So: Will the last outbound Brave capable of driving in a run turn out the lights?
In one offseason, John Hart has shed the hitters who ranked first, third and fifth in RBIs on a team that finished next-to-last in runs. The team that finished last was San Diego, which has added Matt Kemp, Wil Myers, Derek Norris and, via the Braves, Justin Upton. Which would seem to make the 2015 Braves the odds-on favorite to run 30th of 30.
To be fair, Hart can rationalize each jarring trade on its face: J. Upton and Jason Heyward are set to become free agents this fall, and Evan Gattis wasn’t going to catch with Christian Bethancourt at the ready, and wasn’t capable of playing left field. And the prospects the Braves are receiving from Houston aren’t bad. Baseball America rated right-hander Mike Foltynewicz and third baseman Rio Ruiz Nos. 3 and 8 among Astros minor-leaguers, and Houston has been loading up on young talent. (Though it did bungle away last year’s overall No. 1.)
If you’re going to do a complete makeover, this is the way to start: Trade old for young, expensive for cheap, uncertainty for club control. So why, you’re asking, did the Braves sink $45 million over four seasons into the 31-year-old Nick Markakis? Beats the heck out of me. But every other major transaction this offseason has sounded the same chord: Rebuild around young pitching.
Shelby Miller and Tyrell Jenkins were landed from St. Louis in the Heyward trade. Max Fried arrived in the J. Upton deal with San Diego. Now Foltynewicz. If you’re looking ahead to 2017, which just happens to be the first year the Braves will play in Cobb County, the pitching looks pretty darn promising.
Trouble is, the Braves have to slog through 2015 and 2016 first. Those of us who were around in the late ’80s recall how dreary that was. (Or perhaps we don’t. Back then, nobody paid much attention.) Tom Glavine, one of the young pitchers who would lead this franchise to longstanding excellence, had this description of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium circa 1988: “It’s 95 degrees, you’re 20 games out of first place and there are 5,000 people in the stands.”
It has been clear from the day of Frank Wren’s “termination” that two of the three Johns — team presidents Hart and Schuerholz — hate every single thing the former general manager ever did. (It’s less clear whether assistant GM John Coppollela does. He did, after all, work for Wren.) But were the Braves as an organization really as wretched as the new/old guys would have us believe? Is a total tear-down of a team that won 94 games in 2012 and 96 in 2013 necessary?
It was only 11 months ago that Wren was being lauded, in this space but not only in this space, for locking up Freddie Freeman, Julio Teheran, Andrelton Simmons and Craig Kimbrel. Now each of the above — except for Teheran; as a young pitcher, he’s exempt — has to wonder if he’ll be next out the door and, beyond that, if he really wants to stay and play for a team that’s guaranteed to lose big.
Forget challenging Washington for first in the National League East. The challenge for the 2015 Braves will be to fight off Philadelphia for fourth place in a five-team division. The Phillies stand as a case study as to what will happen if a team waits too long to rebuild: Their players got so old and so pricey that nobody wants any of them except for Cole Hamels. Philly became that worst possible entity — a bad old team.
The Braves, however, weren’t old. Their 2014 roster was the second-youngest in the majors, trailing only Houston’s. Those Braves fell apart at the end, but they were tied for first place at the All-Star break. Even if you believe Wren was the dunce of dunces, was it reasonable to assume that his first losing season since 2008 — the year after he’d inherited the team from Schuerholz — was evidence the Braves were doomed to more losing?
I have no issue with wholesale rebuilding when it’s warranted. I’m not sure this was. But I’m reasonably sure the new regime has doomed the Braves, at least in the short term, to loads of losing.
About the Author
