There's No Right Way to Turn Around the Braves, But There Are Many Wrong Ones

I, personally, have always suspected the use of cyborg death-corgis on the part of the Atlanta Braves front office (Pembroke, not Cardigan). These stubby, yapping, fur-and-titanium-alloy creatures are deployed by savvy general managers on potential trading partners, and they nip tirelessly at that unlucky GM's toes until he deals Strasburg and Harper and agrees to cover 80 percent of their salaries.

It is true that we do not have hard evidence for this, but do you have a better explanation for how, last December, Atlanta got the Arizona Diamondbacks to part with two top prospects and one of the best defensive outfielders in baseball in exchange for (to that point) good but not great 25-year-old right-handed starter Shelby Miller? Some have argued that Arizona's general manager Dave Stewart and Chief Baseball Officer Tony La Russa were a bit intoxicated, in a metaphorical sense, with Miller. The use of cyborg death-corgis seems much more plausible.

Having capped his Atlanta teardown tank-job with this canine-aided coup de main, Braves general manager John Coppolella is apparently disdaining additional trades of established players for other teams' prospects. On Saturday, Ken Rosenthal reported that Coppolella would only trade 25-year-old starting pitcher Julio Teheran for a hitter of "comparable quality and age," not a grab bag of potential. "The days of us trading players like Teheran for prospects are over," Coppolella said.

In the specific case of Teheran, this isn't a totally unreasonable thing to say, but in a broader sense the Braves' rebuild is so far from over that ruling out any possible route to improving the team seems seriously premature. Having gone 4-6 in their last 10 games, the Braves have got their season winning percentage all the way up to .294. This puts them on a trajectory to be better than the 43-119 2003 Detroit Tigers, but worse than any other team this century with the possible exception of the current Minnesota Twins, who are pacing them exactly.

While the starting rotation has youth and promise, the offense is hilariously moribund; even with shortstop Dansby Swanson, the former first-overall draft pick swiped in the Miller deal and currently working his way through the Braves system, the lineup would still be roughly a Babe Ruth and a Lou Gehrig away from average. Without going all Henri Poincaré on you with the baseball math, suffice it to say that the 2016 Braves' offense has been, to date, of about the same quality as that of the 1963 Houston Colt 45s, a second-year expansion team whose cleanup hitter slugged .348, or perhaps the 1910 Chicago White Sox, a Deadball-era aggregation whose most famous position-player alumnus not named Chick Gandil was shortstop Lena Blackburne, who hit .174/.245/.194 and is best remembered as the guy who convinced both major leagues that they couldn't get by unless they rubbed baseballs with mud grubbed from his New Jersey farm.

That mud, still in use, is more potent than the Braves, who to date have hit 21 home runs as a team. David Ortiz, who is so used up as to be completing rehearsals for retirement, has hit 14.

Though the Braves' minor league system teems with pitching prospects, the lineup of the future remains mostly a mystery. There's Swanson, first baseman Freddie Freeman (who is signed until the end of time), center fielder Ender Inciarte (the aforementioned stolen defensive wizard, under team control through 2020), and perhaps rookie outfielder Mallex Smith, who has hit well against right-handed pitching. We pause here to note that Nick Markakis is signed through 2018. In late May and early June 1944, the BBC broadcast lines from Paul Verlaine's poem "Chanson d'automne" to signal to the French Resistance that the D-Day invasion was imminent and they should rise up. The first lines were "Long sobs of autumn violins/ wound my heart with a monotonous languor." Think real hard about the Braves' offense and you'll know how Verlaine felt. "Nick Markakis is signed through 2018" should be a signal to the Resistance, perhaps, to blow the bridges to Cobb County, where the Braves will relocate next year.

There are other position players in the Braves system you'll hear about, infielder Ozzie Albies and outfielder Braxton Davidson among them, but most of the sizzle is about pitching. That's not a bad thing, of course, and some of those pitchers can be turned into hitters. Perhaps a polished pitcher can be dealt as the prospects establish themselves—if__ they establish themselves—and Teheran is polished in the same sense Miller was, in that he's both a solid pro and maybe looks a little shinier than is fully representative.

