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Every year at this time, our good friends at Royals Review host a GM Simulation, cobbling together representatives from all 30 SB Nation MLB team blogs to act like they’re in charge of their respective franchise and its decision making. For three days, we condense the entire offseason into one big email chain of transactions, from non-tenders to trades to massive free agent spending.
Honestly, it’s become one of my favorite offseason endeavors. Given an estimated budget, we get to not only try to make the moves we think would best suit the real Reds, we also get to find out just how difficult it is to actually, y’know, make those moves happen. You can want Christian Yelich or Chris Sale all you want, but if the other team’s GM simply doesn’t like your offers - or, in most cases, likes other offers more - the deals just don’t come to fruition. It’s frustrating, but it’s a pretty decent lesson in how value is placed on some of the more prized assets in the game.
We have fun with it, and sometimes even come out looking damn rosy. Last year, for instance, we managed to fleece the Colorado Rockies for Kyle Freeland and Harrison Musgrave in a deal that sent Adam Duvall to the NL West. The year before that, we hornswoggled the Milwaukee Brewers for Jimmy Nelson, Corey Knebel, and Phil Bickford in exchange for Duvall. Frankly, we’re not exactly sure what we’re going to do this year with no Adam Duvall to trade, but rest assured we’ll be doing our best to put the rebuild behind us and to ‘get some pitching.’
With that in mind, we’d love to hear your thoughts on our direction. Should we trade Nick Senzel for Noah Syndergaard? Should we sign Yasmani Grandal to play SS? For how many former Reds out there do you want us to #BringHimBack?
The wheeling and dealing technically begins on Sunday and will run through Tuesday evening, at which point we’ll have a recap of what did, did not, should have, and shouldn’t have happened, detailing our plan for how the 2019 Cincinnati Reds can win the World Series.