Bird on a Wire
This is what 13 waiver claims looks like
The Brooklyn Robins are on a mission. The Ultimate Rebuild for Dummies is just that. A rebuild done wrong by a dummy. GM Alan Ehlers has been preaching like an evangelist for the past several months about how he is going to do this grand rebuild and all we have seen so far is absolute garbage. What kind of a moron trades away a 90 win team and doesn't receive not 1 single top 100 prospect. What kind of a buffoon clear a $70 million debt and immediately trades for 3 of the worst contracts in the league.
And now he is going to feed us this line about how making 13 waiver claims in one sim is a good idea? Newsflash! Nobody wants these players. That is why they are being dangled about for FREE. We're talking about players who their own team doesn't even consider them to be the top 40 in their system.
But here we are. It's opening day and there are little "BRK"'s next to 13 different players currently on the waiver wire document. So what gives? Why is this a good idea? Let's try to analyze why this is happening.
1. Brooklyn sucks right now and some of these players are actually better then what's on our BBA roster-Yup, it's the painful truth of the beginning stages of a rebuild. We've got some sorry players on our roster. Hi lDale Maxwell.
2. We're not starting clocks until we have to- Before anyone throws a temper tantrum about Brooklyn holding players back. We don't have any good players. The players that we are "holding back" are just as crappy as the ones on our roster. The biggest travesty of justice is probably Cisco Martínez, who is a 7/7/5/3/9 right handed hitting 1B. You can argue, as I would, that he should be on my roster. But his margin of being better then who we currently have in the BBA is minute. So all things equal, why put someone on the 40 man who doesn't need to be?
3. We will not get all 13- Unfortunately for us, we've got really bad waiver position. During the first month of the season the waiver order goes by order of finish last season. Since we actually weren't quite as shitty way back then, our waiver position is near the bottom, especially for Frick League players. So the players that we are going to end up with are likely the riff raff that nobody wants anyway.
4.. Adding organizational depth-This really should be #1 but I'm too lazy to go back and rearrange an article that nobody wants to read anyway. Organizational depth is one of the steps in our 12 step...I mean rebuilding system. What I'm trying to do with BBA level/triple A in these early years is to create a really deep pool of "BBA players". They don't have to be great, just replacement or better. The goal is to trade off the better/older players for younger prospects while still maintaining a team that is not total trash. And it may just be a case of matching the right player to the right trade partner. So maybe these waiver players can fill a need on our team. Maybe we can sneak them back through waiver and hoard them in the minors, or maybe we can flip them. It's worth a shot.
Anyway you slice it, adding 13 waiver claims is not going to push us into the playoffs anytime soon. But for a team with a poor farm system that is obsessed with incremental improvements right now. We'll take whatever anyone wants to give us.
