Last night, I was fighting my way through a kidney stone, fully medicated, and thought I hallucinated that the Braves sent Andrelton Simmons to the Angels.
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In short, Simmons was an awesome defensive player but at best an average offensive player on a team that finished last in baseball in runs scored in 2015.
For the Angels, this looks like a pretty great deal, picking up one of the best shortstops in baseball for a couple of high variance pitching prospects, plus one year of Erick Aybar.
He has more range than an opera singer, his arm is a heat-seeking missile, his glove work on a few of the tags of his are other worldly.
“We’ve had a number of conversations with the Braves, as with other clubs, about a number of different players”, assistant general manager John Ricco said before the trade was announced.
Simmons is the best fielder in the league. Defense is half of the game and teams can routinely win and loss ball games because of defense.
So far since the 2015 season ended, there have been two big trades in Major League Baseball, and both featured an AL West team that will be trying to unseat the division champion Rangers in 2016.
Most people would wonder why the Braves would ever move Simmons, but the reason is really clear. And you wonder: Why not trade him as well? Simmons would have been part of what the Braves expect to be their next competitive team… even if that wasn’t coming until 2018.
Simmons handled curveballs, sliders and changeups adeptly from 2012-13, slugging more than 30 points (.438) above the Major League Baseball average (.405). It’s not completely short-sighted, because they were going to need to get a new shortstop soon anyway and now they have a great one long-term, but there were more pressing needs for the upcoming year and this is a team that can’t afford to waste a single season – Albert Pujols keeps getting older, and Mike Trout won’t keep churning out 9 WAR like clockwork forever. The Atlanta Braves have done that a lot in the past year. Simmons is now under contract with the Angels through the 2020 season. As ESPN’s Buster Olney pointed out, since 2012 he leads the league in defensive runs saved by a fairly large margin. I get it, they think that Winter of 16 they start offloading all this “young” talent for a full team and contend in 17 but it won’t happen that way.
I certainly get it. I understand how they justify trading one of their most popular players, a player so great defensively that he was becoming a Braves icon despite being a mediocre-at-best hitter. This is also a risk, but as stated, while they are quite promising neither Newcomb nor Ellis are sure things while Simmons has proven current value. Newcomb and Ellis were rated the Angels top two prospects, and Newcomb is MLBPipeline.com’s No. 19 overall prospect. They have nothing at 2nd base, now at shortstop. nothing at 3rd base and one outfielder who has 1-2 good seasons left. He was set to be a free agent after the 2016 season, so they needed a viable option for the right side of the infield beyond next season. Over the past two seasons, he has totaled 11 home runs and a. 335 slugging percentage, which ranks 10th-worst in the majors. The homers fell to four past year, but his OPS rose to.
The Padres made two huge trades with the Braves last offseason – for Justin Upton and then for Kimbrel/Melvin Upton.
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BRAVES: Veteran catcher A.J. Pierzynski will return for another season after agreeing to a $3 million, one-year contract. Last year, they stripped the roster down, declared a rebuilding process, came away with Shelby Miller (good!), and spent scores of millions on Nick Markakis (uh, okay).
