re: The ATL Thread: Offseason Edition

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We have absolutely no news or rumors to talk about so I thought I'd look ahead to next offseason. All I've been hearing about is how we'll have a bunch of money to spend next year so I wanted to see the numbers myself and came up with this....

Here is all money that will for sure be coming off the books next year. For the record, I'm going to say Chipper retires because I don't really see him playing another year, especially at his $7M option for 2013:

Chipper - 13M
Lowe - 10M
Bourn - 7.3M (proj)
Diaz - 2M
Ross - 1.625M
Hinske - 1.5

I think we'll re-sign Ross and Hinske, but right now we'll say all of them go elsewhere.

Total Money Saved - 35.425M

Now we'll look at all salary increases from next year until 2013. Make a note this is just the value of the increase in dollar amount, and not the total number the player will be making:

McCann - 3.5M
*all others below will be arbitration upgrades and are projected*
Heyward - 3M
Hanson - 4M
Medlen - .5M
Venters - 2M
Jurrjens - 3M
Prado - 2M
O'Flaherty - 1.5M

Total Money Increased - 19.5M

Now, I'm going to play GM for a second and make some moves I think are likely to happen....

*Trading JJ this offseason and in return, getting a young CF that will be ready to play in 2013. Instead of paying his projected $3M salary increase, we now save ourself of his $5.1M projected 2012 salary, but we would really only be saving ourselves from last year's salary which was $3.25M, and for this argument, we'll say the Braves don't spend any of that and use it towards next year.

*Re-sign both Ross and Hinske for about a total of $3M salary for the 2013 season.

Now, we have our projected money to spend in next year's offseason. That number is - $19.175M.

Now let's look at the holes we have on the team in this scenario. I'm going to assume Terd and Salcedo are not ready to take over 3B and Prado moves to there for the 2013 year.

I will also assume that we get the young CF we are looking for in a trade and he's ready to take the reigns in 2013.

This leaves the only starting position that we need in LF. There will also be 3 bench spots left, but doubtful we spend much money in those areas. You'll also have a bullpen spot or two but again, not much money will be spent in those areas in Free Agency.

In conclusion, I think we'll have the money to go out and get a pretty dang good LF next year. Will we be able to go out and get someone for 20 or 25 million dollars a year? Of course not, and that's not something we'd do even if we had the money in all likelihood. But we can definitely afford to give someone up to 15 or 16M if we wanted to go that route, and that would give us some money left over to take care of other needs on this team, which is not even counting any potential payroll increases we make, which I think we will since we probably aren't this year like we said we were going to do.

Notable Outfield Free Agents next year:

Josh Hamilton
Delmon Young
Andre Ethier
Torri Hunter
Carlos Quentin
Nick Swisher

Obviously, we could also have more flexibility in any trade because we could take on more money in any potential trade.

Of course, none of this is going to be completely accurate and I'm sure there are quite a few mistakes I made since I put it together pretty quickly, but hey, at least it's something new to discuss

Hope everyone has a good new year

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Josh Hamilton
Delmon Young
Andre Ethier
Torri Hunter
Carlos Quentin
Nick Swisher

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