Mayer’s ETA is 2025 (A+/AA next year, AA/AAA year after, AAA and majors in ‘25), maybe 2026 if we want to control him during his peak years. Bringing him up in 2026 would give us control for his age 23-28 seasons. There’s no little reason to plan this off-season about a prospect who may make the majors 3-4 years from now. Correa would be a great replacement for Bogaerts.
For C, Wong is hitting well enough that he should get a shot. He’s cost controlled and the options in free agency are very limited. If we bring up Wong next year, we have him for his age 27-32 seasons, covering his peak years.
1B is probably a platoon with Arroyo, Hosmer, Dalbec and eventually Casas.
2B is Story and Arroyo.
SS is Correa ($30m AAV)
3B is Devers under a long term deal ($30m AAV).
RF is Verdugo. LF is Haniger/Pham/Brantley (2-3 year deal, max $15m AAV). CF is Kike ($8m). DH is Hosmer, Casas and AAAA guys.
It isn’t much better than this year, but a higher floor.
Rotation: Sale, Houck, Pivetta, Eovaldi QO, Bello, Crawford, Winckowski, Seabold. Hill on a similar deal would be interesting.
Bullpen: Barnes, Sawamura, Schreiber, Whitlock and $20m on 2-3 guys. If Bello starts the year in the majors then Houck stays in the ‘pen. Depending on how Bloom spends the $20m on the ‘pen, we would be a high 80s to low 90s win team. If Bloom throws away $30m like he did this year (JBJ, Paxton, Diekman) then we end up as a .500 team and he probably ends up getting fired.
Total payroll: ~$240m.
There’s not a lot of upside in this team, we would need to see progress from the young starters (Bello, Winckowski, Crawford, Seabold - maybe Walter and Mata) to end up as a really good team. Downsides are obvious, this is not a young team and there’s not a lot of high upside players.