OC Register: Hoornstra: Will Atlanta Braves’ ‘Core 9’ strategy benefit baseball?

[AngelsWin.com]

Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell and Ron Cey are famous for manning the Dodgers’ four infield positions from June 1973 until the end of the 1981 season. No infield stayed together longer in major-league history.

Besides their longevity, The Infield is remarkable for the relatively late period in baseball history during which they achieved their feat. Their careers did not play out in black and white. Free agency existed for most of their eight-year run. Most people who grew up watching them are still alive.

The persistence of The Infield, and other famous duos and trios of teammates, create a false construct. It’s easy to forget that they are the exceptions to the rule of the average major-league career, which is shorter and more transient than the eight-year run of Garvey, Lopes, Russell and Cey.

And yet, we do not romanticize the journeyman. Gary Sheffield is still outside the Hall of Fame looking in. Carlos Correa’s one season in Minnesota will be no more memorable than Reggie Jackson’s one season in Baltimore. The more good players a team can keep together longer, the better their chances of sticking in the collective memory of a fan base.

All of this is a roundabout way of asking: What exactly are the Atlanta Braves doing?

Tuesday, two weeks after they traded for Oakland A’s catcher Sean Murphy, the Braves signed him to a six-year contract extension that lasts through the 2029 season. Remarkably, Atlanta already has three other players under contract longer: first baseman Matt Olson through 2030, outfielder Michael Harris II through 2032, and third baseman Austin Riley through 2033.

Pitcher Spencer Strider is also contracted to Atlanta through 2029. Outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. (2028), shortstop Vaughn Grissom (2028), second baseman Ozzie Albies (2027), and pitchers Kyle Wright (2026) and Max Fried (2024) amount to a slightly different poker hand than Garvey, Lopes, Russell and Cey, but the Braves will be playing many of cards they were dealt just as long.

We won’t really know what the Braves are doing until these contracts are allowed to play out. Today, the front office might intend to keep the team’s young core together for years. Tomorrow, a rebuild might be deemed necessary, in which case one or more of these contracts might be attractive to another team because they are relatively affordable.

The better question for now: Is this really good for baseball?

It’s easy to say there is no objective truth, that the answer depends on your point of view. Fans of small-market teams – like the Oakland A’s, who traded Olson and Murphy to Atlanta instead of signing them to long-term contracts – might be left to stew in their jealousy of a team with a projected $194 million payroll.

The trend of the rich getting richer is nothing new to MLB. What is new is how Atlanta is distributing its dollars, by investing relatively little in other teams’ best players, and a lot in its own. Another front office might have adopted this team-building strategy before, if it found the perfect confluence of homegrown talent and an unwillingness among those players to test free agency. Perhaps the Braves were simply the first to arrive at a well-charted location.

Fans of free agency might also grouse at this development. By reducing the pool of future free agents, the Braves made nearly every offseason for the next 12 years a little more boring. That means a little less intrigue for fans of teams who cannot develop the next Olson, the next Harris, the next Riley. Their free-agent markets never had a chance to spring hope.

Some interested parties within the ranks of the Players’ Association will always bristle at the news of another long-term extension. There is an unspoken pressure among players to take the most lucrative contract available to them – usually found on the open market, not by negotiating a long-term deal with their current team. Many players have signed similar contract extensions to these. Rarely, if ever, do they all re-sign with the same team.

The MLBPA does a good job reminding the few players lucky enough to make generational wealth how free agency arose: through strategic patience, sacrifice, legal battles, and shrewd negotiating by the late Marvin Miller. Now, Olson and Murphy might never sign a free-agent contract in their lives. The others have delayed their right to test the open market. Who knows how much Grissom or Albies might have extended the market price for every other free-agent middle infielder a few years down the road?

But this question is relevant to relatively few people. Fans of large- and mid-market teams have power in numbers. Many among them are old enough to remember a time before free agency, when teams routinely employed their best players for 10 years or longer. For younger fans, this might be all new.

Old or young, it’s fun to be able to buy a jersey of your favorite player and know (with some reliability) you can wear it to the ballpark for at least the next six years and see Your Guy on the field. The dynastic New York Yankees of the late 1990s and early 2000s had their homegrown “core four” of Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettite and Bernie Williams. Now, in theory, Atlanta has its core nine.

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The experiment might not work out – for the Braves or their fans. The risk of signing a long-term contract runs both ways. All of the players under long-term contract are currently in their 20s. Grissom and Harris are 22. Acuña is still just 25. None of them are signed past age 36. Age should not be prohibitive, but there is a non-zero chance of a career-altering injury threatening their projected success.

