Anthony Franco's NL Central comments

[mikechamp]

These comments came from a chat with MLB Trade Rumors' Anthony Franco that occurred on April 7. (You can find him on Twitter at @affranco10 if you really want to ask him something.)

He stepped in for Steve Adams last week. Not too many divisional questions, so I threw in 5 bonus questions: two about lockouts, one about job advice, one about challenges and one about luxury tax. Enjoy!

The link to the full chat can be found here: https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2026/04/ ... -7-26.html
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What are the Reds doing with Marte? He is a building block guy and he hasn’t played against a right hander yet. Is he just a platoon bat moving forward? I don’t understand it.

Anthony Franco
Yeah I don’t get that one either. They’re not really platooning him, just kind of alternating between him and Will Benson and I’d much rather have Marte out in right field.
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There have been reports about the Cardinals trying to extend JJ Wetherholt. Any updates? Do you think they will try to extend Masyn Winn as well?

Anthony Franco
Don’t doubt that they’d love to get both of them done. Wetherholt seems likelier to me just based on the number of early-career extensions we’ve seen the past couple years.
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Why did the Brewers preemptively give Cooper Pratt a 40-man roster spot when he’s not getting called up and wasn’t Rule 5 eligible until after the 2027 season?

Anthony Franco
It’s required for any player signing a major league contract. Mariners had to do the same with Colt Emerson.
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Are you buying Jordan Walker's breakout?

Anthony Franco
Cautiously optimistic. Still a lot of swing-and-miss but he’s destroying the ball and getting it in the air more than he usually does. Seems like the bat path is a little more uphill this year, which is encouraging if you can pull that off without a massive drop in contact.

It’s two weeks so I’m not fully on board yet because we’ve seen stretches where Walker gets hot and then falls back, but I’m more intrigued than I was on March 27.
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Why is “swing and miss” simply a part of Kurtz’s game, but a detriment to Walker’s breakout?

Anthony Franco
We’ve seen Kurtz have a monster power season despite a 30% strikeout rate already.
If Kurtz had hit six homers last season, I’d be a lot more worried about the whiffs.
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What’s the hold up on the Konnor Griffin extension? Or were we sold yet another PR lie by Bob?

Anthony Franco
Probably waiting a few days to make it look better for that silly PPI rule that says he can’t earn them a pick if there’s an extension done before his MLB debut.
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Giolito kinda makes sense if Horton's out awhile right?

Anthony Franco
Probably but I have no idea what Giolito’s status is at this point. One of the weirder free agent trajectories I can remember.
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How does a lockout impact service time, and does the potential for a lockout get factored into some of the extensions we are seeing?

Anthony Franco
An offseason lockout obviously doesn’t impact service time. If it costs an entire season, that’s something they’d need to sort out within the CBA.

I don’t think it’s having much of an impact on extensions. It probably plays into contract structure a little bit — players would prefer the money as signing bonuses rather than 2027 salary as a hedge — but if the ’27 season gets canceled, they’re not getting paid salaries either way.
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Any tips for securing a job with MLB Trade Rumors?

Anthony Franco
When opportunities come out, we just put out a job posting on the site, nothing available right now. Best advice I could give is to read closely on a lot of the transactional minutia to have an idea of why teams make moves when they do, 40-man implications, etc.
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I’ve seen Tim and now you recently respond to questions about the lockout with a bit more pessimism. Is that me, or are you concerned we may actually lose part or all of next season?

Anthony Franco
Nah I think the offseason will suck but they’ll figure it out late, pretty similar to what happened the last time around.

More pessimistic about 2031 but MLB has so many reasons right now (TV bundle after ’28, expansion, Manfred’s personal desire not to have his legacy be an inability to get a CBA done at the end of his tenure) not to bring it all to a halt this time.
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How do you like ABS challenges so far?

Anthony Franco
It’s been fun. Still think it’ll end up being full ABS once the novelty wears off and we get a blown call that costs a playoff game when a team is out of challenges. But I underrated how much fans would love the idea of the ABS overturning calls on the scoreboard.
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A question/comment about the MLB draft and taxes. As we all know, teams that spend big also pay big taxes and teams that don’t spend, don’t pay the lux tax. There are teams that are legitimately trying to win and others that aren’t. Then there are (not many) teams that spend and try to win with limited resources. Teams like this (best example being the Padres) are penalized by having to pay the lux tax anyway. They are also dinged by having their Q.O. players, that sign elsewhere, bring back a lower draft pick than they would normally receive. To me that seems like penalizing teams that use all their resources in an attempt to win. Bass akwards if you ask me and detrimental to the game. Any chance this gets addressed in the next CBA?

Anthony Franco
MLBPA would love to flip this around. The league puts this in the CBA because they don’t want teams to spend, it’s a deliberate choice.

I don’t think moving a team’s top pick back 10 spots for passing the third tier is a huge disincentive. The QO stuff is, at least for mid-market players, but it’s designed to be to drive down free agent spending. Union has to give up something else to get MLB to give on this.
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