MLB trade rumor grade: Sonny Gray to the Braves?

The Braves had a goal this season: Don’t lose 110 games in the first year of a new ballpark. Don’t embarrass the franchise. Don’t play like the Braves in the first half of 2016.

For the most part, it’s working. They’re just three games under .500, and they’re sitting atop one of baseball’s greatest prospect caches. They’re set up well for the future, and they’re not embarrassing themselves in the present. It was a nifty sleight of hand, and they pulled it off. Remember that exactly one year ago, they looked like the worst team in baseball.

Now they might be looking to trade prospects away?

Seems like a rumor that’s a ripe for gradin’.

This is obvious to the point where I’m going to mail it in. This is what I wrote when I graded the rumor that had Gray going to the Astros:

The A’s philosophy hearkens back to the old Branch Rickey quote, which is roughly “Better to trade a player a year too early than a year too late.” Trading their best players with years of team control is how they got Dan Haren for Mark Mulder, and it’s how they got Carlos Gonzalez and Brett Anderson for Haren.

Then they traded Anderson for Drew Pomeranz, whom they traded for Yonder Alonso, who will bring back a prospect or three this deadline. This trade chain will live forever, and the point is that it’s an organizational philosophy to look the future, cheap seasons of a good player as something that enhances the value for another team, not the A’s.

When Gray struggled mightily last year, the A’s were struck by the Fear of Grieve, and it must have been absolutely jarring. Young, talented pitchers disappear all the time. What if it happened to Gray? What if it already happened?

He improved, and his trade value soared. There are monsters under the Let’s Make a Deal box. The A’s would like the year’s supply of Turtle Wax and not mess with the box this time.

The Braves don’t have a window of contention that’s easily defined. They have prospects knocking on the door (Ozzie Albies, Lucas Sims, Mike Soroka, Luiz Gohara, Ronald Acuna), but the best hitters are hyper-advanced for their age, which means they could struggle in the majors for three years before anyone would even think of panicking. And the best pitchers are pitchers, which is super risky. The Braves might have the best collection of sad, young pitcher tales over the last decade, so you don’t need to tell them.

It’s hard to figure out when the Braves are going to be excellent again, in other words. Could be next year. Could be three years from now. A wholly in-house rebuild is a tricky thing to pull off, even if they already have Freddie Freeman and a couple of other major parts already in place. It’s hard to push everything off until 2021 because the prospects could arrive next year. It’s hard to go all in for next season because the prospects might not arrive until 2021.

The solution is a middle ground, like Gray. He’s under team control for the next two seasons, and he would help the Braves bridge the gap between the R.A. Dickey present and the Ian Anderson future. If the roster solidifies in the meantime, that’s great. They’d have a young all-star. If the roster takes its sweet time, they get to exchange Gray for some of the prospects they lost to get him.

And the Braves most certainly do have the prospects to get him. More than any other team, they have the prospects, the need, and the desire. It’s hard to define exactly where they are on the rebuilding-reloading spectrum, and that’s the point. Get someone who’s around for the next two years, then.

Heck yeah, that’s an A-. The Braves’ 11-through-20 prospects might be better than the top 10 for some teams, and this is certainly one way to guarantee they get some present value from that deep system. Gray makes sense, even if the Braves are currently in sell mode (at least, if the Jaime Garcia trade is any indication).

Pitchers as young, cheap, and talented as Gray don’t come up for auction very often, and the Braves are rightfully interested. They were interested in Jose Quintana, too, and this is just a variation on the theme. The Braves don’t really know what they are at this point, and Gray can help them figure that out together.