If it succeeds, the Braves’ model might inspire other teams to follow their lead. It wouldn’t be anything new, but it will be new to this generation of baseball fans, who can render their own verdicts in time.

View the full article

[T.G.]

3 hours ago, AngelsWin.com said:

What is new is how Atlanta is distributing its dollars, by investing relatively little in other teams’ best players, and a lot in its own.

I like this strategy 

[Second Base]

There's no downside to this strategy. 99% of players that go through the arbitration process and free agency absolutely hate it.

Do you think Austin Riley is really thinking, " Gosh, I wish I could have attended highly contested meeting between the team and my agent and sat around all winter wondering where I'll move my family to instead of getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars to play for a perennial contender surrounded by all my friends I came up with."

When an inventor invents something that is pretty useful, he patents it because he wants to reap the fruits of the usefulness of his labor. Similarly, when teams recognize they have something special, they need to invest in these kids early on so that as they get better and reach their potential, the organization can read the benefits of their success. 

And this strategy really isn't exclusive to large market teams. The Rays, perpetually ones of the "poorest" franchises in baseball did those with Evan Longoria and Wander Franco. The Braves are smart to do this, as were the Angels when they locked in Mike Trout...TWICE!

If I'm the Orioles, I'm exploring big extensions for Adley Rutschman and Gunner Henderson. If I'm the Blue Jays, I'm on the phone with Guerrero and Bichette's agents. If I'm the Angels, they should be talking to Sandoval and Detmers agents. 

Every team should be doing this.

[Docwaukee]

37 minutes ago, Second Base said:

Every team should be doing this.

I would imagine that a lot of them do.  But it takes two to tango.  And the stars sort of have to align in order to make something like this possible.  If you're someone like Sandoval and you play for a team that is about to change ownership and might lose a generational player.  One that is coming off of a 73 win season which was it's 7th losing one in a row then what are you doing?  That's where the money may start to get a little trickier when trying to commit said player to forego a big payday down the line and perhaps move to a team who's shown a penchant for doing things the right way.  

Let's be honest.  The Angels have been a hot mess of late with various lawsuits, ownership uncertainty, a poor development process, perceived poor treatment of many of it's employees, an unconventional leadership structure that's led to discord on a number of occasions and just a general poor approach to fielding a winning team even with two generational players.  Plus, who's been good enough to whom you'd entertain a long contract like this?   Arguably Detmers and Sandoval now but  how many of those long contracts have the Braves handed out to a pitcher?  Exactly one, and I would bet that's not a coincidence.  

And it's not like doing something like this on Jared Walsh or Taylor at age 29 would make sense.  

I am with you that there is no downside and every team should be trying to do this, but the braves were able to smartly manufacture this environment through years of proper baseball management.  

[Angelsjunky]

Yes, it sounds good on paper - but it requires two factors to line up: One, a group of quality young players (and thus a strong farm system), and two, a team that has a track record of perennial contention, thereby making the idea of staying long-term appealing to said players.

The Angels have neither, or at least not yet. This was probably the hope with players like Marsh and Adell, but now Marsh is gone and Adell is--as of this writing--essentially failed prospect. But there's hope in O'Hoppe, Detmers, and maybe some of the guys in the minors. But we're really really a few years from this sort of reality even possibly coming to fruition for the Angels. Maybe they win 85 games this year, or even sniff the playoffs. That's one year since 2015 with a winning record. If I'm a young player, I want to see more than that before committing my prime to a franchise. And even if 5 or 10 of our top 30 prospects turn out to be good major leaguers, we won't know that for a few years yet.

The Braves have been a premier franchise since the early 90s. From 1991-2005 they reached the postseason in all but one year ('94), and since then have had two four-year playoff-less periods (2006-09 and 2014-17), but have reached the postseason in each of the past five seasons, including being WS champs in 2021. 

Most of the players mentioned in the article were on that WS team, but half a decade of playoff appearances and knowledge of the team's legacy over the last three decades, probably helps them feel secure in staying.

If I'm Ohtani or Sandoval, I'm not so sure. In fact, I'm not sure at all. I'm sure both hope that the team turns it around next year, but they're also thinking in terms of performing for a big payday on a better team. But sure, there's a scenario where the Angels improve enough that Ohtani stays, and he and Trout are the heart of a team that gets better and better over the next years. The Angels could be the next Braves or Cardinals...but it looked that way 15 years ago, and instead we got a huge dip in the 2010s that saw the franchise return to its roots of mediocrity.

