Let’s start with this, tweaks at the margins, fine. Signing someone to either boot Castellanos (who sucks and if you claim his contract hasn’t been a shitshow you’re exposing either recency bias or you being a casual) or Rojas is fine. People acting like adding say Juan Soto wouldn’t be a MASSIVE improvement for this team are insane.

Sending away marsh who is the left side (which plays 3/4 of the time) of a right left platoon with elite corner defense and excellent hitting against righties while being affordable (766500 this year) would be fucking lunacy.

Dumping Stott who still had an fWAR of 2 this season while being slightly below average offensively (not a regression in overall performance from last year but just luck) and elite on the bases and solid defensively and only costing 768,000 would once again be stupid

Unless you’re willing to get Alex Bregman, dumping Bohm because Aidan miller who is at closest coming up in August, would be moronic. Even at his most bleh, Bohm is worth about 2 fWAR a season. And is CHEAP. I’m going to keep saying this because decent but cheap players are immensely important to have

JT while definitely regressing (like I said he was in the top 9 players on the roster post which everyone said was stupid), is still absolutely a serviceable starting catcher. Marchan IS NOT THE FUTURE. Want to give him more reps as backup next year if he’s ready? Fine. He is not the long term answer because of a 50 PA sample size.

Harper (no explanation needed)

Schwarber (see above)

Castellanos. I’m dying on this hill. This contract is an abject FAILURE. Every season he has two to three months that makes everyone forget about him being basically WORTHLESS for the other half of the season. You don’t get to ignore that because he decided to finally hit. Oh and by the way, to even be worth it he needs to wrc like 120 on the season because of how useless he is in the outfield. Stop using a few playoff moments to defend this awful fucking contract. I’m NOT asking for him to be Bryce Harper or a 50 war player. I’m asking him to put up like 2-3 war a season. The closest he came was 1.3 in 2023. If we are just looking at numbers for who should be gone if they sign Soto it is either Nick or

Johan Rojas.

I really thought Rojas could improve enough to be playable, I really did. I thought he could wrc like 80 and his elite defense and speed would hold it up. Basically be the anti Castellanos. He hasn’t. And I don’t think he will. If you dump him or relegate him to bench you move Marsh to center and Soto to left.

Starting rotation:

I don’t believe anything should change here other than the ejection of Walker into the sun, but that’s so obvious it barely deserves mentioning. Painter will pitch next year but he’s going to be innings limited.

Bullpen: I’m bringing basically everyone back. If you wanna dump any of the big three of Hoffman Kerkering and Strahm you’re a moron. Bring Hoffman back, PLEASE. This unit blowing up over a microscopic 4 game sample size does not warrant discounting how lights out they were all season. Don’t be reactionary idiots, these guys are a massive reason this team got this far.

Edit: This entire comment section be because I dared shitting on the most overrated player on this team is insane. The Castellanos fan club is worse than the 2022-2023 Alec Bohm fan club.