, Julio, and an upcoming Alex Wood in the rotation.
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Never Forget.
 
Southcack77 said:
I guess if the Braves had been able to have complete health amongst its thin rotation of mostly fourth and fifth starters it could have continued being a decent non contender for a couple more years.

It doesn’t matter. It didn’t happen and it’s nit an especially unusual or unexpected result t have pitching injuries. If we pret he that doesn’t happen and it’s some bizarre quirk if fate, which it decidedly isn’t we still don’t have much.
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Hanson was a great pitcher before getting hurt. That being said his mechanics meant he was likely to get hurt. Hanson's rookie and second year were both great seasons. Jurrjens was also pretty great before his knee injury. Beachy and Medlen were ticking timebombs of health. They had brutally inefficient mechanics. Hanson's were cringeworthy but at least he had leg drive and hip separation. Minor is an interesting one. IMO he was never trusted as much as he should have been by management. We should have shopped Lowe around going into the 2011 season rather than hope for a bounceback and gone with Minor. I think that could have reshaped his career.
 
Southcack77 said:
And if they had lots of prospects in the system instead of none it would be different too.

Counterfactuals are ... counter-factual.

Also, Hansen, jurrjens, and Minor weren’t particularly good players to start with.
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Teheran and Delgado were highly rated prospects. Wood had been drafted.
 
sturg33 said:
Didn't Wren draft or sign the likes of Gattis, Kimbrel, Simmons and Wood? And of course Albies and Acuna.

And didn't he also make the great trade for JUpton?

Aren't those the assets that Coppy used to acquire the ****ty pitching prospects?
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JS didn't exactly leave Wren much of a farm either , for what it's worth but. .. Wren wasn't the best at drafting, but outside of the Tex trade we won every trade. Wren was also pretty good at putting together good pens (which Freddi promptly destroyed see... Venters). I kinda think he got blamed for the 2014 disaster. Always thought he got scapegoated because of that.
 
Managuarantano's Volunteers said:
Jurrjens was good, but I feel like the stats part of our fanbase treated him like Williams Perez so we never really saw true talent level.

Minor and Hanson would have been legit in my opinion
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I know it feels like a certain part of the fanbase trashed JJ but he was a good pitcher. He just wasn't the ace that some made him out to be.
 
Of all those guys, only Hanson was really a potential TOR starter. even Minor never had that potential (even when drafted inside the top 10).
beachy and medlen were fine, but were guys i think you were hoping to get a couple to a few good years out of before injury or ineffectiveness.
wren was good at finding BP arms so he's got that.
 
I expected Beachy and Medlen to be #2/#3 in the rotation for years. I loved the way Medlen pitched.
 
DirkPiggler said:
The Braves were set up to fail going forward, as they had no starting pitching and no money to bring any in. They were never going to be able to resign Heyward or the good Upton, had no one anywhere near ready to replace them, and had no prospect capital with which to buy future replacements. The team was a giant **** sandwich for sure. Wren deserves a fair share of the blame for that. Schuerholz deserves at least as much of that blame.
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I don't think that it can be argued that in a now-for-later sense, we won most of the trades Wren pulled off, but it was now-for-later. We were loaded to go for it all and didn't get the brass ring. We were set for a rebuild and I think one can argue persuasively that we perhaps should have held onto Heyward and J. Upton through their contracts and trying one last time, but the day of reckoning had arrived. I'm not going to assign blame, but we were geared toward competing in a short window and the window was going to close after 2015. The ranch hands at the Triple J accelerated the re-build by a year and the results have not been that promising. On balance, I give Wren a C- and The Triple J crowd a D.
 
50PoundHead said:
I don't think that it can be argued that in a now-for-later sense, we won most of the trades Wren pulled off, but it was now-for-later. We were loaded to go for it all and didn't get the brass ring. We were set for a rebuild and I think one can argue persuasively that we perhaps should have held onto Heyward and J. Upton through their contracts and trying one last time, but the day of reckoning had arrived. I'm not going to assign blame, but we were geared toward competing in a short window and the window was going to close after 2015. The ranch hands at the Triple J accelerated the re-build by a year and the results have not been that promising. On balance, I give Wren a C- and The Triple J crowd a D.
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The problem with holding those guys for one more year is that we were short at least two starting pitchers, with no money to buy them on the open market and no prospect capital to trade. We basically had Teheran and Wood, and could've probably afforded to bring back Harang. The competition for the last two spots in the rotation would've been between David Hale, Williams Perez, and maybe Ryan Weber and Sugar Ray Marimon. No team is getting to the postseason with that many gaps in the rotation. It was time to rebuild.
 
50PoundHead said:
I don't think that it can be argued that in a now-for-later sense, we won most of the trades Wren pulled off, but it was now-for-later. We were loaded to go for it all and didn't get the brass ring. We were set for a rebuild and I think one can argue persuasively that we perhaps should have held onto Heyward and J. Upton through their contracts and trying one last time, but the day of reckoning had arrived. I'm not going to assign blame, but we were geared toward competing in a short window and the window was going to close after 2015. The ranch hands at the Triple J accelerated the re-build by a year and the results have not been that promising. On balance, I give Wren a C- and The Triple J crowd a D.
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To be fair, we didn't really give up much in Wren trades as far as pitching goes. Delgado was the biggest one. Most pitchers traded were middling like Clemons, Oberholtzer, and Hoover. Wren dealt B-/C prospects for MLB talent regularly. 2 of his most masterful moves involved trading bench players for starts (Uggla and Bourn trades)

