It's that time of year again.....time to bid adieu to the twenty worst teams in baseball. I'm a little behind on the eliminated teams , but I'm hoping to get all caught up in the next day or so.
Anyway, since it doesn't make sense to have live content in two places, I'll be announcing the teams in here and then posting an excerpt from the article and a link to the dot com. We'll start with last week's hapless eliminants:
Anyway, since it doesn't make sense to have live content in two places, I'll be announcing the teams in here and then posting an excerpt from the article and a link to the dot com. We'll start with last week's hapless eliminants:
Hey, look! Incremental progress! It looks like this is the year where the Philllies finally realized that once you reach Hell, it’s best to stop digging.
For years, the Phillies attempted to hold the trade market hostage with a squirt gun pointed backwards. Every year at the trade deadline, sportswriters make a list of all of the players that the Phillies could trade for some sort of value, and every year, the Phillies made obscene demands that dissuaded other teams from talking to them. Ruben Amaro sensibly decided several years ago that he needed to remake the farm system; unfortunately, Amaro decided that the best way to do it was with “magic bullet” trades (i.e. one or two trades that would completely restock the farm), which is a lovely idea in theory but falls apart when one actually attempts to find a trade partner that’s willing to give up said magic bullet. Long story short, the Phillies had been waiting out the trade market for almost three years.
This year, Andy MacPhail was brought on staff in an attempt to talk sense into Amaro. Whatever it was that MacPhail said to Amaro, the pep talks seem to have worked, as the Phillies finally started making reasonable trade requests to other teams.
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I think it's safe to say that the first season of the post-Frank Wren era was a disaster.
Last year, the Braves fired Frank Wren, a middling GM who had constructed some decent teams but also saddled Atlanta with ridiculous contracts to players like Melvin Upton, Derek Lowe and Dan Uggla. After Wren’s departure, the new Braves’ brass decided to limit the payroll without completely committing to a tear-down, so new team president John Hart spent this past offseason trying to swap out good players for other good (but cheaper!) players. Out went Jason Heyward, Jordan Walden, Craig Kimbrel, Kris Medlen Ervin Santana and the better Upton; in came Shelby Miller, Nick Markakis, Jim Johnson and Cameron Maybin. The goal was to keep the team competitive while transitioning to a younger core, allowing the likes of Andrelton Simmons, Julio Teheran and newly-acquired Jace Peterson to move slowly into the spotlight under the tutelage of veteran players who knew how to play “the right way.”
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