It was a quiet Saturday for the Atlanta Braves as the offseason is officially at a crawl league-wide with no real movement in any part of the market. The nontender moves certainly played a part in that as teams wanted to see who was actually going to be available, but it is fair to say that things are moving very slowly at the moment.
We have done a lot of previewing free agency from the Braves’ perspective in the last few weeks. Sure, we have covered the sexy names like Trea Turner, Carlos Correa, and of course Dansby Swanson, but we have also made a real effort at evaluating all of the Braves’ options at a variety of price points. For example, yesterday we had a post go up that talks about the idea of bringing Jason Heyward back into the fold. Yes, we know that he is not anywhere close to the player he was years ago, but he could be an interesting option as bench or platoon option if (and its a big IF) the price is right.
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Another place that we wanted to make sure we covered this offseason is the trade market which can get overlooked since player availability and price are not always known and it can be overwhelming. One such option that could be interesting if the Braves cannot re-sign Dansby is Amed Rosario. He only has a year of team control left and the Guardians are not exactly known for paying real money to re-sign players (plus Cleveland has some roster depth), so it could be a possibility especially if the Braves want to give Vaughn Grissom some more time.
MLB News
The rumor mill across the league has also been suspiciously quiet, but one rumor that was spelled out explicitly yesterday was in regards to Jose Abreu. The former AL MVP seems to be a priority target for the up and coming San Diego Padres who need a 1B/DH type of bat for their roster.
Also, as we mentioned above, some really interesting players ended up getting nontendered on Friday and that seemingly shook up the free agent market…at least a little bit. Not all of those players are interesting or good, but MLB put together a pretty decent list of 10 nontender players that offer some amount of intrigue in free agency.