I will always "love" how you cherry pick and slant the discourse into some funnel of your logic..
Make no mistake, when we tried to trade for Lucroy, you were without a doubt one of the most vocal critics (if not the most) of said trade - something about "selling out of future" or something like that..... You were not a fan...
I am onboard with trading from out prospect ranks to improve the MLB team, it makes sense on a lot of levels. Questions remain, how much salary we want to take on, who are reasonable targets (not wish-listers) and who of our top prospects are we willing to deal. They can't all be rule 5 guys, as other teams will be wary of absorbing players they will have to roster in 2022.
Thanks for the controllable, soon to be plus playing outfielder. Here are 3 guys to crunch your 2022 roster... Look we win!
I was not happy about the Lucroy trade, because it was a halfway measure, which was before the Miller trade was announced.
And, as unlikely as it seems, this is an almost completely new era, in which prospects, even lottery picks, are way over valued.
In 2016 it took one elite prospect, two solid prospects, and a good looking young reliever to acquire a year and a half of Lucroy.
It took two very good prospects and two lesser relief prospects to acquire two and a half years of Miller.
Two short years later, it took one elite prospect to acquire three and a half seasons of Hand plus a good looking young reliever with five years of control.
Notice the difference in two short years?
Now, fast forward to 2021. Notice anything different? The going rate for prospects has gone up faster than the housing bubble.
If you want to be any kind of investor, including a baseball executive trying to acquire the most MLB talent possible, you want to use inflated assets to acquire undervalued assets. In today's baseball world, prospects are inflated assets...far different than five years ago.
How do smaller market teams compete? They buck the prevailing trend.
The Indians did it when they began signing young players to long term contracts, something that other teams were too conservative to do.
They also took advantage of a baseball market that undervalued prospects.
There is no way today that the trades for Colon, CC, Lee, Casey Blake, Broussard, or Eduardo Perez would happen today.
And what is undervalued today?
Young MLBers with prospect pedigrees playing for impatient orgs. We now have a boatload of them.
Another undervalued group?
Young prospects with hit tools, but not a lot of immediate power. We now have a boatload of them.
Its not fantasy to think that there are a bunch of impatient orgs who will willingly overpay for prospects.
There is a reasonable chance that there are good young MLB hitters that can significantly upgrade our offense immediately. My wish list may seem like fantasy to you, but several of them are already here, when a lot of fans snickered at the idea.
My wish list...and it was more trying to read our front office's wish list than mine...included Franmil, a top 100 left hand starter, a top 100 right hand starter, and Amed.
Bingo, bingo, bingo, and bingo.
You may not want to believe it, but there are a ton of teams that want what we have, some of which have what we want. And when the right circumstance occurs, there will be another bingo.
They will either want to rebuild, or want to build up their farm system, or want to save a little money, or simply lose patience.
About that save money part...
There are players who will be hitting arby that won't cost us any more than we are paying Eddie and Hernandez right now, and who are playing for teams that won't want to pay it, but will want to overpay for prospects.
