While the New York Mets seemingly spending an endless supply of money this offseason, the Atlanta Braves were quiet yesterday. While the team could surprise us with a trade to fill their roster deficiencies, there doesn’t seem to be any clear answers left on the free agent market that would represent guaranteed upgrades.
Alex Anthopoulos has been making the rounds in recent days to talk about where the Braves are with their payroll, their offseason, and just their philosophy with team-building in recent days and, to be frank, the answers have been underwhelming. It feels like they were never really entertaining the idea of swinging big this offseason. While its clear that payroll is going up, it may not be going up at the speed fans would like and with so many guys getting extensions early in their careers, more money is being tied up down the line which is keeping the Braves from doing big, long-term deals for free agents (that may not be a bad thing).
More Braves News
Elsewhere on the site, we wanted to make sure that the Braves’ bullpen got some love. Over the course of this impressive run Atlanta has been on since 2018, their bullpen has been a very important part of that success and last year was no exception. Going into 2023, the relief corps should as strong if not potentially stronger depending on how some of the middle relief guys do.
MLB News
It is hard to top the wild news from late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning where Carlos Correa’s deal with the Giants fell through and the Mets ended up swooping in and snatching him up, but yesterday was interesting for different reasons beyond free agency.
Trevor Bauer’s suspension for violating MLB’s policies on domestic violence and sexual assault has been under appeal for seemingly forever now as a third party arbitrator decided as to whether or not it would stand. Yesterday, that arbitrator upheld that Bauer violated the policy but reduced the suspension, reinstated Bauer, and docked his salary for the first 50 games of 2023. Now, the Dodgers have until January 6th to decide whether or not to keep him on the roster or release him.
Wil Myers was a player that we had mentioned that could be of interest to the Braves to bolster their left field ranks, but the Cincinnati Reds ended up signing Myers to a one year, $7.5 million deal.