I have to say, if we’re still at a point where signing some SP5 has to be contingent in any way on dumping $3.5M of Ryan O’Hearn — that would be so very disheartening.
I get why folks want to see Kjerstad over O’Hearn. We all want to see Kjerstad. We all want to see the very exciting all-homegrown-prospect lineups we’ve been pontificating about ad nauseum for years now.
But we’re trying to win it all this season, and O’Hearn had a higher wRC+ in the bigs last year than Kjerstad did in AAA. Just dumping a guy who was a critical part of the lineup last year on blind faith seems a bit rash. And unnecessary.
Maybe O’Hearn regresses to his pre-2023 form. Maybe Kjerstad absolutely rakes. The nice thing is, we have the luxury of letting it all play out. It’s a very long season. If O’Hearn hits his way off the team — or Kjerstad hits his way onto it — then great. That’s a miscalculation we can easily (and happily) correct. But if you ship O’Hearn out and then Kjerstad can’t hack it (or gets hurt, that’s much tougher to un-do.