Trading Garcia serves future

Maybe you read the particulars of Monday’s trade and thought, “Total dud.” The Atlanta Braves traded a member of their big league rotation and a catcher who’d played a little in the majors for a prospect not listed among Minnesota’s top 20.

I understand that reaction: Fans like to think their team won a trade, and there’s no way to know if Huascar Ynoa, who’s 19 and who has a 5.26 ERA in rookie ball, will ever do anything of note in Single-A, let alone the bigs.

So why do a deal at all? Because Jaime Garcia will become a free agent at season’s end, meaning the Braves would have gotten nothing if he’d left on his own. Also because they’d lost six of their past eight games going into Tuesday night’s game in Arizona and fallen 9½ games back of the sec- ond wild card. Three teams — Cubs, Pirates and Cardi- nals — stand between them and Wild Card No. 2, mean- ing the Braves would have to catch four clubs just to reach a postseason that might last only one game.

In sum, there’s every reason to sell. (We might have mentioned this already.) Writing for ESPN Insider, Dan Szymborski goes further. His advice: Sell (almost) everybody. He mentions the Garcia trade and also R.A. Dickey, on a one-year deal with a team option for 2018, and then writes:

“This is a team that needs to do more than that. None of Matt Adams, Brandon Phillips, Tyler Flowers, Matt Kemp, Nick Markakis and Jim Johnson is likely to be part of the core of the next actually good Braves team. Any of these players that receive any kind of interest should be wearing new uniforms.”

I’m reasonably sure the Braves won’t go that far. I doubt Kemp will get traded. I’m almost positive Flowers won’t. (If he does, the Braves would have to turn around and find another stopgap catcher; there’s none at the ready in the farm system.) But Szymborski’s point is well taken: The Braves aren’t yet good enough not to be in asset-acquisition mode. The 2017 season was meant to be a bridge, not a finished product.

Toward that end, the Braves traded Garcia. They saved $4.7 million — the Twins are paying the remainder of his salary — and money is an asset. Given that the Braves have control of Ynoa, he’s an asset. You accumulate assets in the hope they’ll become something more. If not, you flip them for more assets. This is baseball, but it’s also Economics 101.

Every trade can’t be Swanson/Inciarte/Blairfor-Miller. A GM is lucky if he gets one of those a decade. But the idea is to keep adding assets.

A John Coppolella mantra: “We try to get better every day.”