Mets game 2: braves on life support

Enscheff said:
A lot of people doing a lot of crying now that the team is struggling. But those people were saying very different things when the moves they got the team to this place were made.

Everyone loved every extension when the signing spree was happening. I warned they were eliminating all flexibility by locking into this core, but folks still loved it.

Everyone loved the Olson trade and extension. I warned it was not a great idea to extend a power goon into his 30s, but everyone still loved it.

Everyone loved the Murphy trade and extension. I was upset to give up Contreras, and mentioned extending catchers into their 30s is a bad idea. Everyone still loved it.

Everyone wanted to extend Acuna for another 10 years. I wanted that guys with knee problems rarely get better with age. Everyone still wanted to extend him further.

It was less than 1 year ago everyone on this board was busy patting themselves on the back listing out all the extended stars they were so certain would lead to 5 more deep playoff runs. Now, less than a year later, everyone is crying about how bad these players are and lamenting the fact they are under contract so long.

It’s amazing how the attitudes change when smacked upside the head with reality.
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Don't put me in with "everyone." I've been one of the few on this board who has criticized some of the moves you've outlined here only to be told to be ready with the towel to wipe off Anthopoulos' feet when he's done walking on the water. The extensions route is a risky one. It could still work out, but the team has lost budget flexibility in the process and that, along with the dead money were are paying to guys playing for other teams due to the machinations to acquire Kelenic, has complicated this trade deadline.

As for Freeman, it ended up badly on both ends as far as I'm concerned, but I'm also of the opinion that Anthopoulos had sticky pants for Olson and knew that Freeman wasn't going to accept his last/best offer. I've spent a lot of my adult life dealing with negotiations of a sort (not contracts per se), and just because an offer is the last/best doesn't mean it's serious if you know the other side is going to reject it. I think that happened in the Freeman negotiations. I have no way of knowing that, but it just looks that way from the outside. On the plus side for the Braves, Olson is less expensive than Freeman so unless Olson's production completely falls off the map it won't be a complete disaster. It's always an assumption, but I figured that both Olson and Freeman would decline during the duration of their respective contracts, but one has to figure rate of decline into that as well and Olson may well decline more rapidly given his profile. Then again, Olson could hit eigth home runs next week and people would forgot about the past couple of months.
 
50PoundHead said:
Don't put me in with "everyone." I've been one of the few on this board who has criticized some of the moves you've outlined here only to be told to be ready with the towel to wipe off Anthopoulos' feet when he's done walking on the water. The extensions route is a risky one. It could still work out, but the team has lost budget flexibility in the process and that, along with the dead money were are paying to guys playing for other teams due to the machinations to acquire Kelenic, has complicated this trade deadline.

As for Freeman, it ended up badly on both ends as far as I'm concerned, but I'm also of the opinion that Anthopoulos had sticky pants for Olson and knew that Freeman wasn't going to accept his last/best offer. I've spent a lot of my adult life dealing with negotiations of a sort (not contracts per se), and just because an offer is the last/best doesn't mean it's serious if you know the other side is going to reject it. I think that happened in the Freeman negotiations. I have no way of knowing that, but it just looks that way from the outside. On the plus side for the Braves, Olson is less expensive than Freeman so unless Olson's production completely falls off the map it won't be a complete disaster. It's always an assumption, but I figured that both Olson and Freeman would decline during the duration of their respective contracts, but one has to figure rate of decline into that as well and Olson may well decline more rapidly given his profile. Then again, Olson could hit eigth home runs next week and people would forgot about the past couple of months.
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The thing a lot of people are seeing now with Olson is how long his swing is and how many mechanical movements there are to it. If any of those movements are out of whack, the whole swing is out of whack. Last year he was able to put together a full season of phenomenal performance. But the prior and so far this year, seen him struggle for an extended period of time. Freeman on the other hand has a very short compact swing. That’s why I felt he would age better and still believe that to this day. We are definitely going to regret this contract.
 
Kelenic down to 0.8 fWAR. The move to get him is killing us... he's not good, and now we have no money to upgrade
 
msstate7 said:
Kelenic down to 0.8 fWAR. The move to get him is killing us... he's not good, and now we have no money to upgrade
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I don't have anything against Kelenic and I think he would have been a more reasonable acquisition IF they hadn't had to go through all the rigamarole to get him. At face value, he's a reasonable risk. I would have rather they would have reduced the number of bad contracts they took on to get him and sent the Mariners a better prospect instead. Kelenic wasn't going to require us sending them one of our top guys. The payroll implications subside after this season, but the front office made the assumption that everyone was going to be a picture of health all season long and when you are trying to maximize a contention window, strangling your flexibility in the short term hurts your chances. Of course, no one foresaw everything short of the Black Plague hitting the Braves' locker room this year.
 
Kelenic isn’t a one year deal. He has a lot of cheap control left. So that crap the team went through is at least spread out over years.
 
The Braves spent over 50% of their offseason resources acquiring Kelenic.

While it was a reasonable gamble, the narrative was “the worst case scenario is the .720 OPS he posted overall before the broken foot.” I very clearly stated that the floor was unplayable, which we are close to seeing.

So once again people are conveniently forgetting what was being said when everyone was stoked about the deal. Now those same people either forgot they said it, or have completely vanished from the board.

Very typical of people who argue with me and then vanish when my statements prove correct. Speaking of which, where’s that clown who “knows athletes” that disagreed with my Harris comp of Adam Eaton? Where is that genius now?
 
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