Bring Back Puig?

[CJD]

(08-11-2019, 03:52 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: They had better make some noise in the stretch run of this season.  Because it would take a lot of season ticket sales and likely a huge uptick in licensed merchandise sales to justify that sort of payroll expansion.  Especially when they are still on the hook for Votto for what, another 5 years?

I mean, Bailey/Kemp's contract is finally off the books after this season.
So is Wood's, Roark's, Puig's, Gennett's, Iglesias', Hernandez' and Duke's.

That's a total freed up space of 60.875 million dollars.

They took on Bauer and Gausman, who make up about 22 million dollars.

So for the year, they shed a net of about 39 million dollars going into 2020.

Bauer, Gausman, Peraza, Disco, Dietrich, Lorenzen, Casali, Schebler, and Peralta are going through arbitration and will presumably get raises, but they shouldn't be extreme raises, as most of their production was down compared to 2018.

Farmer, Castillo, Stephenson, Garrett, Mahle, Winker and Blandino are all pre-arbitration in 2020, so they'll remain super cheap.

Considering they traded their top prospect for Bauer, a player who is only under contract through 2020 who has said in the past he has no interest in long term contracts, I have to assume that they are planning on going all in for 2020. That means spending money.

All told, I would expect them to spend about 30 to 45 million dollars of new money (does not include the re-signing of the above players) spent this coming off season. Which should be enough for a quality starting position player or 2 and a few good bullpen pieces.

Now, whether they consider Puig to be better than the combination of Aquino, Ervin, Winker and VanMeter is a question that we'll see explored this off season. But they definitely have the money for it, if they choose to go through with it.

Either that, or they just wasted a ton of time and value with that trade for Bauer...