When the Atlanta Braves traded dominant closer Craig Kimbrel (and roster dead weight Melvin Upton Jr) to the San Diego Padres on Sunday night, baseball fans were shocked. Many Braves fans had a meltdown, seemingly in disbelief that a team projected to finish fourth in the NL East this season would want to trade the best closer in baseball. Why would you sell off that high-end sound system from your beat-ass Corolla? It’s an awesome sound system! Yes, but you don’t *need* it, and can do more without it than you could with it.
Trading Craig Kimbrel wasn’t exactly some sort of idea out of right field. We wrote about the idea in January, and sure enough, executing the trade wasn’t easy for John Hart. Hart packaged Kimbrel with Upton, who has one of the worst contracts in baseball, and only got two prospects (only one of which is a top 100 guy) and a draft pick in return, along with some of San Diego’s contractual deadweight. Braves bloggers were writing about this a year and a half ago, when Kimbrel wasted away in Atlanta’s bullpen as Juan Uribe ended the Braves season in the NLDS.
The trade in and of itself isn’t all that shocking. The Braves dramatically remade their roster this winter, dumping Jason Heyward, Justin Upton, and Evan Gattis, among others. The pitching staff largely remained untouched through trades, prior to last week’s acquisition of ex-Diamondback Trevor Cahill. Despite John Hart’s assertions that Atlanta thought of Kimbrel as a building block, trading Kimbrel made too much sense for it *not* to happen.
Imagine the situation Atlanta would be in had Kimbrel blown his elbow out in May, which isn’t exactly a crazy thought given how hard he throws – they’d be on the hook for what’s left of his $9.25 million salary in 2015 while getting no production, and would be on the hook for his $11.25 million salary in 2016, when his return is still a question mark. For a team operating on a lower budget like the Braves that already is dealing with the sunk costs of Melvin Upton and current National Dan Uggla, adding another bit of dead money to their payroll would be a complete disaster.
But while the trade itself may not have been shocking, the timing (and the selection of the Padres as a trade partner) blew my mind. This deal went down less than 24 hours before Opening Day for the Braves at Marlins Park. The promotional materials had been printed. Even the MLB.com Twitter promos for the Braves featured Kimbrel! This was tweeted less than a day before the trade.
Even when the Braves traded both David Justice *and* Marquis Grissom to the Indians in 1997, they pulled the trigger a week before Opening Day as opposed to the night before Opening Day. It’s staggering that Atlanta managed to pull this off after officially setting their Opening Day 25-man roster. Talk about flying by the seat of your pants.
The choice of San Diego to deal with also came as a bit of a shock, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The Padres had a roster crunch in the outfield, and managing to turn their two bad contracts into one (that gets to start the year on the DL) was a logical move.
Also, the Padres had the prospect depth to wet Atlanta’s whistle (like they did in the Justin Upton trade earlier this offseason), and the bullpen was the one area that AJ Preller didn’t at least modestly upgrade this offseason (because you can ague that the Padres didn’t *need* to upgrade it, but that’s a completely different topic). They didn’t give up a ton, but took on some significant salary obligations for the future, turning this Padres team into one that looks to win in the next year or two as opposed to way down the line.
These two franchises are going in opposite directions, and based on each of their strategies this offseason, the Kimbrel trade makes perfect sense. Of course, just because something makes sense, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t completely shocking. Barring an injury, this trade will be impossible to evaluate for at least another two years, and the entire landscape of baseball could be completely different by then.
