I'm open to anything. I kinda hate rehashing the 2016 success, but they had successful conversions on all kinds of talent acquisition.
* The big FA splurges with Lester, Heyward, Zobrist, Lackey (and later Hamels and Darvish).
* The less pricey FA pickup with Jason Hammel, who provided solid 170 and 166 good innings in 2015 and 2016 (3.7 and 3.8 ERA's).
* Rizzo was obviously a prospect-for-prospect trade. That was a pure baseball trade, nothing $$-related at all.
* Arrieta the high-ceiling-wildman take-a-shot who turned out wildly good.
* Hendricks, the low-ceiling-soft-tosser who turned out shockingly good.
* Fowler, kind of a mixture of trade/salary-pickup and then surprise FA re-sign. (I often think of that offseason as Heyward-Zo-Lackey.
* Hector Rondon via Rule 5, he was terrific in 2015 (30 saves, 1.0 WHIP, 1.7 ERA)
* Chris Coghlan was a +115 OPS+ guy in 2015, he was huge regular contributor during the second-half surge. Scrap-heap reclamation.
So just a beautiful variety of talent-acquisition approaches taken, and a bunch of them turned out really good, at least for a while, and particularly so during the 2015 breakout leading into the 2016 magic. Obviously they made some other efforts too, that didn't always work great. (Mike Olt, Ian Stewart...). But they hit on a lot of the pickups. Whatever Hoyer and Hawkins do, they've got to click on a bunch of the moves they make.
If they were to do some prospect-for-prospect, and they picked up a 3B prospect who turned into a good player, that would be super cool.