As @Docwaukee has called me (well, us) out for, every year I can't help but feel that hope springs eternal, and that this will finally be the year that the stars align and the team becomes more than the sum of its parts. But.....

[Stradling]

We should be doing this with Ward, Detmers and Sandoval.  With Ward it really won’t cost you much because he is an older controllable player.  

[jsnpritchett]

34 minutes ago, Stradling said:

We should be doing this with Ward, Detmers and Sandoval.  With Ward it really won’t cost you much because he is an older controllable player.  

Not much reason to do it with Ward for exactly the reason you stated for why you would do it.  He's under control for four more seasons, at which point he'll be heading into his age-33 season.  I'm totally fine just riding it out with him and taking a chance on going to arbitration each year--at least at this point.  Given his track record, I'd still want one more solid season out of him before I'd make an offer that would cover any of his free agent years.

[Warfarin]

1 hour ago, jsnpritchett said:

Not much reason to do it with Ward for exactly the reason you stated for why you would do it.  He's under control for four more seasons, at which point he'll be heading into his age-33 season.  I'm totally fine just riding it out with him and taking a chance on going to arbitration each year--at least at this point.  Given his track record, I'd still want one more solid season out of him before I'd make an offer that would cover any of his free agent years.

Yup.

It generally is beneficial to do it with players in their early/mid 20s.  You buy out 1-2 years of free agency, and also lower the AAV for those final years, in exchange for financial security for the rest of these players' lives.  Seems like a solid tradeoff.  Hard for a 24 year old to turn down 100-150mil guaranteed.  Sure, they can always hope to maximize it more down the line, but that's a sizable gamble from the player's perspective.  Injuries, sudden ineffectiveness, etc.  

[Dtwncbad]

I like what the Braves are doing, but it was the Indians that I recall being the first team that I saw aggressively locking up their young players to wisely save money long-term in the Carlos Baerga days.

[Second Base]

18 hours ago, Angelsjunky said:

Yes, it sounds good on paper - but it requires two factors to line up: One, a group of quality young players (and thus a strong farm system), and two, a team that has a track record of perennial contention, thereby making the idea of staying long-term appealing to said players.

The Angels have neither, or at least not yet. This was probably the hope with players like Marsh and Adell, but now Marsh is gone and Adell is--as of this writing--essentially failed prospect. But there's hope in O'Hoppe, Detmers, and maybe some of the guys in the minors. But we're really really a few years from this sort of reality even possibly coming to fruition for the Angels. Maybe they win 85 games this year, or even sniff the playoffs. That's one year since 2015 with a winning record. If I'm a young player, I want to see more than that before committing my prime to a franchise. And even if 5 or 10 of our top 30 prospects turn out to be good major leaguers, we won't know that for a few years yet.

The Braves have been a premier franchise since the early 90s. From 1991-2005 they reached the postseason in all but one year ('94), and since then have had two four-year playoff-less periods (2006-09 and 2014-17), but have reached the postseason in each of the past five seasons, including being WS champs in 2021. 

Most of the players mentioned in the article were on that WS team, but half a decade of playoff appearances and knowledge of the team's legacy over the last three decades, probably helps them feel secure in staying.

If I'm Ohtani or Sandoval, I'm not so sure. In fact, I'm not sure at all. I'm sure both hope that the team turns it around next year, but they're also thinking in terms of performing for a big payday on a better team. But sure, there's a scenario where the Angels improve enough that Ohtani stays, and he and Trout are the heart of a team that gets better and better over the next years. The Angels could be the next Braves or Cardinals...but it looked that way 15 years ago, and instead we got a huge dip in the 2010s that saw the franchise return to its roots of mediocrity.

As @Docwaukee has called me (well, us) out for, every year I can't help but feel that hope springs eternal, and that this will finally be the year that the stars align and the team becomes more than the sum of its parts. But.....

That's kind of the entire reason for having a farm system, so that you can have hope for buildings a future sustainable winner. We aren't there yet, but we've got some pieces that will be worth building around. 

A pitching staff that includes Detmers and Sandoval. Maybe we'll luck out with Silseth and Bush. Trout, O'Hoppe and Neto all three have me excited. Excited to see what Trout does with better health, excited to see what happens if O'Hoppe gets the opportunity to play everyday, excited about Neto's Bichette like potential. 

It's a start. They're a long way from successful, but if if they invest properly in infrastructure, and a good draft, 2-3 years from now, maybe. 

