Just a few things: 1) you have to take any buzz around the moves as they are happening as just that, buzz. Huntington was literally saying the other day that he's not looking to trade expiring contracts. Whatever chatter there is about Lyles pivoting back to being a starter is just that. He's depth one way or the other. They might do something like roll RichRod out as an opener and have Lyles on board for multi-innings games. Whatever NH says, it's just GM speak that meaninglessly covers numerous conceivable possibilities.
2) With the Nova move, even if it's 100% to clear salary and not reinvest any of it except for this Lyles move and another depth pitcher, it doesn't really significantly change things. In fact, I'm not sure any reasonable FA would do that - even if we spend the $$ for Marwin Gonzalez, I'm not sure how it moves the needle drastically. Huntington has firmly planted the team inside a window of mediocrity, and it's going to either take some real creativity and/or some real luck to burst out of the upper side of the window. Let's even just say, for the hell of it, that he goes on a spending spree and gets Lowrie, Marwin Gonzalez, and trades for Sonny Gray. That's a much better team on paper, but I'm still not quite moved that the ceiling is any different from the 84-88ish wins that the current team has.
To put it more succinctly, I don't quite get having too strong of an emotional investment in anything this offseason, or any other. In fact, the best strategy is to kill your emotion, and only allow it to emerge for micro-level things that something awesome or annoying that happens in the sixth inning of a game next May. We're going to be a fairly good but not great team hoping for a bunch of breaks.
