It occurred to me that some Braves fans might not realize that there was another group of fans out there.
You see, while some of you seemingly celebrated every move that John Coppolella made, there were those of us who never fully bought in. For us, the last week or two have been a different - and perhaps even more frustrating - experience that what you've had.
For me, it wasn't always that I necessarily distrusted Coppy specifically. It was the nature of what trust means to me as a sports fan and former sports writer. I need to see proof.
In that vein, Coppy had never been part of a rebuild and had never been a general manager before. There were no "receipts" to show that he knew how to tear down an experienced but unsuccessful franchise and turn it into a championship organization. While he quickly showed that he knew how to tear down, we had not seen that he knew how to build up. In that regard, my decision not to simply "trust the process" wasn't one to distrust Coppy, but I simply needed to see proof that he could finish the job.
We, of course, never got that proof.
That's not to say that I didn't have specific reasons not to trust Coppolella. In my mind, he always displayed a desire to be seen as the "smartest guy in the room," capable of making moves others couldn't make. Sometimes that worked out great, like when he turned a year of Shelby Miller into Dansby Swanson, Ender Inciarte and Aaron Blair. Those are the deals that made us tweet irrational things about Coppy being some sort of deity or horned farm animal.
But there were other deals that some fans just trusted would pan out, that people like me never liked. Sending away Andrelton Simmons was always stupid because he was always trending to be better in every facet of the game than Ozzie Smith. Yes, even defensively. If you say no one saw Simba's improvement at the plate coming, that's false. Some of us knew from the moment that trade happened that it was a bad idea, and even if Sean Newcomb is the second coming of Kershaw, he'll only pitch every fifth day.
That wasn't the only deal, of course. There were plenty others, like the one that sent Alex Wood to Los Angeles for Hector Olivera. Others are really too small to mention, but they felt like "trading for trading's sake" and did very little to make the team better. Again, not all of his trades were bad, but I always wondered if Coppy just liked making trades and moving players around like a fantasy GM.
Of course, we'll never know what the next steps would've looked like, and that's the real point of this rambling.
John Coppolella is out of the Braves' organization because he got caught flaunting the rules that others worked around. By accounts we've read, he was a miserable person to work with, and other GMs and even agents had perhaps decided they wouldn't deal with him anymore. Maybe this is why, even as veterans like Brandon Phillips, Matt Adams and Jaime Garcia played better than could've been expected, Coppy was unable to move them for anything substantial.
At the time, fans like me were told to trust that Coppy got the best deals that were available, but do we know that now? Or were other teams simply tired of dealing with him, and he was left to take what little he could get?
So now, fans like me are left in a different position.
We sat through all those deals we hated, all the necessary losing that felt worse than it really needed to be due to guys like Simba not being on the roster. We put up with deals we didn't understand because other fans said "trust the process" and talked down to us if we disagreed.
And what did we get in the end?
Another rebuild.
Because that's where we are, folks. The odds of a new GM wanting to continue what Coppy started, or even being able to continue what Coppy started without incurring further violations, are pretty low. Sure, the pieces are there, but so is a manager that probably would've been let go if not for the front office turmoil.
So excuse fans like me if we're a little saltier than usual and aren't willing to just "trust the process" as the same front office that botched reining in Coppy finds a new GM. At least for me, I need to see it play out first.
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