Five biggest gaffes of TLR Era in Arizona

[caulfield12]

https://www.azsnakepit.com/2017/1/30/14442364/arizona-diamondbacks-gaffes-tony-la-russa
 

In its entirety, the five-player deal sent Miller and relief prospect Gabe Speier to the Diamondbacks, who in turn gave up Ender Inciarte, Dansby Swanson, and Aaron Blair to the Braves. Just about six months earlier, the D-Backs made Swanson, a 21-year-old shortstop from Vanderbilt, the first overall pick in the 2015 draft. For that hefty price, Arizona got their man.

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In June 2015, the Braves acquired Bronson Arroyo and prospect Touki Toussaint from the Diamondbacks in exchange for Phil Gosselin. The Braves also took on the remaining $10.1 million still guaranteed to Arroyo while he was recovering from Tommy John surgery.

“The epic failure of the TLR/DS regime finally pushed Kendrick and Derek Hall to go all in with a new-school regime that will incorporate analytics—which is to say, all the information, insights, tools, and ways of thinking available or potentially available to them—into the way it does business. Too bad it happened this way, but then again maybe it almost had to happen this way.”

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From a gaffe perspective, the Yoan Lopez signing is, by far, the biggest and it’s not even close. To not fully understand the new international free agent rules and therefore not realize that we would have to pay both an $8 million luxury tax AND lose out on 2 years of IFA signings? That is, literally, a gaffe whereas the Y. Tomas signing and Shelby Miller trades were just terrible talent evaluations.

I find it funny that the Tomas signing ranks ahead of both Lopez and Miller even though his "cost" to us was arguably the least. Yes, he’s cost us a good amount of money, but he didn’t cost us much in the way of talent like the Lopez signing (no IFA for two years) or Miller trades (see ya Ender and Dansby) did. The biggest problem with Tomas is that we rushed him to the MLB, after taking an entire year off from baseball to defect Cuba, and likely stunted his development curve. And we still have three years of Miller, so it could end up being much better than it stands, currently (that comment didn’t age very well, haha.)