Spencer Strider is a pitching nerd. He’s also a promising prospect putting up stellar numbers in his first professional season. Drafted in the fourth round last year out of Clemson University, the 22-year-old right-hander has a sparkling 1.50 ERA in six starts split between Low-A Augusta and High-A Rome. Moreover, he’s overpowering hitters to the tune of 14 hits allowed and 44 strikeouts in 24 innings.

Strider — No. 22 on our Atlanta Braves Top Prospects list — nerded out about his repertoire, and the evolution of his approach, prior to last night’s game.

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David Laurila: Tell me about yourself as a pitcher. How do you get guys out?

Spencer Strider: “I believe in attacking the zone and putting the game in the hitters’ hands. Whether you’re throwing 50 [mph] and can’t throw a strike, or you’re throwing 101 and spotting up like Jacob deGrom, the hitters have to deal with whatever you give them. The statistics show that’s going to work in your favor the vast majority of the time.

“I’ve also come to learn a lot about my fastball. At the end of college we were able to get more more data and metrics on it, and I understood the concept of vertical break, how spin is helpful, and everything else that’s part of the vernacular now. I’ve focused on pitching to the top half of the zone, where it’s most difficult to hit a good rising fastball. Most of my attention over the last few months has been working on a breaking ball that complements that fastball use, something with more vertical depth at a high velocity.”

Laurila: For years, pitchers tended to tell me that they pitch to contact. Now it’s more common for them to say they’re trying to miss bats. Where do you stand?

Strider: “I’m definitely trying to miss bats. That’s the best outcome. I want to give myself the best chance of being successful, and if a guy swings-and-misses, I can’t be hurt by that. If I can pitch in a way that guarantees me more swings-and-misses, that helps remove the possibility of bad outcomes. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Goldstein and I have updated the pro portion of the Top 100, which means we quickly reviewed the placement of players in the 50 FV tier and above, and considered who was not yet in those tiers but should be based on how they’ve looked during the first month of the 2021 season. I still have three total org audits to do — Milwaukee, Oakland and the Cubs — before I start peeling graduates off the list. Those will be completed shortly. You can find the updated list here.

Also, if you missed it, Kevin and I updated our draft rankings and posted a Mock Draft on Monday.

The lone change up near the top of the 100 is Riley Greene moving into the top 20; he’s in the mix with several other similarly-aged players with the talent to be consistent All-Stars, like Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodríguez, and Corbin Carroll.

DL Hall moved into the 55 FV tier on the strength of his stuff. He’s still walking a fairly high rate of opposing batters but just on the strength of his three plus pitches, could be a Haderesque relief weapon even if he can’t start. Read the rest of this entry »

In our preseason positional power rankings of the league’s third basemen, the Braves came in at No. 25, projecting for just 1.4 WAR at the position, with Jason Martinez writing not only about Austin Riley’s potential contributions, but also possible production from Jake Lamb. Roughly two-and-a-half months later, the picture looks entirely different: Lamb never took an at-bat in Atlanta (though he’s playing well for the White Sox), while Riley has put together a very solid offensive season. In 59 games and 231 plate appearances through June 9, he’s slashing .300/.381/.515 with 11 home runs and a 142 wRC+ and has accumulated nearly as much WAR by himself (1.3) as the team’s total positional projection. As a result, the Braves have gotten some of the best value in the majors at third base relative to those projections. (The Rangers mess with the table a touch, since they were projected for and have achieved negative value so far, but I digress.)

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If you’ve read a lot of my work here, you probably know that I’m a huge fan of bunting. Some bunting, at least — I’m not talking about bone-headed sacrifices at the altar of small ball. There’s just something satisfying about a well-placed bunt, pushed past the pitcher and to an open space vacated by the defense. Bunts against the shift are a delight. Bunts not against the shift, where the hitter is simply better at bunting than the defense is at defending, are great too. This article is not about one of those bunts.

On Friday night, the Dodgers were locked in a tight battle. Runs had been hard to come by against opposing starter Ian Anderson, though Julio Urías was doing his part to keep the team in the game, surrendering only a solo home run through four innings. In the top of the fifth, Urías got a chance to help the team on the offensive end as well. With runners on first and third and the game tied after a close play at the plate, he stepped up to bat with one out in the inning.

