So much kvetching about the state of the rotation, which is understandable given the injury news before Spring Training games have even begun.<\/p>\n
But, let\u2019s pivot slightly: we know the deals that have already happened. Which ones should the Braves have made?<\/p>\n
For me, the big money deals were too big and inflated for the production they offered, but that shouldn\u2019t be surprising at this point. The played-in-another-league-last-year deals (Tatsuya Imai, Cody Ponce) are a lot more modest, but still fairly risky \u2014 I would\u2019ve preferred them be more like pillow deals.<\/p>\n
That said, a lot of mid-tier deals, I think would\u2019ve been good to make. Sure, the Braves may not want to add a mid-tier guy, but I don\u2019t see those deals as substantially constraining flexibility. We\u2019ve talked at length about Chris Bassitt at this point, and his salary is pretty reasonable. Steven Matz looks like he has a great chance to produce surplus on his contract. I\u2019m not very excited about the Justin Verlander, Nick Martinez, and Dustin May deals, but they\u2019re not terrible.<\/p>\n
Foster Griffin was an interesting signing for the Nationals given the low, short commitment. Wouldn\u2019t have minded that one.<\/p>\n
There were a handful for quantity-for-quality-ish trades of starters. In particular, Shane Baz and Ryan Weathers come to mind. Those moves would\u2019ve been the opposite of Chris Bassitt in a way since they wouldn\u2019t necessarily add a reliable arm, but would just diversify a high degree of risk further. Even the MacKenzie Gore deal, while on the pricier side because Gore is a pricier pitcher production-wise, seemed okay.<\/p>\n
I think that\u2019s largely where I come out \u2014 either one of the Bassitt\/Matz\/Griffin deals, or one of the Baz\/Weathers\/Gore deals would\u2019ve been nice. I don\u2019t think the Braves have much interest in Zack Littell, but maybe if they give him a pretty cheap deal, that could be Bassitt-lite. They probably don\u2019t have interest for the same reason they apparently had little inclination to engage on Bassitt, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So much kvetching about the state of the rotation, which is understandable given the injury news before Spring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":582701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2394],"tags":[191,46,73299,4166,5,192,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-582700","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-braves","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-braves","10":"tag-atlanta-braves-discussion","11":"tag-atlantabraves","12":"tag-baseball","13":"tag-braves","14":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116102549557895221","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/582701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}