I 100% believe this will be the chosen path. 85 win teams bring fans to the seats and make the team money. I think fans overestimate just how much owners really care about winning the world series. This is board is going to go berserk over these decisions, which will be hilarious. We'll eventually bring in a new GM and we'll sell off whatever we can and we'll all get excited by all our prospects - only to watch most of them become flaming piles of s*** - just like we have with Vlad, Kirk, Pearson, Manoah, DJ Davis, Groshans, Zeuch, Harris, Hoffman, Pentecost, Warmouth, Ricky, Moreno, Snider, JPA, Lawrie, etc.
If we try to buy our way out of this - it seem inevitable we'll eventually swing and miss and end up with a Baez, Pujols, etc. situations on our hands. We've seen teams try to build through free agency and it almost always fails....so we should probably drop payroll back to like $80-$100M while we go through this rebuild.
Those who hate this FO and what they've done over the past 5 years may soon realize how much more they prefer watching an 85-90 win team that never really "goes for it". s*** will probably get really ugly around here. It might be 2030 by the time we even consider the playoffs again.