When the Braves acquired Matt Olson earlier this month, it wasn't the product of talks that had just recently begun.
Instead, dialogue around an Olson trade to Atlanta dated back for months.
Atlanta let franchise icon Freddie Freeman walk and replaced him with Olson – who comes younger and cheaper. Although the Olson trade came prior to Freeman actually signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos said on 92.9 The Game this week that he knew Freeman was gone before making the move.
And while the Olson move really came together after talks with Freeman’s camp broke down, The Athletic’s MLB insider Ken Rosenthal said on the “R2C2 Podcast with CC Sabathia and Ryan Ruocco” that the Braves and Oakland Athletics had kicked around an Olson trade before the lockout.
“There was talk of Olson before this all went down. And, in fact, I thought the whole time the Braves were weighing one against the other,” Rosenthal said. “That was always something that they were considering, in fact they talked to Oakland before the lockout and those talks were fairly serious. And Oakland knew the whole time that if the Braves thought they weren’t going to keep Freddie, they were sitting there with a kid from Atlanta, a really accomplished player, excellent player. Not Freddie, but he’s really good.
“They knew with a guy four-and-a-half years younger that was a really good fallback for (the Braves). They paid a steep price to get him, but ultimately they ended up in a pretty good place because the money they saved on the Olson-Freeman exchange just for 2022 – Olson is $15 million, Freddie is going to be $27 million – that enabled them to do some other things.”
Now, because of the lockout it’s not as though the teams were exchanging proposals for four months, but it was most certainly on both of their radars.
The wild part of it all was that the consensus around the industry all offseason was that Freeman returning to the Braves more or less was a foregone conclusion. In reality, the Braves were canvassing options to replace Freeman right off the jump. That doesn’t mean the door was closed on a return all the way back in the autumn, but it does mean that even at that point Anthopoulos and Co. were acutely aware of the possibility that Freeman wasn’t coming back.
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