If you’re not a super fan of the hot stove season, you might not vibe with what I’m throwing down. I LOVE all aspects of baseball, including the long, drawn out months with no baseball from November through March. However, there are specific dates that I keep in mind during the offseason that I thought I’d share:
The Braves have decisions looming and today marks the first day that starts the real trimming of the 40-man roster as teams have to decide which players that are Rule-5 eligible are worthy of a 40-man roster spot. Fortunately for AA, this decision is quite easy as there might be 2 guys that could be considered: Luis De Avila and Tyler Owens. However, neither is a shoo-in.
Friday marks the day that really starts the 40-man trimming as the Braves front office has to decide to tender or non-tender both pre-arb and arb-eligible players. Here’s that list:
- Kolby Allard
- Nick Anderson
- Ian Anderson
- Yonny Chirinos
- Dylan Dodd
- Bryce Elder
- Max Fried
- Daysbel Hernandez
- Dylan Lee
- A.J. Minter
- Angel Perdomo
- Jared Shuster
- AJ Smith Shawver
- Michael Soroka
- Michael Tonkin
- Darius Vines
- Allan Winans
- Kyle Wright
- Huascar Ynoa
- Chadwick Tromp
- Vaughn Grissom
- Nicky Lopez
- Braden Shewmake
- Luke Williams
- Forrest Wall
Guesswork: The Braves will non-tender several on this list, but before non-tendering, they will do everything they can to make small trades. Some like Luke Williams, Chadwick Tromp, Yonny Chirinos, and Kolby Allard have no real value to other teams, so the easy answer is they are non-tendered. My guess is we will see a few small trades and see 4-5 spots on the 40-man open up by the weekend.
Chirinos is the first one to be DFA’d…didn’t see that one coming, but frankly, I’m glad.
Here is my offseason plan:
Sign Ohtani
Sign Snell
Sign Nola
Trade Ozuna for a young, superstar leftfielder and a dominant closer
Boom!
A team like that could give us 130 wins. We would still probably get knocked out in the second round of the playoffs. Yeah, I’m still bitter about how this year ended.
Second round, eh? I was thinking half our starting rotation would get a hangnail in the last week of the season and the other half would get flu. We’d be piggybacking Chavez and Tonkin off Winans in game 1.
Good guess based on the Bummer trade.