Click here to read the transcript of tonight’s baseball live chat, moderated by MLBTR’s Mark Polishuk
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Cole!
That is all!
Hale no. That is all.
Teheran all day looong.
Flippin birds at FiP.
Find a couple hundred million dollars laying around that Braves ownership forgot they had. Then get Cole to agree to forgetting about the no trade clause (because the Braves have never given one out to any free agent player). Then get Cole to agree to a stipulation in his contract that allows the Braves to back out of the deal if he gets injured like Kevin Brown, Mike Hampton, Johnny Cueto, David Price and Chris Sale did. The Braves don’t play in a Boston or New York market. If they did that deal without all three of those things happening and Cole gets injured (which pitchers often do) then you just killed the Braves franchise for the next decade.
That is all!
That is great but that mindset is also the reason the Braves have not won a postseason series since 2002.
But you are right because I’m used to the Braves settling for mediocrity in the rotation. Whether it was Lowe, Kawakami, Maholm, who else am I forgetting not named DK?
Took them how many years to develop an elite caliber pitcher (Soroka) since Smoltz and Glavine?
Slightly different since it was a trade but the Astros would not have won a WS without Verlander.
Great FA option: “Too expense!”
Great trade options: “Too expensive!”
LOL if you think the only thing ATL missed was an ace during the drought. Sure, Maddux was signed, but he declined less money (NYY and other teams) to pitch with ace-level arms in Smoltz, Glavine. Obviously, Glavine, Smoltz were both groomed within. My point: ATL has never gotten their best pitchers by being the highest bidders. It’d be a luxury to have Cole, but there’s most likely more value somewhere else. For every Scherzer there’s a Greinke deal that even when pitching well, the club cannot sustain and he inevitably will end up on another deal.
team*
If you’re waiting for the Braves to sign a top FA then you should just go ahead and follow the Dodgers, Yankees or Red Sox instead. They won’t do it as long as Liberty owns them. I’m fine with that for the very reason the OP stated. Spending stupid money buries mid-market teams when those contracts don’t pay out. Other clubs can afford to pave over mistakes by writing off bad contracts as sunk cost. The Braves can’t do that. They’ll run that player out there every game trying to get some value out of that bad contract all while the cheaper replacement level players that could’ve been had will out produce them. See BJ Upton for example.
Braves a top 5 to 7 team? That’s dumb or you simply aiming low. Who do you have ranked better? Yankees, Astros, maybe dodgers (although we just took 2 of 3 from them) are the only teams you can argue are better than the braves. And I’ll even say it, Dodgers are better and in general there is clearly a different lvl between those 3 and the braves. But the braves are on a different lvl than the rest of the league and continue to show it. Give them more credit… 5-7? They are easily at worse a top 4 team right now not even close to 7th lol
I may be bias though… I will neither confirm nor deny it. Although I think I make a strong case
I agree with your original statement wholeheartedly. I have seen some rankings that mix and match the Twins, Indians and Rays ahead of Atlanta. I think one even put Boston ahead. Braves fans are used to this. The media hates them. Mostly because the pundits are former MLB players (like John Kruk) who hated watching the Braves win their division every single year for the decade and a half that the pundits played. Kruk hated it the most because he was in the Braves division most of that time.
Maybe the list was done while the Cubs were on a home stand.
The Braves are currently 10th in run differential. The Braves run differential equates to 90 wins over a whole season. Thus far this season they have outpaced their predicted wins by seven games.
Obious they better than that….time to not believe in stats