In my last diary entry, I highlighted four holes that will need to be filled this offseason in order for us to field a competitive team in 2022. After looking over our roster once more, I found several more that are fairly significant:
Hole #5: A third starting pitcher
My assumption, up until recently, was that we would only need to add two more mid-rotation inning-eating arms to our rotation. With Scherzer, we were 361 innings short of having a full starting rotation (six innings times 160 games.) After looking at the available free agent pitchers, it became painfullly obvious that adding only two pitchers would not suffice. There simply aren't enough free agents available with that number of innings in MLB '21.
Hole #6: A shortstop against left-handers
Brandon Crawford hit just .244/.300/.422 against lefties in MLB. It wouldn't kill us to start him against southpaws, but he certainly wouldn't be an asset. If we plan to be a competitive team in '22, we probably shouldn't head into the season with three potential liabilities in our lineup.
Hole #7: Shohei Ohtani
Despite his likely defensive liability, we have Ohtani penciled into our lineup against both lefties and righties. The problem is that we also plan to use him as a starting pitcher. That is roughly 24 games this season. On those 24 occasions, who will take Ohtani's place in the outfield? As it stands, we have Yadiel Hernandez with a little over 100 PA's in usage against lefties. Against right-handers, we would have only one viable outfielder, Andrew Benintendi. The problem is that he isn't much (.264/.318/.437) with the bat. This leaves us with a mostly-empty outfield against right-handers!
In addition to these glaring holes, there are also some "nice to have" items on our Christmas shopping list, including a shut-down closer, a decent-hitting catcher, and a backup infielder.
With Scherzer, we had $20.1 million left to spend on 13 players. We decided on a budget of:
- Steven Matz: $6M
- Brandon Belt: $6M
- Another SP: $3M
- Yet another SP: $2M
- Catcher: $1M
- Backup catcher: $500K
- Shortstop vs. LH: $100K
- One more reliever: $100K
- Four scrubs: $400K
The problem here is that we're spending $20.1 million to fill a bunch of holes with a lot of below-average players. And this is the best-case scenario! The odds of signing both Matz and Belt to $6M each are astronomically-low -- especially given the "X-factor" of Billy Romaniello throwing money around like Robert Deniro in Goodfellas.
After realizing that this wasn't a very good plan, I began to wonder what our budget would look like if you removed Max Scherzer's $15.5 million salary from the equation. Our spending budget would balloon to $35.5 million! Which would make our auction/draft budget look something like this:
- Steven Matz: $6M
- Brandon Belt: $6M
- A.J. Pollock: $7M
- Another starter: $5M
- Yet another starter: $2M
- Catcher: $3M
- Backup catcher: $500K
- SS vs. LH: $500K
- Top-notch closer: $5M
- Four scrubs: $400K
Wow! What a difference! I plugged Pollock in there at $7M, just to show the quality of the type of player we could add for that kind of money. I really would not want to sign Pollock at that price, but he would be an excellent fit for us. Instead of spending $5 million on two starting pitchers, we could spend $7 million on two. The difference in quality there would be substantial. Likewise, we could add an actual closer to the bullpen, which would push all of our other relievers down a notch. And we would have a much better catcher at $3 million than $1M.
There is no doubt that we would have a much better, much deeper, team without Scherzer. We placed him on the block, and after a week or so, made an offer to the Ravenswood Infidels: Luis Garcia and Henry Davis for Scherzer. Ravenswood GM Brian Potrafka asked us to throw in Matt Wisler, and we sealed the deal.
There is no doubt we downgraded our rotation. In fact, we probably just gave away the OL Cy Young award winner (unless the league decides to unjustly reward Gerrit Cole yet again.) Our franchise's philosophy, since the very beginning, has been to feature a strong starting rotation. That philosophy ended with last season's debacle. It's time to try something new.
Garcia has some serious split issues (827/548), which will cause problems against the many BDBL teams that like to fill their lineups with lefties against such pitchers. Garcia will likely face twice as many lefties in the BDBL this season as he did in MLB. But that's okay. He has 170 innings of usage, and absolutely dominates right-handers. There is some good value there, if we use him correctly.
Davis is a guy we don't really "need" thanks to the presence of Adley Rutschman on our roster. He can serve us in one of two ways. First, although scouts praise his arm strength, there are many legitimate questions about his blocking, game-calling, and framing skills behind the plate. It's quite likely that he will move to another position over the next year or two, and we could use a power-hitting first baseman or corner outfielder. Second, he could become very valuable trade bait -- which is something we lack at this point.
Normally, I like to stay as far away from the auction as possible. It has been many years since we had this much money to spend, but this auction class does not look as though it is worth the money. As with every auction class, it is filled with aging veterans who are unlikely to be worthy of their salaries a year from now. The last thing we want to do is handcuff our 2023 and 2024 teams for a one-year-only benefit.
Thankfully, Doyle is gone, so the auction's greatest wildcard is now a relic of the past. Unfortunately, he's been replaced by Billy Baseball, who is an even greater wildcard. Billy has told me that he plans to build around the tiny core of players that Doyle left for him, and he has a ton of money to do so. The last thing Billy should be doing is blowing money on aging veterans in this auction/draft, but it appears that is his plan.
No comments:
Post a Comment