Urías isn’t a bad hitter, at least as far as pitchers go. He sports a career line of .175/.188/.190, a fair sight better than the overall .124/.143/.159 line across baseball over the course of his career. Still, he’s an awful hitter, as far as major league hitters go. Dave Roberts called for a bunt. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, Ben Clemens investigated Francisco Lindor’s struggles as a New York Met. The answer was complicated, as in most cases, though he did treat us to a series of tables and graphs. Inspired by the endeavor, I wanted to take a crack at a different NL East superstar: Braves’ first baseman Freddie Freeman.

To be fair, his predicament is hardly as lamentable as Lindor’s. As of writing, Freddie Freeman has a 115 wRC+. There have been stretches where he put up similar levels of production. Nothing seems out of the ordinary – just a good hitter in a dry spell. It’s not like he was going to replicate his abbreviated MVP campaign, anyways.

What is uncharacteristic, however, is his .224 BABIP. It surprised me, considering that he’d sustained a BABIP of .341 from 2010-20, a feat that required a decade of hard-hit line drives and an above-average contact rate. Gary Sánchez, he usually is not. But it’s been an odd year for the first baseman so far, which we can see for ourselves. Below is his 50-game rolling BABIP, stretching back to a few years ago:

At first, the explanation for this seems simple. Freeman currently carries a line drive rate of 24.5%, his lowest since 2011. His groundball rate, in contrast, is the highest since then. Fewer line drives and more grounders is a terrible combo for a hitter’s BABIP – the former land for a hit over half the time; the latter are snagged by infielders. But this raises a question. If Freeman’s current batted ball distribution resembles his in 2011, how did he achieve a .339 BABIP that year? Read the rest of this entry »

Rick Kranitz knows the art of pitching. Now in his third season as the pitching coach for the Atlanta Braves, he’s been tutoring hurlers for over three decades, with roughly half of those years spent at the big-league level. Prior to assuming his current position in December 2018, the 62-year-old “Kranny” served in that role for the Florida Marlins, Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, and Philadelphia Phillies.

Kranitz talked pitching when the Braves visited Fenway Park last week.

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David Laurila: Pitching has never been better. Does that make a pitching coach’s job any easier?

Rick Kranitz: “I wouldn’t say it’s easier. Number one, this is a very hard game. A lot of it is built on failure — you can make a good pitch and something doesn’t happen quite right — but you still have to go out there and execute. The biggest thing for me is getting them to believe in who they are and what they can do. It’s a lot of mental stuff, having them prepared to execute what they need to execute.

“A lot of hitters — in recent history, for sure — have the same swing paths, which we can attack similarly. But there are also guys… like this Boston club we’re playing now. They’re very difficult, because they do a lot of different things. They have a lot of situational hitters who look for pitches, so you can’t just do the same thing over and over again. But I think I know what you’re alluding to. Back in the day, it was ill-advised to throw three of the same pitches in the same area. Nowadays, with the swing path, you can get after that a little bit more against a lot of guys. For sure.”

Laurila: Is that a big part of why your staff dominated the Cincinnati Reds last October? Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves are short one outfielder for at least six weeks, with Marcell Ozuna placed on the IL after injuring two fingers on his left hand while sliding into third against the Red Sox on Tuesday night. It wasn’t immediately obvious whether Ozuna would miss significant time, with manager Brian Snitker telling the press that the two-time All-Star was going back to Atlanta for tests, but with Wednesday came the news that his stay on the shelf would be a long one.

Ozuna has gotten off to a poor start in 2021, hitting .213/.288/.356 in just over 200 plate appearances, for a 79 wRC+ and -0.1 WAR — a major disappointment for a player coming off an OPS of 1.067 last season. It wouldn’t be the first time he had a bit of a letdown year after what seemed to be a breakout campaign, as was the case with his two seasons in St. Louis, but at least he hit for enough batting average then to be a league-average player in a corner outfield position.

Atlanta hasn’t received much production from Ozuna, but there were several reasons to think that his overall lines would recover. His power numbers are down from past seasons, but he’s partially compensated for that with some of the best plate discipline of his career. ZiPS thought his BABIP of .244 should have actually been more like .298 from his contact data, and Statcast saw similar underperformance, with an xBA of .268 and an xSLG of .471, both numbers more in line with his typical showing. A repeat of 2020’s 179 wRC+ was always unreasonable, but even with this early slump, his Depth Chart-projected wRC+ was still at the 123 it was back in March.

