Yeah, they badly f-ed up that winter. Literally burning the money might have given us more production than those guys did. Wish they hadn't misread the market and jumped on Morales, but the team was also in enough trouble that it didn't really matter what they used the 40m on it wasn't gonna be enough to get them to the playoffs.
That's the thing...I don't really buy this, and I don't think it stands up to scrutiny.
So let's assume that you do away with just the wasteful spending on Bautista, Morales, and Peace. Let's also assume that you're trying to play the Shatkins game and be "risk averse" (which really means cheap, because they don't avoid risk at all).
Well, the first thing you can do is do what a bunch of us suggested as a Morales alternative at the time and sign Eric Thames as your DH. This comes with the bonus of him being able to field a position (sort of...he's something of a Greek tragedy in the OF, but functions when you're in a pinch). Is neutral value with his legs and turned into a legit stick while overseas (would have been our 3rd most valuable stick last season). Removed the negative value of his defence by plugging him into a DH role and he's a 3+ WAR player last season. That's a 4 win swing in replacing Morales with Thames. Also carried the bonus of being paid 4M last year. So we've got about 35m left to play with and we're probably an 80 win team.
Now we move on to Bautista & Pearce in the corners. There were a number of functional (and cheap) options that would have been an improvement on Bautista. I guess first is the required logic behind moving on from an icon. Showed huge decline between 15 and 16 including pretty significant decreases in power and contact rate, and a signficant increase in K%. Maybe we could have squeezed some extra high end baseball out of him had we moved him to DH a couple years before (he really did turn into a horrendous OF over the last few seasons he was here) but we didn't and the signs of decline were all over his 2016 season. That he was expecting to get paid was all the reason we needed to move on. 1.3 WAR 36 yr old demanding ~20 million to stay? We all love him, but hard pass. After ****ing up the Edwin situation though, Shatkins didn't want the bad press and panicked.
When we look at the options, the pretty obvious ones were Colby Rasmus & Brandon Moss. Both went in between 5-6.5 million, both had strong track records of being starters. Both of them were less than ideal, but functional and put up a total of 2.4 WAR, about a 3 win advantage over the Bautista-Pearce pairing. Now we're an 83 win team with 25 million to spend.
But then if we consider spending a bit of that money, Fowler & Reddick were both available and within the budget if we're not puking money away. Maybe we go hard at them, maybe we get both (we didn't even try by any account and money talks, so let's not play the navel gazing "they would never come here" bullshit game that gets brought out to support team Shatkins and their bargain bin hunting). Fowler & Reddick were worth 8 wins, so now we're at an 88 win club even with all the injuries. A few decent depth trades so that Goins & Barney aren't getting 800 PA's between them to the tune of a -1.0 WAR (you know, like the trades we finally made this off season for capable middle infielders like Solarte, Diaz, etc....let's not play the game that Goins wasn't a known negative going into the season), and we're a 90 win club even with some of our best players missing significant chunks of the season.
I have a hard time accepting that beating the Twins at 85 wins was some incredible achievement that nothing could have possibly been done by management to achieve. When you light big chunks of your payroll on fire, and keep known crap on your roster then yeah, but that's management and nothing to do with being "old" or whatever else.
But let's cut that last bit down the middle. Say we blow our brains out on one of Reddick/Fowler and land just one of them. Let's then say that we take a 1 year flyer on Rasmus/Moss or even Rajai Davis as the other OF. Then let's say we actually proactively protected the middle of our infield just to the point where we received replacement level value for them (instead of what Goins/Barney provided). None of these are crazy moves, and many of us were suggesting similar at the time.
That's an 86-87 win ballclub, and in the wild card. Maybe Shatkins even grows a pair at the deadline and adds pitching. Darvish didn't exactly cost a fortune (one fringe top 50 prospect and some stuff). The A's didn't exactly get a haul for Sonny Gray. A massive bucket of good relievers switch cities and a lot of them for less than you would expect as well.
I'm kind of stunned that anyone can look at the job they did and shrug their shoulders and give them a pass under some nonsense logic that "nothing could be done" when they worst part of the team was almost entirely their additions to it.
I'm wondering what exactly they've done, anywhere in their careers, to lead anyone to give them this type of pass. An 85 win team made the playoffs last year. Being an 86 win team really isn't ****ing hard, especially when you took over a 95 win team 2 years prior.
