Is Alex Anthopoulos Evolving as a General Manager?
The news of Atlanta's abandoned five year deal with Jeff Hoffman makes you wonder if the Braves have changed their willingness to sign pitchers to market-length contracts.
There are a few things that we know with some reasonable certainty about Braves president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos:
He does not like leaks out of his front office.
He doesn’t want to go above $22M AAV for a player on a multi-year deal.
He really doesn’t want to commit long-term to a pitcher.
Since joining the Braves in late 2017, he’s made exactly ten multi-year commitments to pitchers, with only four of those being for more than two years (Will Smith, Joe Jiménez, and Reynaldo López) and exactly one of them being for more than five years - Spencer Strider’s six-year, $75M extension he signed in 2022 at the age of 24.
So naturally, the report from MLB.com’s Mark Bowman that not only did Atlanta back out of a deal for free agent pitcher Jeff Hoffman but that the deal would have been for five years and between $45-48M raised a few eyebrows over here.
Let’s talk about it.
What was AA planning on doing with Hoffman?
Running last offseason’s best free agent signing back.
Last October, the Braves signed failed starter turned bullpen ace Reynaldo López to be a starter at $10M AAV and were rewarded with 135 innings of 1.99 ERA ball.
Jeff Hoffman’s also a failed starter turned bullpen ace - debuting in Colorado before moving to Cincinnati, Hoffman had a 5.64 ERA in 50 career starts between the two clubs. Since sticking to just relief work with Philly, it’s a 2.28 ERA (and one All-Star selection) over the last two seasons.
But with a 4S/slider combo backed up by a splitter that he can locate surprisingly well, Hoffman’s arsenal was good enough that several teams were interested in adding him to their rotation.
And his rumored deal would have also been roughly around López’s $10M AAV, with Bowman’s report of “five years and $45-48M” for Hoffman coming out to $9M-9.6M AAV.
You can see the appeal of this type of contract and idea - even if he doesn’t work out as a starter, the fallback is a proven back-end reliever. And if he sticks as a starter, it’s fantastic value - the average reliever who converts to starting gives you 131 innings in year one.
(By contrast, Charlie Morton made $20M last season for 165 innings of 4.19 ERA ball. Anybody who can make 30 starts or pitch 150 innings is going to get at least $15M AAV in free agency.)
But five years? AA’s not made a habit of going more than three years for an arm and the one time he did, it was an extension for a 24-year-old.
Why five years for Hoffman?
We don’t know the contract structure
It’s entirely possible that this wasn’t a standard five-year deal - remember, all we heard was “five years” and “$45-48M”.
The fact that the money is a range tells me that there could be club options with buyouts attached. The money there is typically reported as the guaranteed years plus the buyout amount, as that’s paid either way, but not including the value of a club option year. Maybe this was a three-year deal with two club options? Maybe this was a four-year deal with a single club option attached? Both structures would have increased the AAV if there were less than five guaranteed years.
But I think there’s something else here.
An evolution in the team’s thinking
The Atlanta Braves don’t have an owner in the conventional sense - formerly held by Liberty Media, they’ve now been spun off to Atlanta Braves Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: BATRA), who owns both the team and The Battery Atlanta.
But there IS a control person that ultimately is the final decision maker for the team, and that’s Terry McGuirk. Officially the Chairman and CEO of Braves Holdings, McGuirk was CEO of Turner Broadcast System from 1996 through 2001 and is who AA comes to for final authorization on spending.
And while McGuirk doesn’t like dead money on deals, many of the most notable recent losses by the team in free agency can be at least partially attributed to contract length.
Max Fried got eight years from the New York Yankees. Freddie Freeman got an extra year from the Los Angeles Dodgers (6/162) over his Atlanta offer (5/140). Dansby Swanson got both a much higher AAV and more years than Atlanta offered him.
It’s possible that AA has been able to convince McGuirk that sticking to two and three-year deals simply isn’t good enough to be competitive in the marketplace anymore. If you want to sign guys and be competitive when they have multiple suitors, you’ve gotta be willing to go four or five years.
Due to the risk, Atlanta probably won’t do that for most free-agent pitchers…but you can see the allure in certain situations like this one, where you can mitigate the risk by knowing that the fallback is still a proven All-Star-caliber reliever.
And the fact that AA was willing to be this aggressive on a free agent using an unique (to him) contract structure should make Braves fans feel good about the willingness of this front office to make the moves required to keep the competitive window open in future offseasons.
(If you want more detail on this, including potential fallback options for the Braves, we covered this on the Tuesday edition of the Braves Today Podcast.)