Setback for Lodolo's Return

[*ochocincos*]

(08-23-2023, 01:09 PM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: Yea, I think Nick Krall was put into a tough situation at the trade deadline. To this point, his team has gotten to where they were on the backs of lightning in a bottle in the form of several rookies outperforming, by a wide margin, the expectations of a team full of rookies. That 12 game winning streak singlehandedly turned this season from a rebuild season to a potential playoff season, but it was built on the back of EDLC's unsustainable start to his career.

Our situation wasn't nearly as high stakes as theirs, but the Los Angeles Angels are the perfect representation of the risks of buying at the deadline. They could have gotten a truly generational return for Shohei Ohtani. Despite being a rental, he is the best hitter in the AL and one of the best pitchers in the AL as well. They could have easily converted him into several top 100 prospects, maybe even a top 10 prospect plus more. The Athletic estimated they could have received "six to eight top-20 type prospects."


I don't know about that much, but the point is, they could have played it safe, traded off their rentals for a huge prospect gain and moved on to next year.

Instead, they chose to go all in. They traded away 7 minor league pitching prospects, including 4 of their top 30 overall prospects (all of whom were traded for rentals) to acquire a bunch of mid tier players who have not helped them make the playoffs, and now their future is considerably bleaker for it.

They rolled the dice and lost. Horribly.

The Reds didn't hold onto any rentals (like the Angels did Ohtani) that would have brought in major prospect returns, but they could have traded highly valuable prospects for rentals like the Angels did (Like CES or Phillips for Giolito).

I think Krall approached this season as "house money" with next year being the true goal to contend. I know many people feel like if you have the chance, take it, but that can be just as disastrous as playing it safe, so I don't think there was a "correct answer" to what we should have done at the deadline.

The good news is, even with how awful our offense has been over the last 3 weeks, we are still only half a game out of a playoff spot with series against 3 of the 4 teams that we're competing with for those final 2 spots (Diamondbacks, Giants and Cubs. The 4th team is Miami, but we don't play them) coming up in succession very soon.

We can take commanding lead of those playoff spots if we handle business over the next two weeks (A 10 game winning streak over those 3 series would be just peachy  ).

Or we can peter away and miss the playoffs by a few games.

We'll have to see how it goes :).

It's probably my distain for the 1-game playoff format for the WC teams a few years ago when they had 5 teams make it, but I always hated making the WC.
Maybe it was more that the Reds were just so bad in those 1-game WC matchups.

Now that the WC series is actually a 3-game series, maybe I'll be less worrisome of losing in one. And to be fair, if the Reds even were to win the division, they'd probably be the 3-seed anyway, so they'd have to play in the WC series regardless.