Centre Court wrote:If AA was creative he could have freed up more cash. Moving one of Reyes, Buehrle or Dickey would have given him some flexibility - even if he had to eat some of those contracts.
The Marlins, smartly, traded those players when they were at their cheapest. The moment Reyes and Buehrle's backloaded deals came into effect, they lost value. It would have been pointless to move them since they couldn't have been replaced internally and the value coming back would not have come close to the value that was given up for them when they were making $10M annually instead of $18-22M.
AA did not cut salary likely because the only salary that he could afford to move without downgrading the roster was untradeable (Romero, Izturis). I felt they could have survived with Gose at CF if they traded Rasmus for a middle infield upgrade but I'm not sure how likely that was.
Regardless, I just find it completely unrealistic for a GM who put so much emphasis on value to suddenly not see the value in cheap controllable talent (Alvarez, Escobar, TDA, etc). I don't blame him for doing it, but I'd imagine he wouldn't have done it if he knew he maxed out on payroll the moment those deals happened.
