Will Braves' 2021 midseason revamp be possible in 2022?

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

Even before the Atlanta Braves’ new-look outfield propelled their 2021 run to a World Series title, it was clear that their feat of reinvention would ripple throughout the league.

In July, Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos remade all of a diminished position group for a small, short-term financial cost and, in terms of prospects, an even smaller long-term cost. He did it in a matter of days, after team chairman Terry McGuirk informed him at midseason that the franchise had made more money than expected and could reinvest it into the roster.

And it worked. The Braves started winning as soon as their reinforcements arrived, and they never stopped.

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The implications of what Anthopoulos accomplished have only increased in significance amid Major League Baseball’s ongoing lockout. Whenever it ends, teams will be faced with a quick scramble to finish assembling their rosters for the upcoming season. And, of course, they’ll do so while operating under the terms of a new, as-yet-unknown collective bargaining agreement.

Whatever those terms are, teams will have to determine how to treat competent but unspectacular players seeking short-term contracts. Last offseason, clearly, the sport undervalued them. The Braves’ outfield foursome of Joc Pederson, Eddie Rosario, Adam Duvall and Jorge Soler made a combined $26.25 million in 2021. That's less than Angels outfielder Justin Upton is slated to make in 2022 in the final year of a contract he signed in November 2017, right before he could have become a free agent.

And it’s not like the league caught on come the summer of 2021. Ahead of the July trade deadline, Atlanta obtained all four players for the total price of a third-string catcher, a Class-A reliever, a .206-hitting, Class-A first baseman and veteran Pablo Sandoval, who was released upon receipt.

Imagine if a team could rely on remaking a weak spot in a similar fashion this summer. Why would anyone sign a competent free agent if that remained the going rate for him amid a substandard season? The smart teams could wait to see what they need, wait to see how many tickets they sell and wait to see which of their peers flail — and then text them to start a trade dialogue at the season’s halfway point.

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So, no, it stands to reason that teams shouldn’t be able to rely on following the Braves’ model. Some, surely, will adapt. But what will that adaptation mean for the middle-class, not-old, not-young tier of players like the Braves’ foursome? (It’s worth noting here that three of the four are indeed free agents. Only Duvall is slated to return to the Braves, and he is under club control for just one more season.)

The rational next step would be for the likes of Rosario to start finding the multiyear deals they didn't in recent offseasons, especially if, as the league said last week, draft-pick compensation for free agents will be removed from the next CBA.

Maybe no team will want to pay Rosario much more annually than the $8 million he earned in 2021. But at 30, why would he not be a candidate for a two- or three-year contract? He should’ve been a year ago. He represents, at least, competent depth at a price that’s nowhere near crippling. If his new team underperforms, someone else would still have a use for him at the deadline, even with a year-plus left on his contract.

Think of it this way: The most successful regular-season teams over the past decade have been the deepest teams — the Rays, the Dodgers, perhaps now the Giants. They have had not just depth but also cheap depth, homegrown prospects who have supplied cost-controlled competence in abundance. That, as much as anything, is the preeminent winning model of recent years. There’s no reason to think it will stop working.

But many teams simply do not have the established player-development programs to produce that kind of internal depth — at least not yet, not in 2022. The next best thing is to find that depth in the form of middle-tier free agents, as Anthopoulos demonstrated. He worked with Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi in Los Angeles. He observed up close their approaches to depth acquisition and the dividends they reaped. He adapted their model into what worked for him, in the middle of a season, in a pinch.

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Now, Anthopoulos’ peers must adapt his adaptation to work for their needs. But it won’t be as simple as his unprecedented outfield restructuring.

The price, for one, should be higher. That’s part of what the players are petitioning for in the current CBA negotiations. They want to incentivize more teams to pursue winning so the future NLCS MVP isn’t again traded in a pure salary dump. They are also pushing for younger players to earn more money, as teams rely more and more on their services and spend less and less on players in their 30s.

Perhaps the latter requirement would have the side effect of enticing more teams to go back to spending on the men in the middle, like Anthopoulos did seven months ago.

The impact of the 2021 Braves’ surprise success is far from complete.

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and L.A. Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.