Edited December 30, 2022 by Second Base

[Dtwncbad]

36 minutes ago, Second Base said:

excited about Neto's Bichette like potential. 

Just curious where the Neto/Bichette comparison comes from?

[Second Base]

8 minutes ago, Dtwncbad said:

Just curious where the Neto/Bichette comparison comes from?

Both early round draft picks, both shortstops that play the game with a lot of flair and passion. They have the same build, use the same leg kick. Same general skill set, only amplified a little in Bichette's case. 

[Dtwncbad]

18 minutes ago, Second Base said:

Both early round draft picks, both shortstops that play the game with a lot of flair and passion. They have the same build, use the same leg kick. Same general skill set, only amplified a little in Bichette's case. 

Dante or Bo?

[TempeAngel]

Isn't the downside to this strategy the possibility of locking up the wrong player?  The Angels may have done this with the early extensions they gave Fletcher and Stassi.

[Second Base]

32 minutes ago, Dtwncbad said:

Dante or Bo?

Bo. 

https://youtu.be/xsqu8xAGs0M

 

https://youtu.be/x6FC9uwDnlw

[Second Base]

1 minute ago, TempeAngel said:

Isn't the downside to this strategy the possibility of locking up the wrong player?  The Angels may have done this with the early extensions they gave Fletcher and Stassi.

It is but the Angels mitigated that risk by making those extensions lower pay. Basically neither of them are so egregiously overpaid that you can't move contract, nor does it hurt you particularly bad if they don't perform. 

Fletch is making 6 million per year across the next three seasons, then the Angels have two team options with 8 million of they feel he's worth it. Stassi is making 7 million this year and next year. If the Angels want to bring him back after that they have a team option at 7.5 million.

If I'm Minasian, I make both those extension offers. At the time, Fletch was one of the most underrated players in baseball and Stassi had come into his own as a good defensive catcher with solid power. Obviously, it hasn't worked out yet, but it's still early. 

 

[Dtwncbad]

29 minutes ago, Second Base said:

Bo. 

https://youtu.be/xsqu8xAGs0M

 

https://youtu.be/x6FC9uwDnlw

Ok my mistake.  I automatically thought you meant Dante and I thought “I must be missing something.”

[Angelsjunky]

4 hours ago, Second Base said:

That's kind of the entire reason for having a farm system, so that you can have hope for buildings a future sustainable winner. We aren't there yet, but we've got some pieces that will be worth building around. 

A pitching staff that includes Detmers and Sandoval. Maybe we'll luck out with Silseth and Bush. Trout, O'Hoppe and Neto all three have me excited. Excited to see what Trout does with better health, excited to see what happens if O'Hoppe gets the opportunity to play everyday, excited about Neto's Bichette like potential. 

It's a start. They're a long way from successful, but if if they invest properly in infrastructure, and a good draft, 2-3 years from now, maybe. 

Yep. There's the possibility of a strong long-term core, led by old man Trout (and possibly Ohtani), but we're still a couple years, at least, from knowing who they are and how good they'll be.

Remember back during the Eppler days when we were always "N+1" years away from seeing the farm system take off? It is sort of like that, but now we're "N+2-3" from being the next Braves.

[Second Base]

2 hours ago, Dtwncbad said:

Ok my mistake.  I automatically thought you meant Dante and I thought “I must be missing something.”

You know you're old when Guerrero, Bichette and Biggio no longer mean Vladimir, Dante and Craig, and are instead Jr., Bo and Cavan. 

[Second Base]

14 minutes ago, Angelsjunky said:

Yep. There's the possibility of a strong long-term core, led by old man Trout (and possibly Ohtani), but we're still a couple years, at least, from knowing who they are and how good they'll be.

Remember back during the Eppler days when we were always "N+1" years away from seeing the farm system take off? It is sort of like that, but now we're "N+2-3" from being the next Braves.

In hindsight, I think the logical flaw was thinking we'd have these prospects in a year or two. The prospects weren't the issue, it was the system of unearthing and choosing which prospects to select that was an underlying weakness. And that likely had less to do with Billy and more to do with Arte. 

Now, we seem to have confidence in the system of personnel that Perry has helped bring in, that they will be able to get the right prospects and over time, create a surplus. The all-pitcher draft really did wonders for the system, even with Bachman not particularly impressing yet. And Neto looks legit, and acquiring O'Hoppe will hopefully reallocate the value of Marsh behind the plate and in guiding a pitching staff. If we give Perry 2-3 more drafts, we might just be there. 

With the sale of the team pending, I'm not sure he'll get the chance though. And that would be a shame.