Really Wren's issues were the collapse of Upton and Uggla. If those 2 players aged as most projected them to, we would have been a much better team and Wren would be the GM still. Actually hell he could probably still be the GM if not for wanting to fire Fredi. Which he was 100% right to do because Fredi was a terrible manager.
 
zitothebrave said:
To be fair, we didn't really give up much in Wren trades as far as pitching goes. Delgado was the biggest one. Most pitchers traded were middling like Clemons, Oberholtzer, and Hoover. Wren dealt B-/C prospects for MLB talent regularly. 2 of his most masterful moves involved trading bench players for starts (Uggla and Bourn trades)

Really Wren's issues were the collapse of Upton and Uggla. If those 2 players aged as most projected them to, we would have been a much better team and Wren would be the GM still. Actually hell he could probably still be the GM if not for wanting to fire Fredi. Which he was 100% right to do because Fredi was a terrible manager.
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That and the likes of Meds and Minor burning out sealed his deal. For all the crap Wren gets the Braves were the talk of baseball going into the 2013 season with the best collection of talent 25 and under with the new stadium revenue meaning we could extend our guys. But that didn't happen and we're hoping the young guys now can get us to the place we were then.
 
thewupk said:
Yes because those guys were clearly all 4th and 5 starters. Were you even a Braves back during that time?
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I've been a Braves fan since the early 80s, how about you?

As such during the seven years of Wren's tenure, I have seen a lot of bad baseball and knew what a good baseball team looked like. I never considered Tommy Hanson, Jair Jurrjens or Mike Minor to be particularly good. I doubted whether Beach and Medlen were as good as their early results, though I think they were better players than the others, and I guess I was either right about that or at a minimum we'll say we will never know.

In Wren's seven years, he made the playoffs three times and never won a series. He won the division once and his final team with all those roster depleting trades and free agent contracts had a losing record and was committed to BJ Upton and Dan Uggla, two of the worst players in baseball to the tune of 30 million dollars. They had no realistic way of replacing Upton or Heyward with comparable players, their was simply no pitching left in the system, and they had no realistic path to winning in a two-three year time frame.

Hey, if you want to put the armor on and defend the honor of Frank Wren and the likes of Tommy Hanson from aspersions of mediocrity, that's cool. I'm willing to engage from time to time on that subject if you want to give it a go.

The Braves haven't been a contender really since somewhere in the early 2000s. I can't put my finger on the exact moment, but it was over once the rotation came apart. There were some teams that bashed and had maybe the chance of riding one or two pitchers and praying the bullpen held together, but it was never particularly realistic. Maybe they had bad luck along the way, but that's part of it.
 
Southcack77 said:
I've been a Braves fan since the early 80s, how about you?

As such during the seven years of Wren's tenure, I have seen a lot of bad baseball and knew what a good baseball team looked like. I never considered Tommy Hanson, Jair Jurrjens or Mike Minor to be particularly good. I doubted whether Beach and Medlen were as good as their early results, though I think they were better players than the others, and I guess I was either right about that or at a minimum we'll say we will never know. .
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apparently not
 
nsacpi said:
Teheran and Delgado were highly rated prospects. Wood had been drafted.
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Wren traded Delgado in the Upton trade, I think. He is in any event a guy who has not even been a particularly effective receiver, so I don't think he counts.

I was counting Teheran and Wood since they were on the MLB roster when Wren was fired.
 
zitothebrave said:
To be fair, we didn't really give up much in Wren trades as far as pitching goes. Delgado was the biggest one. Most pitchers traded were middling like Clemons, Oberholtzer, and Hoover. Wren dealt B-/C prospects for MLB talent regularly. 2 of his most masterful moves involved trading bench players for starts (Uggla and Bourn trades)

Really Wren's issues were the collapse of Upton and Uggla. If those 2 players aged as most projected them to, we would have been a much better team and Wren would be the GM still. Actually hell he could probably still be the GM if not for wanting to fire Fredi. Which he was 100% right to do because Fredi was a terrible manager.
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There gets to be a lot of unwarranted Melvin defense among some. His OBP during his final year in Tampa was < .300. His defense was never particularly good. Wren should have been in the market for a guy like Denard Span and probably could have gotten him for someone like J.R. Graham. As for Uggla, he was never a good athlete and one look at his body type should have been enough of a caution never to extend him.
 
Wren and Coppy had pluses and minuses.

I think it's worth pointing out that the 2010 team had injured Chipper, injured Prado, injured Jair and injured Wagner and still pushed the eventual WS Giants. Should have won the series honestly and if that team had been completely healthy, might have won the WS. The 2013 team was very good. It's still inexcusable that Kimbrel wasn't in the game in the eighth of game four against the Dodgers. If we could have closed that out, we would have cleared Kershaw and at least a reasonable chance of winning game five. Might not have fared well against the Cardinals, but if this team had a 2010 world championship and 2013 NLCS appearance, Idk how much of a **** people would have given about a down farm system. Maybe it would have caught up eventually.
 
50PoundHead said:
There gets to be a lot of unwarranted Melvin defense among some. His OBP during his final year in Tampa was < .300. His defense was never particularly good. Wren should have been in the market for a guy like Denard Span and probably could have gotten him for someone like J.R. Graham. As for Uggla, he was never a good athlete and one look at his body type should have been enough of a caution never to extend him.
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I hated both of those deals immediately. I never imagined that they would be arguably the two worst players in baseball. I don't know why the Braves so often have someone in the running for that distinction. Generally someone who was a big acquisition (Not just a Wren thing).
 
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