Quote Originally Posted by RockyDog View Post
Agree. You have nearly 2/3 of the lineup locked up for 7-8 years and Strider. They most likely will not pay Fried's asking price and Morton is about done. So there are a lot of questions with depth, LF, and a couple of spots withe the rotation. That's why all of those pitching misses hurt, the Braves had a LOT of holes in the pitching rotation and weren't willing to spend $ there outside of 1 year contracts. They got fill in success from those guys I mentioned but nothing sustained, and when they held on to them too long, their values diminished.

They need to get another title in the next couple of years and it'll be a good run. I'm glad the Braves payroll is expanding, but it's only going to get worse for them. Fried's gonna be gone. SOMEBODY is going to pay 5-600 mill for Ohtani, whether that's the Mets or Dodgers. Phillies are going to continue to spend stupid money. It's going to be hard to keep up with those guys if the Braves can't replenish the minor league talent and build up some trade capital.
It's always easy in hindsight to say, 'We should have kept ___ and gotten value out of ___ while we could have.' The problem is, you never really know who those guys are beforehand. That's why AA kept most of them, because the odds of some of them hitting are high when you have that many. And you know some won't, and that's ok if several do. And we've had several hit in a big way. If Soroka comes back healthy this year, we suddenly have an embarrassment of riches in the rotation. Look around baseball, nobody has 'enough' pitching.

And the reason our farm system is so weak right now is because a) we have graduated a bunch of really good players in the last few years, and b) we have drafted low and had serious international restrictions. Those international restrictions have now been lifted, so we should be able to once again pull actual talent from that market, and we need some time to re-stock. It's in no way a failure of AA that our farm system is weak right now. It's actually a product of us doing such a great job of actually graduating our talent into legit MLB players. And because we have so much young talent locked up long-term, it buys us the time to restock and rebuild our farm system.

Obviously it remains to be seen what happens with player health and how the farm system gets built back up, but AA so far has provided just about a masterclass on how to do it.