In my opinion, you push all your chips in now.
Now that Repchinski has signed, our best chances at improving are over Gamel and Starting Pitcher.
1) My first call would be to Aroldis Chapman's agent to see if he's trying to pursue starting again. If he is, offer him a backloaded 5 year $100 million contract with an opt out after 2 or 3 years. He may actually only want a 1 or 2 year deal so he has an opportunity at a $200 million payday next offseason as a proven SP. We slot him in as our #5 SP to stretch him out. If it doesn't work, you have a Two Headed Monster in the bullpen. What a tragedy, right.
2) Carlos Beltran at 2 years $12.5M per year to push Gamel to AAA. Beltran had an .850 OPS last season. Did Gamel do that at any point even in the minors?
Neither of them have Qualifying Offers attached. Double bonus.
Let Gamel, O'neill and Heredia roam AAA.The majority of our young talent has 2 options left. Use them. Gamel's numbers in the minors aren't impressive. He hasn't earned anything. Especially on a contender.
In my opinion, we need to keep the top of our minor league system stuffed down. Don't force guys like Luiz Gohara and Ben Gamel to come up until they force the issue. Many good teams have guys blocked for a year or two at AAA. Since when is that a problem?
Is Gamel going to blow our socks off in 2017? I doubt it. If he's not going to be good, he should never set foot out there again. Unless Beltran gets hurt. Then, show us what you've got kid. Play well enough to make sending you back to AAA not an option.
We currently have no proven talent at the MLB level even above average in the outfield. Year after year we think we're ok in the outfield going into the season. They need to put some actual proven talent out there in a year like this.
This team hasn't earned the luxury of us letting them off the hook easy for going into the season again with these unproven rookies everywhere. Even 1B. Again.
This wreaks of a situation where Geoff Baker would rip the team a new one for trying to go into another year counting on guys like Gamel, Maranda and Vogelbach when there was still $25 supposedly available in the budget.