Atlanta Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos joined Dukes & Bell to talk about the re-signing of OF Marcell Ozuna, why the team backloaded the contract, and whether the team still done making deals?
Anthopoulos talked about why the team back loaded the Ozuna deal.
“We prefer to not backload deals, we didn’t do an extreme backload but we definitely gave ourselves a little bit of room our payroll is going to be lower in ’21 than it was in ’20,” Anthopoulos said. “There’s still a lot of good players out there in trade and free agency and we wanted to have a little bit to work with still if we thought there was good opportunity. During the summer if something comes up trade deadline wise we wanted to have some funds available as well.
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“My attitude is we have what we have, my job is to make it work but you could always want more and do more and you’re never done, you never have a complete team. I will say this our payroll a year ago before pandemic was the highest that it had been in the history of the organization, I think it’s still going to be pretty strong. Are we ever going to be where New York or the Dodgers are? No, but we definitely have enough to compete and win, there’s less margin of error for me doing my job, but that’s not an excuse.”
