When looking at where I wanted to improve, I saw two needs...With McCoy being gone, I wanted to add a bat and then I thought we needed to add a player at 1B...After doing some digging, Roy O'Donnell was a bat that stood out to me and we were able to get him in on a three year deal totaling $26.6 million...
As things stand now, Roy is going to be the 8th highest player in the GBC this season, but I think it's warranted...McCoy was one of the best players in the league last season and I don't think it's a stretch to O'Donnell is an upgrade from a hitting perspective and he ended up being cheaper than what it would have cost to bring McCoy back...
He's someone who I think can replicate the production that McCoy gave us, albeit at a different position...At 26, he helps the team get a little bit younger and he's someone who I can envision being on the team for a little while if he has some success...He's a catcher and we have two decent catchers at the position, but Yano isn't getting any younger and Ramon Perez is better in smaller samples...We will be looking to get off of one of these guys before the deadline...We were able to get O'Donnell's number low enough that we still had enough money to play with to add another starting level player at 1B, a position I wanted to upgrade...We were down to one pretty inconsistent 1B after Jeff Sawyers left the team in free agency...We would have liked to try and bring Sawyers back, but he was asking for way too much money...Mike McClure was the man we identified to be our everyday first baseman, signing him to a three year deal totaling $16.8 million...
Sawyers might be the better player overall, but McClure was more cost effective and considering the fact we are pushing right up on the salary cap we are spending ($49.1 million this season) McClure was the right man to bring in...
After losing two really good starting pitchers, we decided to not really look the starters in free agency this year...One, we didn't have any money and two the SPs that were willing to come to the GBC had some really high demands...I think we have enough slightly above average SP options to cobble together a good enough rotation to have success (more on that later)...All things considered, I think we did a pretty good job of retooling the team and adding players that will allow us to compete at a high level...My predecessor put together a really good team and made my job pretty easy as I didn't have to upgrade at a lot of spots...I'm just trying to keep the train on the track for right now...Not sure how accurate the preseason predictions are, but they seem to agree with me, marking us down for 106 wins and leading the Eurasia...
