Trade Deadline Thread

[CJD]

(08-11-2023, 06:07 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Except they don't if the rookies are any good. If they are any good (which they will need to be for there to be any window in the future) they will make a lot of money in arbitration. 

A very mediocre former Red, Kyle Farmer, got over $5.5m as an Arb2 guy this season. Alex Verdugo, a league average bat, got $6.3m. 

On the high end, Shohei Ohtani got $30m for his last year of team control. Pete Alonso as an arb2 guy got $14.5m which means he'll get even more next year despite being under team control.

This is a team that waived Wade Miley rather than pay him $10m, gave away Sonny Gray rather than pay him 2yr/$22m, and gave away Raisel Iglesias rather than pay him $9m. So once all the young rookies from this year hit arb2, that's already the beginning of the end. The only way they will all still be around is if they aren't very good, and thus won't cost much in arbitration.

So really the Reds have just 3 more years before they become too expensive for this cheap FO. Assuming they stay healthy and keep getting better like we hope.

India and Stephenson reach arbitration for their first time next year, so goodbye to their combined $1.52m payroll. Heck, in 2 years Hunter Greene will be $8.3m and then the year after that he'll be $15.3m.

They do not have 5 years before having to pay guys.

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Yes, because I have never heard of him before just now. I'll also probably never hear of him again.

I didn't want one starting pitcher. I wanted 2 starting pitchers and a long reliever. I wanted 2 starting pitchers like 2 months ago. It was 100% predictable that Abbott would get tired out with a career high workload plus rookie wall, and all the bad starters would burn up the bullpen.

The playoffs are largely a crapshoot, mostly anyone there has a puncher's chance. You have to get there first and this division was wide open to take. Nobody has ever won a World Series while watching the playoffs from home. It will never be the year if you wait for all the stars to align before you are willing to make ANY moves towards winning in the current year. 

We knew the starting rotation was going to be bad before the season even started and did nothing in a winnable division. That's a bit of "you make your own luck" there. If they added 2 league average starting pitchers to this team on Opening Day and they've easily got an 8-10 game lead in the division right now.

Heck, maybe if they made some moves at the deadline this team wouldn't look so dead in the water because they wouldn't have seen the front office just punt the season away and wave the white flag. If your FO isn't trying and is already looking towards next season, naturally so will you.

You know what, that's a good point. I'm used to thinking of pre-arb and arb years as a player's "rookie contract" like in football, but it isn't the same, especially if they're star players.

This is why I hate the lack of parity in baseball haha. Small market teams are at such an incredible disadvantage relative to the big market teams because there is no salary cap and no salary floor, so if your team is any good, you are basically guaranteed to lose it all at some point in the near future.

With that said, I think adding some league average pitchers to the team would have helped us, I think this offense would have still had the same power outage these last 2 weeks regardless. Averaging 3.3 runs per game over the last 7 games with a team BA of 0.203 is not going to cut it. The pitching averaged giving up 5 runs over those 7 games, so you'd think they would have been able to win more than 1 of those 7 games. 

I would not have been happy if we sold off a bunch of prospects to get a couple 4.5 ERA pitchers, only to still lose 6 of 7 (since starting pitching wasn't typically the problem, with 3 quality starts in that time frame).