Official Offseason Thread

The mention is that if they intend to contend SOON, they're going to have to do it via the trade route. Trout and Adell would be a great pairing - their version of Acuna and Albies - but they're simply not going to build anything any time soon without shaking things up. If they spend $100 million to land Donaldson, they've got their Acuna/Albies/Freeman. Upton's not a bad 4th piece when he's healthy. They only have Simmons for this year, then they'll have to replace him.

Even if they had added Cole, they'd still be 3 SPs shy of fielding a halfway decent rotation. Cole and Donaldson would have made them better, but wouldn't make them winners. They're not going to ever be competitive with the stars and scrubs approach - until they stop chasing big names and do something to make their lineup and rotation deeper, they're as good as they're ever going to be - Cole/Trout/Donaldson/Adell wasn't going to win them any more championships than Acuna/Albies/Freddie/Soroka have won the Braves.

They're just not deep enough, and there's not enough available talent for them to spend themselves into winners.

Even if any that were valid (it's not) it's still an incredibly dumb trade. You're talking about a trading guy that may be the consensus number 1 prospect in the game for an aging mediocre David Price that's due 96 million over 3 years and Andrew Benintendi, a solid but unspectacular LFer with 3 years remaining of control.



It's beyond words to describe how dumb of an idea that is.
 
Arenado is tough to evaluate due to the opt out. FG did a good analysis of the value of opt outs here:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/whats-an-opt-out-worth/

When the article was written, the "actual value" Arenado's contract was $9.6M/WAR, which is a good deal higher than the ~$8M/WAR SD and Phil paid for Machado and Harper. This means the Rox got worse than FA value on their Arenado extension...it was a bad contract the moment it was signed because the Rox are morons.

Then Arenado went out and posted a huge 2019, increasing the likelihood he opts out after 2021 from 40% to...something higher. Let's call it 50/50 now? Since his 2019 salary was so much lower than the rest of his yearly salaries, the Rox just used up the most valuable season of the contract, and it's still roughly valued at $9.5M/WAR.

In short, at $9.5M/WAR, the Arenado contract isn't as valuable as most folks think it is. In fact, it's not that valuable at all. Any team dealing for Arenado is doing so praying that he opts out after 2021, because if he doesn't that means the contract has turned into a disaster.

I didn't know about the opt-out. Certainly changes things. How does this compare to Stanton when he was traded to NY?
 
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I didn't know about the opt-out. Certainly changes things. How does this compare to Stanton when he was traded to NY?

It does, but I'm not sure how much. You have to weigh the odds that a 31 year old player will forgo another 164 million in the hopes of getting more against the risk that he decides to opt in. I think its still more likely that Arenado opts in to that contract rather than rolling the dice on an increasingly sporadic market.

He is tough to valuate, but no matter how many mathematical gymnastics you go through, he isn't going to be worth the massive packages that some of the people on here are throwing around. Sometimes I think that people just see a big shiny superstar name and forget all the other circumstances surrounding a trade. If you want to be more accurate in your valuations, it takes like 3 minutes to look at the circumstances and do the simple arithmetic to find out what the answer is.
 
Here’s some Rendon news. That leaves the Rangers, Angels, Nats and us for Rendon and Donaldson. Also, with the Dodgers not going after Rendon that removes whatever slim hope there was we could then trade for Justin Turner.

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Even if any that were valid (it's not) it's still an incredibly dumb trade. You're talking about a trading guy that may be the consensus number 1 prospect in the game for an aging mediocre David Price that's due 96 million over 3 years and Andrew Benintendi, a solid but unspectacular LFer with 3 years remaining of control.



It's beyond words to describe how dumb of an idea that is.

Yeah. I didn’t feel like saying anything. Clv gets enough grief. But his response had nothing to do with his initial trade proposal. Just that the halos need to strike. I figured he conceded the trade was bad so I think we all can move along.
 
The more I think about it, the more I'd be okay with a more substantial Donaldson deal if he'd be willing to take on some deferrals in his contract. If we offered him a frontloaded 4 year 100 million dollar contract, but deferred 20-30 million of that to be paid between 2025 and 2028, is that something that we could live with?

We could structure it like this:

1st year: 25 million
2nd year: 22 million
3rd year: 18 million
4th year: 15 million

That would leave 20 million dollars left to paid out through the deferral years. You could pay him 5 million per year through 2025 and 2028, or 6.66 million per year through 2025-2027 if he wanted more over a shorter period of time. You could play around with this structure a bunch, but the main thing that's necessary for us is that the contract is frontloaded (if possible with our payroll constraints) and that at least some of the money is deferred. The benefit for Donaldson is that he gets the four years that he wants at the expense of having a chunk of his money spread out over a longer period.

The only way that I could see this working is if Donaldson actually does prefer to stay in Atlanta. I think that there are probably teams who would be willing to either beat this contract or have a more beneficial structure to Donaldson, but something like this could maybe get us close enough for him to stay in Atlanta, if that is what he wants.
 
Even if any that were valid (it's not) it's still an incredibly dumb trade. You're talking about a trading guy that may be the consensus number 1 prospect in the game for an aging mediocre David Price that's due 96 million over 3 years and Andrew Benintendi, a solid but unspectacular LFer with 3 years remaining of control.



It's beyond words to describe how dumb of an idea that is.

He also seems to just forget that they still have Ohtani who is should be pretty good as well, especially if he comes back to pitch in 2020.
 
Basically, Riley you would think would have to be involved to replace Bryant. Then it's 2 arms. Question becomes if 1 of those 2 arms is Anderson. Riley and Anderson is a steep price for Bryant, but it's within reasonable distance of fair value for Bryant. Riley and Anderson have roughly 60-70 million in SV. Bryant has around 50-60. Not a drastic overpay, but an overpay nonetheless. Such is the market for 3b however.
 
Who wants to rosterbate a lineup after we trade for Bryant and Anderson.


Waters and an arm for Anderson.

Ronald Acuna RF
Ozzie Albies 2b
Freddie Freeman 1b
Kris Bryant 3b
Brian Anderson/Nick Markakis LF
Gerald Perry CF
Ozzie Virgil C
Andres Thomas SS

Rotation:
Cole Hamels
Mike Soroka
Mike Folty
Charlie Puleo
Pete Smith
 
I didn't know about the opt-out. Certainly changes things. How does this compare to Stanton when he was traded to NY?

Actually fairly similar, and the Yankees got Stanton for essentially free. Does anyone think there is any chance Stanton opts out after 2020? Nope, and the Yanks are on the hook for all of it.

That's the danger of huge contracts with opt outs. Either the player is great and leaves (or gets more money), or he sucks and the contract becomes dead weight. It takes away all the potential long term upside for the contract. The opt out Cole got was worth ~$20M due to the extra risk the Yanks were forced to take on.

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/valuing-gerrit-coles-opt-out/
 
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Wright/Wilson + Touki and Ender makes a ton of sense...

1 bat and 2 pitchers is about exactly what we had been discussing for Bryant.

Obviously it depends on who those guys are, but if it's something like Riley/Wilson/Touki that's something to seriously consider.

I still don't see a scenario where trading Ender makes sense without adding yet another OFer, but he could certainly be the bat in this scenario.

Waters could possibly be the guy as well, though the arms going along with him would be far less valuable.

Pache...no way.
 
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