Teheran is a known quantity: three of his last four seasons (counting 2016 to date) have been strong. He gets a little home-run happy sometimes, but he has been a quality pitcher and is signed to a six-year contract that lasts through 2019. Teheran won't break the $10 million mark until the final guaranteed season. There's also a $12 million team option for 2020, which, given the way pitcher salaries are going, is going to look a lot like pitching for free.

That combination of steadiness and, uh, steadiness might not win Cy Young Awards, but it's also not nothing, and it may be considerably more valuable than whatever the Braves could turn Teheran into. A prospect might turn into Bryce Harper or Clayton Kershaw, or he might become Al Chambers or Scott Ruffcorn. The latter, or something mediocre, is a lot more likely. The more wheeling and dealing you do, trading knowns for unknowns—even if they're seemingly safe bets like Swanson—the more chances you have to take your unspectacular but solid starter and turn him into a spectacular flameout.

There was a GM in the 1950s, "Trader" Frank Lane, who ran that risk all the time, making more than 400 deals over a relatively short career. His teams never won a damned thing, but he did manage to turn young first baseman Norm Cash and his nearly 400 future home runs into third baseman Steve Demeter and, well, zero home runs, and a Teheran-aged Rocky Colavito into the older, positionless singles and doubles guy Harvey Kuenn. You've heard of how an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually recreate the complete works of Shakespeare? Well, they'd pound out a whole lot of gibberish, too. The same goes for an infinite number of GMs making an infinite number of deals. Dave Stewart isn't always on the other end of the phone to save you from your mistakes.

As bad as the Braves have been overall, it's been encouraging to watch the starting rotation (along with 25-year-old closer Arodys Vizcaino, who took a long, injury-riddled road to get here) do its best to overcome an offense populated by veteran schlubs. That lineup is, frankly, something of an insult to the fans, but the rest is just baseball. The Braves' rotation has a lower ERA than that of the Diamondbacks, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Cincinnati Reds, the Milwaukee Brewers, and the Colorado Rockies, and though that might seem like damning them with faint praise, in the context of a historically miserable team it's an accomplishment. If Coppolella says, "I will build my shining city on this mound," he's not necessarily wrong.

But he's not necessarily right, either. Pitchers break. Hitters are more reliable, and as long as Swanson doesn't start partying with Johnny Manziel he should make it to the major leagues. You can't say the same about most prospects. And on yet a third hand, you could trade Teheran for a prospect like the Texas Rangers' Joey Gallo and find out he never will make enough contact to hit .210 in the majors, or deal Teheran for the White Sox' Triple-A shortstop Tim Anderson (about all they've got in the position-player line) and discover that he's so trigger-happy he'll struggle to draw 20 walks in a season and, bonus, he also has to be moved to the outfield.

There are really no right answers here, no guidance. Every team that has dug itself in this deeply has gotten out in a different way. The 2003 Tigers team the Braves are presently racing to the bottom was the logical endpoint of a long series of miserable teams that stretched back to 1993. The Tigers didn't finish rebuilding until 2006, when they won 95 games and reached the World Series. That team had a number of things go right, as is the case with all successful rebuilds. Free-agent signings like Ivan Rodriguez and Magglio Ordonez; a Rule 5 pick that worked out unusually well in first baseman Chris Shelton; they made an insanely lopsided trade of their own in acquiring shortstop Carlos Guillen from the Seattle Mariners for a utility infielder and a minor league pitcher. The San Diego Padres tanked the first-overall pick of the 2004 draft (they took Matt Bush) so the Tigers could select consensus top talent Justin Verlander at No. 2. If any one of those doesn't work out, things look different.

It won't happen that way for the Braves. It seems unlikely there will be a Verlander waiting to be taken when Atlanta picks third overall on June 9. While SunTrust Park opens up in Cobb County next year, there has been no indication that ownership intends to let the team play in the free agent pool, and even if they did, the coming class is nothing much. Future classes may also be thin as teams flush with cash choose to extend their best young players rather than letting them hit the market.

So yes, holding on to Teheran is a risk. Dealing him is a risk. Really, the only certainty is this: if you run into John Coppolella, you should buy him a drink and wish him good luck, because the only sure way to solve a problem like the Braves is not to run down a team to this degree in the first place. The Braves don't need to trade Teheran; they need a time machine. But that's ridiculous—unlike cyborg death-corgis, time machines are purely science-fiction. Only harsh realities await the Braves now.