Atlanta GM defends Simmons trade to Fangraphs. Fangraphs commentariat loses shit.

Read about it here, my synopsis/analysis follows…

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/john-coppolella-on-trading-andrelton-simmons-and-more/

OK, so a few points:

1. David Laurila is FanGraphs’ best writer (we’re always bragging his Sunday Notes up…) and here he and anybody who edited the piece wisely just chose to let Braves’ GM John Coppolella talk. Thank you.
2. The Braves’ fan base is upset about this deal because Atlanta’s been bad for a couple years, the Wood/Peraza trade looks terrible, and this move pushes the recovery further down the road.
3. Coppolella chose the wrong forum to defend this trade if he was every going to say anything like “We feel there is an argument to be made that we may be better in 2016 with Erick Aybar because he’s one of the best hitting shortstops in baseball with a career .276 batting average. ” Fuck me. The FanGraphs crowd is very Sabrmetric, and Sabrmetricians hate batting average. Bringing up BA on FanGraphs is unwise at the best of times, and for the Braves these are not the best of times.
4. The commentariat duly ripped that apart, pointing out that, never mind defence, Simmons’ is Aybar’s equal or better on the Sabrmetric offensive stats, regardless of how geeky you want to get. First order stats that everyone understands like OPS and SLG? Simmons. Easy compounds like OPS? Simmons of course. Complicated stuff like isolated power and normalized runs created?  Simmons by a wide margin.
5. What really happened here is what I wrote about Friday: Aybar is in his walk year, and the Braves took him either because they had to (to get the AA pitchers they actually wanted) or with half a mind that he might be OK and flippable as a cheap rental near the trade deadline for even more prospects. That’s it.
6. Coppolella won’t be granting longform interviews to FanGraphs again anytime soon.
7. Copp would make a better real-world GM than Coppolella. In a case of a sum being less than its parts, so might Copp’s grade-school daughter, Ella.

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