Quote Originally Posted by smootness View Post
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.
If every single free agent walks with nothing in return then it is on AA. And that is one reason the farm is in the shape it’s in. Other teams are bringing up youngsters, signing stars, and maintaining a solid or even great farm system. To act like it can’t be done is just an excuse.

And I’m not advocating for trading upcoming free agents. But at this point some of them need to be signed. Fried should be locked up before next season.