Free agency officially started yesterday and while we haven’t even gotten to many of the important dates and deadlines this offseason, that did not keep the Atlanta Braves from keeping us busy on Sunday.
The biggest news of the day was that the Braves gave us our first trade of the offseason when they acquired Sam Hilliard from the Rockies in exchange for relief prospect Dylan Spain. Hilliard is a tooled outfield prospect, but he also has failed to hit consistently in the big leagues after multiple chances and is 28 years old. This is more a depth move that has some lottery ticket-type characteristics, but you can’t beat the price the Braves paid.
More Braves News
Elsewhere in the world of Braves, we continued our trip down the offseason rabbit hole with an examination of some of the potential bad contract swaps that could, in theory anyways, give the Braves a way to get Marcell Ozuna off of the roster.
We also continued our look back at the 2022 seasons of the Atlanta Braves roster with a look at Adam Duvall’s injury shortened campaign. We will never know for sure, but it definitely looked like Duvall was starting to turn around his rough 2022 season before he was hurt. Instead, it is entirely possible that he played his last game with the Atlanta Braves.
MLB News
While the Braves made their first trade of the offseason, it was their division rival, the New York Mets, that made the biggest signing of the day. Free agents can’t sign with other teams until five days since the end of the World Series has passed, but free agents CAN sign with their current teams and the Mets re-signed Edwin Diaz to the largest deal for a reliever in baseball history.
Getting a five year deal with over $100 million to throw sixty-ish innings a year seems like a pretty good gig if you can get it. All kidding aside, Diaz was arguably the best reliever in baseball this year (along with Emmanuel Clase who our own Fred Owens would be upset if I didn’t mention), so he deserved to get paid….although the wisdom of paying that much to ANY reliever is certainly fair to question.