The thing about last season that didn’t make sense to me at the time was that we knew in may that the bullpen was destroying us. We knew we had an underlying good team statistically. So, the obvious answer is to overpay for multiple relievers right then and as soon as possible. Instead, we got great deals on two relievers but too late.
That’s all in retrospect but this was stuff I was saying at the time in may last year. Go out and make some bad trades for relievers where you know at the time that you got ripped off in the trade, and probably by a lot. The Sportsnet propoganda network kept telling us how hard it is to make early trades for relievers when it isn’t hard.. it’s just hard to make FAIR trades. Why did they have to be fair? Overpay.
At the time, I thought it meant that we weren’t going to go crazy at the deadline but then we made a massive trade for berrios even though our playoff odds were just good enough to justify it. Those actions didn’t seem to be consistent to me.
I think there’s a lot of ego and ass covering involved in these jobs. You don’t want to lose trades (especially obvious losses at the time of the trade) and you don’t want to do anything outside the norm like make overpay trades way before the deadline, because teams don’t do that. If that goes wrong idiots will destroy you instead of the manager even though it was the logical thing to do.
In saying all that, in the grand scheme that’s a minor enough quibble. The main problem with this front office is that we are in a division with two top 5 front offices in the entire league. And the other two teams are run by guys who come from front offices that are top 5 in the league.
If we were in the AL central none of this would matter.