They could have kept the money and they could have kept the prospects, and then nobody would have called the Arizona Diamondbacks crazy.
Nobody would have called them winners, either.
Sure, the Diamondbacks paid insane money to sign 32-year-old Zack Greinke, who has a $34.4 million average salary for his six-year contract. Sure, the Diamondbacks stunned plenty of people with what they gave up in Tuesday night’s Shelby Miller trade with the Atlanta Braves. Who trades the first overall draft pick before he’s ever had a chance to shine—or fail?
The baseball budget hawks hated the Greinke deal. The prospect hawks were quick to pan the Miller deal. As David Cameron of FanGraphs tweeted not long after news of the trade (first reported by Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports) broke:
Not long after that, Cameron (who also blogs about the Seattle Mariners) compared it to the Mariners’ February 2008 trade for Erik Bedard.
Not a compliment, at least not for the team acquiring the established pitcher.
Perhaps he’ll end up being right. Perhaps Dansby Swanson (that No. 1 pick) turns into the Braves’ version of Adam Jones. Perhaps Aaron Blair (the 23-year-old right-handed pitcher in the deal) becomes Chris Tillman or something better.
And perhaps Miller will be as completely average in Arizona as Bedard was in Seattle (Bedard was 15-14 with a 3.31 ERA for three Mariners teams that didn’t make the playoffs).
That’s an optimistic scenario for the Braves’ side of the deal, which also includes outfielder Ender Inciarte. Prospect deals are rarely analyzed well in the minutes after they’re made, but by all accounts, the Braves did well with another trade that continues their long-range rebuilding plan. They could be really good in another two, three or five years.
The Diamondbacks could be really good in 2016. If I’m Greinke, chief baseball officer Tony La Russa, general manager Dave Stewart, manager Chip Hale or any Arizona fan, I’d take that.
Think of it this way: A week ago, we were all wondering whether Greinke’s free-agent decision would leave the Los Angeles Dodgers as the acknowledged power in the National League West or shift the balance north to the San Francisco Giants.
He left—and left the balance of power so up in the air that the NL West could become the most interesting (and competitive) division in baseball.
The Dodgers could certainly recover, especially if they find a way to do a monster deal for Jose Fernandez. The Giants lost out on Greinke and Ben Zobrist, but they signed Jeff Samardzija and are still a possible landing spot for one of the many free-agent corner outfielders (or even for Fernandez, according to Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com).
At the moment, though, neither the Dodgers nor the Giants have a rotation top three to match the Diamondbacks trio of Greinke, Miller and Patrick Corbin. Don’t forget Corbin, who was a 14-game winner and an All-Star in 2013 and had an impressive 16 starts last season in his return from Tommy John surgery.
And don’t forget that the 2015 Diamondbacks scored the second-most runs in the National League (behind the Colorado Rockies but ahead of both the Giants and Dodgers). The D-Backs were a sub-.500 team because they didn’t have nearly enough pitching.
Now they do.
They got it without touching the core of that offense. The first reports (like the one by Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic) of the Miller trade quickly mentioned that center fielder A.J. Pollock was not in the deal, and while Swanson, Blair and Inciarte was a big price to pay, trading Pollock would have hurt Arizona’s 2016 chances quite a bit more.
The Diamondbacks also didn’t need to give up Corbin, and a tweet from Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald showed they might have needed to give up Corbin, Swanson and more for Jose Fernandez:
Prospects are more popular than ever, and teams like the Houston Astros and Chicago Cubs showed last summer why the path the Braves are now taking can work. But the Diamondbacks believed they made progress in 2015. They have an MVP-type offensive centerpiece in Paul Goldschmidt and a management team that wasn’t brought in for a long-term rebuild.
When La Russa went on Arizona Sports radio Tuesday morning to talk about the Greinke signing, he spoke of the excitement it generated among the Diamondbacks staff at the winter meetings.
“You think about what’s next, and what’s next is to make it work for victories, and go into September with a chance to play into October,” La Russa said. “We don’t want to watch TV in October. We want to play in October.”
The Miller trade may eventually be known as the Swanson trade or the Blair trade, and it may eventually give the Braves their chance to get back to October. The Diamondbacks were looking at October 2016, not October 2019 or 2020.
With Greinke, Miller and Corbin, they have a real chance to get there.
Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
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