Thurston Fluff

It’s been overstated so many times that Braun’s contract hurts us. Well it didn’t stop us from adding over $20M to our outfield for years to come a few days ago. Not only that but if 1WAR = $8M, I think Braun will probably do alright in getting the value out of that contract. Also you may want to check out who the Cardinals are paying money to over there in St. Louis. Lol The reason we can pay that now isn't because we just got done selling off every expensive piece we could. The reason we did is because every other veteran player we had was valuable enough compared to their contract to get good value in return. Now we are good enough to win which made these moves possible. Braun couldn't get us anything of because of his contract. So now we sit here with a guy who can only play 120 games a year, making more than the rest of the outfield combined and we now have to figure out what to do with Santana. Who BTW may very well be better than Braun at this stage. But that isn't hurting anything. My point about the Cardinals isn't that they never waste any money. It's just we want to have that string of success. In my mind the best way to do that is not to pay players more than they are worth in any given year. When it comes to judging the value of a contract looking at WAR over the life of the contract is next to useless. It doesn't take consistency into account at all. A player can be great one year, suck the next and it's the same as if he consistently produced year in and year out. When building a team for the long haul every GM in the world would take player B over player A.

We'll see how that plays out in years 4 and 5 of Cains contract. There is a pretty good chance we have that bloated contract on the books when we need to have the money for another player at that time, but will be strapped. I might be wrong, but so could everyone else. But you’re more missing he point. He will be nothing but a bonus in terms of the value of the contact by then. In year three he will, most likely, have made the contract worth it. And $18M in 2021 isn’t going to be holding the crew back if in contention just like Braun isn’t present day. You’re just looking for reasons to hate this because your beloved prospects are gone. I think the point is if we are working towards always being a contender we should never knowingly overpay someone for the year they are playing. Braun's contract already hurt us. Imagine if the money spent on him the past four years were spent on players worth that much money. To me the contract's total amount is only half the issue. How it's structured is the other half. Knowingly overpaying someone at the end of the contract for gains at the beginning of the contract creates a cycle of a couple years of good teams followed by a couple years of terrible teams. The goal is to be St Louis not Pittsburgh.

For me it's not underrating him as much as wondering if the difference between him and what we already had was worth trading 4 prospects for. I would have prefered not to have done this deal but not overly fussed about it either. One thing I do like about this is he is the type of hitter that we don't have a lot of. I'm a fan of having different types of hitters in the lineup and we were missing his type of hit tools.