Why did the Atlanta Braves sign Drew Smyly?
The deeper we look, the more curious this Drew Smyly signing by the Atlanta Braves appears.
Certainly, the Atlanta Braves don’t shy away from the stats game. In fact, I was initially prepared to suggest that this Drew Smyly signing was driven entirely by analytics… and that still could be true to some extent… but only if you narrow the focus to an elite group of stats. We’ll get to that in a bit.
But the price? $11 million for one year. If that sounds steep, you’re not alone. Right now, there’s a clear disparity between the perceived value of players and their actual value:
- MLB Trade Rumors estimate: 1 year deal, $5 million
- Jim Bowden of TheAthletic (paywall). Didn’t rank Smyly in his Top 25 free agents, and his #25 was estimated at 2 years, $12 million.
- Keith Law of TheAthletic (paywall). Didn’t rank Smyly in his Top 40 free agents (no contract estimates given).
- Smyly’s ask: 3 years/$10 million apiece.
Hearing Smyly was asking teams for the neighborhood of 3/$30m. Not sure why he took 1/$11. Perhaps he felt the #braves were a good personal fit, or he could get even more with a good, full 2021. He is from Arkansas.
— Henry Schulman BLUE CHECK MARK (@hankschulman) November 16, 2020
The philosophy employed by the Atlanta Braves under Alex Anthopoulos has been to go for the quick, big strike — particularly for the one-year contracts:
Alex Anthopoulos continues to be the godfather of the 1 year contract. Absolute king.
— SportsTalkATL.com (@SportsTalkATL) November 16, 2020
This has been done in recent years with Josh Donaldson, Marcell Ozuna, and Cole Hamels. Two of these worked out very well. That other one really didn’t hurt the team that much.
There’s also this odd dynamic that will be going on this Winter: more than a few free agents may be looking at the new owner of the New York Mets and wondering if they will throw money in their direction.
Even if not, agents could be banking (literally) on the threat that the Mets could spend big to keep the prices high for their clients — at least for a couple of months. That kind of thinking could partly have been at work here — along with the fact that Atlanta was targeting Smyly.
The biggest surprise from a Braves Country point of view might be this: the team spent $11 million when they may not have needed to. So maybe they’re going to go higher on the payroll than we thought?
It’s hard to rail against such short-term moves for very long. That’s probably going to be the case here as well, though it’s worth asking: ‘why this guy in particular?’
In the next couple of pages, we’ll explore a couple of further answers to that question.