The Atlanta Braves have not built a team roster that should be able to play deep into October. Couldn’t that have happened a lot earlier?
While the Astros are getting praise all over for making “The Big Move” at the trade deadline, the Atlanta Braves should get the award for the Most Improved Team.
By now we know the details: Mark Melancon and Shane Greene for the rest of this year and the next; Chris Martin for the stretch run here in 2018.
But what if these guys had already been on the club in February? Wouldn’t it be better to have them for the full season and avoid all of the frustrations we’ve all endured since the start of the season?
Certainly, if you believe that the Braves are going to be better now, then having the extra wins throughout the season would have put their cleats on the necks of their NL East rivals by now.
The real trick of course is that hindsight has 20/20 accuracy. Foresight is not nearly as sharp.
The major portion of team construction for the season typically does take place in the Winter months – whether via internal or external sources… but while you certainly want to do the best you can, perhaps it really is wise to withhold some resources for the Summer.
That may especially be the case when a lot of your efforts are thwarted.
We (mostly this writer) participated in the lampooning of the ‘financial flexibility’ interview that Alex Anthopoulos conducted back in mid-February. In retrospect (more hindsight), that interview ended up explaining the plan for 2019… if you had read between the lines.
What Anthopoulos probably should have said at the time was this:
- ‘We have had great difficulty this Winter getting some of the players we’d prefer to have’
- ‘We’re going to go with the players we have now: we still firmly believe they’re easily good enough to dominate this division’
- ‘When we get to the Summer, we’ll re-evaluate where we are and then make additions as needed then. We have the funds to do that, and we expect that many players having good seasons should be more available then than they are now.’
That’s pretty much what he did say at the time… but somehow it didn’t really go over that well back then.
The Braves spent something close to $20 million this Summer. They tried to get Michael Brantley, who would have cost something around $16 million had that attempt worked. Other players and other deals were offered that failed.
Even this Summer, attempts to sign Craig Kimbrel or trade for Zack Greinke were made (it’s unknown just how far the attempts went, but clearly: even more money would have been involved).
So even as the significant moves have been made, the Atlanta Braves still didn’t do everything they set out to get accomplished… which is understandable – and a common reality.
Perhaps it’s the marketplace of baseball now: between teams that are reticent to offer long-term lucrative deals to aging stars and equally reluctant to part with their emerging stars via trade, maybe using the Summer to pry the better players away from the non-contenders is a better option… once they figure out that they are actually non-contenders.
Sure: if you can get everything done in the Winter and those players perform to the expected level, that’s a recipe for great success. But that doesn’t happen often, and it appears that this idea of ‘winning the off-season’ is developing into an increasingly difficult task.
Alex Anthopoulos adjusted well and pulled off an excellent set of transactions this Summer… with some of the performances thus far notwithstanding.
Thus it’s appropriate to give credit where the credit is due. We just wish he’d told us a bit more directly what the plan was at the time.