Ozuna suffered a similar injury in 2019, breaking the middle and ring fingers on his right hand while sliding during a pickoff attempt. It probably won’t assuage the worries of Braves fans that he went from an .847 OPS before that injury to a .729 OPS after returning, but I wouldn’t worry much about this limited precedent. I haven’t found much underperformance in hitters returning from broken fingers, and month-to-month play is quite volatile without any injury-based explanations involved. Short of significantly worse news, I wouldn’t be especially concerned about Ozuna after he returns, probably at or near the All-Star break. At least he can take it as consolation that he broke his fingers doing actual baseball things, unlike Zach Plesac, who suffered a broken thumb taking off his shirt.

Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Packy Naughton, LHP, Los Angeles Angels
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Salt Lake Age: 25 Org Rank: TBD  FV: 40
Line: 7.2 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 8 K

Notes
After he was sitting in the mid-80s in the time surrounding the 2020 shutdown, Naughton’s velocity has rebounded and he’s once again living in the 90-92 range with his tailing fastball. He’s another lefty of the east/west variety, relying on some mechanical funk, working his tailing fastball to both corners, and mixing in three secondary pitches. While Naughton locates his slider to his glove side very consistently, the same way a lot of over-achieving, soft-tossing lefties do, many of them have been a little too far away from the zone to be competitive and the pitch is average on its own. The same is true of his changeup. Naughton’s changeup execution is less consistent than is typical for pitchers who throw this hard but still end up as successful back-of-the-rotation types. He’s looking more like a depth starter than a true No. 5 at this point, but it’s good to see that his velocity has bounced back and that he’s pounding the strike zone like usual. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Games from 5/18

Terrin Vavra, MIF/CF, Baltimore Orioles
Level & Affiliate: Double-A Bowie Age: 24 Org Rank: 9  FV: 45
Line: 3-for-3, 2 BB, HR
Notes
This makes five consecutive multi-hit games for Vavra. Cursory video analysis shows no change in his swing or physicality; he’s just on an epic early-season heater and should probably be at Triple-A. The real development here is his defensive movement: After playing both middle infield spots with Colorado, he’s now also getting reps in center field with Baltimore. Those who miss and appreciate all-fields contact will love Vavra, who is very adept at hitting outside pitches to the opposite field. He projects as a good multi-positional role player. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite all the injuries the Mets are dealing with — including losing two key regulars to hamstring injuries in the same inning on Sunday and then two more players the next day — they still lead the NL East with a 20-17 record while the Braves lag behind and languish below .500 at 20-23. The latter’s hopes for a fourth straight division title have taken a significant hit over the past several days with their own losses of two starting pitchers. Mike Soroka, who had yet to appear for the team this year, underwent exploratory surgery on his inflamed right Achilles tendon on Monday, while Huascar Ynoa was diagnosed with a fracture in his right hand sustained when he punched a dugout bench in frustration on Sunday, thus interrupting a breakout season. Both will be out until at least the All-Star break, and quite possibly longer than that.

For Soroka, this is just the latest disappointment in a frustrating series of events that began last August 3. Three starts into the follow-up of a stellar rookie season in which he made the NL All-Star team and placed second in the NL Rookie of the Year voting, he tore his right Achilles, sidelining him for the remainder of the 2020 campaign. The Braves hoped that he would be available to join their rotation by mid-April, but after making just one Grapefruit League appearance and several in simulated games at the team’s alternate site, he was shut down due to shoulder discomfort and wasn’t cleared to resume throwing until late April.

After experiencing renewed discomfort in his surgically repaired Achilles during his recent workouts, Soroka had an MRI, and when that proved inconclusive, he underwent an exploratory procedure and clean-up by Dr. Robert Anderson, the surgeon who performed his initial repair. Via The Athletic’s David O’Brien, Anderson will reevaluate the pitcher in two-to-four weeks, “to determine if anything else needs to be done and when he might be able to resume his rehab schedule.” Read the rest of this entry »