The thought was exciting - I wanted off the road, would be moving in with my now fiancee, and would be beginning the next step in my career. The future looked promising. The catch - I still had to move. This meant getting a moving truck, buying a new house, selling a new house, buying a new car (because they took away my fleet car ... bastards), and settling into a brand new position. Exciting but also terrifying.
I often wonder if that is what it was like in the Braves front office. They made the decision to rebuild (agree with it or not), and the thought must have been ... exciting and terrifying. Exciting because ... I mean ... you get to build an entire organization in the way you want to - OOTP-style. Terrifying because you know the work ahead of you - trading players, dealing with unhappy fans, developing younger players, and trying to make the team into a consistent winner. And that last item is where we start.
Building a contender is obviously difficult, but I think it's harder than most people expect. You have to get 90 wins out of 25 roster spots. Given that a replacement-level team is considered a 48-win team (we'll just go with it for now ... this is mostly a theoretical exercise for now), that means you need 52 wins out of 25 spots, meaning a little more than 2 wins a spot. Sounds easy, right?
The issue, of course, is that all roster spots are not created equal. There are bench spots and bullpen spots that have a hard time even getting to 1 win. I took the liberty of compiling a sort of expected roster and what their WARs would look like.
There are several columns to this. The first is an optimistic take on what that player could reasonably be in 2017 - not probable. The second is what they did last year. The third is what Steamer currently projects for 2017. And the fourth is an average of those. Is it scientific? Not exactly, but I think they balance out some of the negatives each column has - optimism is great but rarely do you see everyone hit their ceiling at once, last season was last season, and projections sometimes miss observational things that might lead us to think a player can be better (or worse).
And I think the average column is pretty reasonable - 77-78 wins. Now, that's with no additions other than the octogenarians the team added to the rotation. I also left a few areas blank, but I did that assuming what we would add internally would be essentially replacement-level. But even my optimistic take didn't quite reach that magic number.
Then came this week. Rumors have been swirling about the Braves aggressively looking at just about everything. The consensus seems to be that the Braves aren't ready to make that leap, and looking at that 77-78 win projection here, they're right ... ish.
If the Braves were to make a move like trading for Sale/Archer/Gray, I would assume they plan on being aggressive elsewhere. So I also made a chart should the Braves add a number of new players - Sale, Jason Castro, Justin Turner, and Ian Desmond. I'm not saying they should do this. I'm simply using this as a sort of best-case scenario. Remember, we're having a more theoretical discussion for now.
Alright, now we're talking ... sort of. The average projection has now been increased to 89.6 wins, which puts the Braves on the cusp of being contenders. It also took a lot of effort to get there. Adding several good players moved the needle about 12 wins.
We can argue about each player's projection, but for now, I'm not sure that matters a whole lot. 88, 89. 91 wins. The particulars don't matter. But the range around that 89-win projection seems reasonable, and that makes everyone right so far. The Braves aren't close enough to just add Sale/Archer/Gray. They'd have to add one of those players as part of a master plan to add other significant talent this offseason - again, the particular players don't matter as much as the necessary talent needed to be added.
And again, I'm not currently arguing whether they should go for it or not. I have an opinion, but I think it'll take a little longer to flush that out. The argument also needs more nuance - you can't simply add players. Adding players means adding payroll, losing prospects, or both. And the question becomes whether the Braves can do that and what that would mean for the organization.
To find that out, you'll just have to wait 'til next time.
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