The teardown of the Braves, which began Nov. 17, 2014, with a trade that brought Shelby Miller to Atlanta for Jason Heyward, ended Tuesday night when the Braves sent the same Shelby Miller to Arizona. After one year and three weeks of deconstruction, a dozen major trades and 95 big-league losses, this organization is again ready to rumble.
This isn’t to say the Braves will win the National League East in 2016. They might finish fourth, same as last time. But general manager John Coppolella has dropped the first hint that they’re no longer in rampant accumulative mode. They just traded for three players, two of whom are not — repeat, are not — pitchers. They’ve retooled, and now they’re reshaping.
The newly acquired outfielder Ender Inciarte had a WAR value of 5.3 last season. By way of contrast, only one Brave (Andrelton Simmons, since traded) had a WAR value of even 4.0. An even bigger part of this second Miller trade was landing Dansby Swanson, the first player taken in the June 2015 draft. We note that June 2015 was six months ago. The Braves didn’t land a player who has stalled in the minors. They got a big-time talent not far from being big-league ready.
Mike Oz of Yahoo Sports' Big League Stew notes that the Braves seized on an MLB rule change: Before 2015, teams weren't allowed to move a draftee until he'd been under contract a year. Per David Schoenfield of ESPN's SweetSpot, only three No. 1 of No. 1s — Adrian Gonzalez, Shawn Abner and Josh Hamilton — made major-league debuts for teams that didn't draft and sign them. Those are two reasons to applaud this trade, and there's also this:
Swanson was born in Kennesaw and graduated from Marietta High. Kennesaw and Marietta are in Cobb County. Remind me again: Where will the Braves play come 2017?
This trade is yet another example of how creative Coppolella can be: He took a year’s control of Heyward and bought an All-Star season from Miller plus the futures of Swanson, Inciarte, Tyrell Jenkins (acquired for Heyward) and Aaron Blair, a 23-year-old pitcher rated the No. 3 prospect in the Diamondbacks’ chain. That’s a bloomin’ wonder.
Inciarte offers immediate help for an outfield that needed all it could get. He was mostly a corner outfielder for Arizona — the D-backs had the excellent A.J. Pollock, about whom the Braves inquired often, stationed in center — but Inciarte has played center field and has stellar defensive metrics. Provided Hector Olivera can hit in the majors, what was baseball’s least imposing outfield has the chance to be something above replacement-level and maybe even pretty good.
Swanson is a shortstop, but he could move. (Seem to remember another No. 1 overall pick who shifted to third base. Played for the Braves. Name of Jones.) The Braves like Ozzie Albies as their down-the-road shortstop; they also like Austin Riley, a teenage third baseman taken 41st overall in June with a pick acquired in the Craig Kimbrel trade. Still, the greater point is that an organization that had skewed, intentionally so, toward pitching has been brought closer to plumb with this one trade.
Trading Miller is the first proof that what the Braves were saying — that young pitching is the game’s greatest currency — is true. The D-backs didn’t draft Swanson hoping to move him before he took a big-league swing, but they have a new and aggressive front office led by Tony La Russa and Dave Stewart and everyday pillars in Pollock and Paul Goldschmidt, and they just sank $206.5 million into Zack Greinke. They’re in win-now mode. Teams in win-now mode get antsy. Check the trades the Padres’ A.J. Preller made with the Braves last offseason. Think he’d make either one again?
I’ve mentioned the franchise-changing trades made by the teams that reached the 2015 World Series so often that you know them by heart, but here they are again: In December 2010, the Royals sent Greinke, the 2009 American League Cy Young winner, to Milwaukee for Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar; in December 2012, the Mets sent R.A. Dickey, the newly minted National League Cy Young winner, to Toronto for a package including Noah Snydergaard and Travis d’Arnaud.
Coppolella and I had lunch in late October, and he cited the then-ongoing postseason as his template. A rebuilding team must take considered risks and seize its chances. Trading Miller to Arizona ticked both boxes. Miller’s value might never be higher. As good as he was last season, he ranked ninth-worst among NL pitchers who worked 150 innings in xFIP, a measure of fielding independent pitching that factors home-run rate against a pitcher’s expected home-run rate; xFIP is seen as a leading indicator of future performance. And if the Royals and Mets could trade Cy Young winners, why couldn’t the Braves part with Miller, merely an All-Star?
That said, the return on this — two of Arizona’s top three prospects, both ranked among the top 61 in baseball by MLB.com, plus a proven big-league outfielder who’s only 25 — was astonishing. On Thanksgiving, I mentioned that the Braves needed to throw their disgruntled fans a bone; those fans were just served T-bone steak. This was the move a bad team has to make to hasten the process of getting good. This was a master stroke.
