A report Tuesday from MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand indicates that Yasiel Puig will sign a one-year contract with the Atlanta Braves. The 29-year-old Puig hit .267/.327/.458 with 24 home runs for a 101 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR while playing for the Reds and Indians in 2019. The former Rookie of the Year runner-up spent most of last season in Cincinnati before heading to outfield-deficient Cleveland as part of the three-way trade that sent Trevor Bauer to Cincinnati and Taylor Trammell to San Diego. The exact financial terms of the deal are not yet available, but it’s unlikely that Puig’s one-year contract is for an exorbitant amount of cash from the team’s point of view.

From a pure “how good is Puig?” standpoint, completely divorced from context, this signing is an underwhelming one. Puig hit the market unencumbered by the possible loss of a draft pick upon signing (he was ineligible to receive a qualifying offer because of the trade), but even still, his free agency garnered a tepid reception this winter. Now, this offseason’s free agent market featured a lot more action than other recent ones, but that was driven by elite free agents such as Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendon. Teams were still generally uninterested in first basemen and corner outfielders, with few getting multi-year deals and only José Abreu and Nick Castellanos getting more than $20 million guaranteed. Puig drew some interest, but nobody seemed all-in on bringing him in before spring training or when transactions were recently unfrozen. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, in the wake of nationwide anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, the Quaker Oats company announced that it would retire the name and logo of its Aunt Jemima brand of pancake mixes and other breakfast foods, acknowledging that its origins are “based upon a racial stereotype.” Other corporations quickly followed suit as the branding for products such as Uncle Ben’s rice, Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, Cream of Wheat cereal, Dixie Beer, and Eskimo Pie ice cream bars came under closer scrutiny. This remarkable, long overdue reckoning on branding and symbolism, on who we honor and how, had already spilled over into the sporting arena with NASCAR’s decision to ban the Confederate flag from its events and the Minnesota Twins’ removal of a Target Field statue of former owner Calvin Griffith over racist remarks he made in 1978, but last week it advanced on several fronts. The NFL’s Washington Redskins and MLB’s Cleveland Indians (hereafter referred to by the team’s respective city names) both announced that they would consider name changes, while the Baseball Writers Association of America has begun an internal discussion to change the names of two awards on which its members vote.

On the NFL front, in the latest turn of a decades-old battle, Washington announced that the team “will undergo a thorough review of the team’s name.” That came after FedEx, which owns the naming rights to the team’s stadium, requested it do so. Within hours, Cleveland followed suit with a statement saying that the club is “committed to engaging our community and appropriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regards to the team name.”

pic.twitter.com/NUM5GYvlwe

— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) July 4, 2020

The statement arrived nearly a year and a half after the franchise announced a phaseout of its Chief Wahoo logo, a grotesque and demeaning caricature that in various incarnations had been in use since 1948, the same year that Cleveland won its last World Series. The logo made its last lap around the league in 2018, and did not appear on any of the team’s 2019 uniforms. Read the rest of this entry »

Darren O’Day isn’t your typical submariner. While most pitchers with down-under arm angles live down in the zone, O’Day features a lot of four-seamers up, and he’s thrived while doing so. Over his 12 big-league seasons, the 37-year-old right-hander has logged a 2.55 ERA and fanned better than a batter per nine innings. Since the start of the 2015 season, his K/9 is an eye-opening 13.1.

O’Day, whose best seasons have come with the Baltimore Orioles, is currently with the Atlanta Braves. He discussed his pitching M.O., and explained why his “Jenny Finch” is such an effective weapon, in a recent phone conversation.

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David Laurila: You’re atypical in that you work up in the zone from a low arm angle. How did that come to be?

Darren O’Day: “When I was a rookie — kind of a scared rookie — I did what the team told me to do. My short time with the Mets, as well. I pitched down in the zone, because I’m a sidearmer, a submariner, and they wanted groundballs. They didn’t care about strikeouts as much back then; they just wanted quick outs, which was kind of the philosophy of the game.

“Then I bounced to my third team, the Rangers, about a year after [breaking into the big leagues]. I kind of said, ‘Forget about that. I’m going to pitch the way I want and figure out if I’m good enough to be here.’ That’s when I started pitching up in the zone, in 2009, and you saw the strikeout numbers go up a little bit.

“That’s really been the big paradigm shift in baseball, and it’s kind of ‘the chicken or the egg’ — did the high damage come first, or did the need for the swing-and-miss come first? But that’s what everybody wants, even if it costs you a couple more pitches per inning.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds have been eagerly awaiting Hunter Greene’s return from Tommy John surgery. And for good reason. Prior to going under the knife 15 months ago he was hitting triple digits with his heater. Drafted second overall by the Reds in 2017 out of a Sherman Oaks, California high school, Greene is No. 77 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list.

According to Kyle Boddy, his return is nigh. Cincinnati’s pitching coordinator recently spent time with Greene in California, and he deemed the 20-year-old’s rehab “basically done.” Throwing in front of a Rapsoto, Greene was “an easy 97-plus [mph], reaching 100-101 when he was rearing back.”

More than a return to health is buoying the return to form. With the help of technology — “he’s really getting into the metrics and analytics” — and a former Chicago White Sox pitcher, Greene has made a meaningful change to his delivery. What had been “long arm action with a big wrap in the back” is now a shorter-and-cleaner stroke.

“That’s a credit to people like James Baldwin, who was the rehab coach and is now our Triple-A coach,” Boddy told me. “JB has worked with Hunter extensively, leaning on materials from Driveline Plus. Hunter has had a tendency to cut his fastball, so we’ve relied on a lot of video to show him how to fix that and get more carry.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is another installment of my series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. If you missed the first piece, you’re going to want to take a peek at its four-paragraph intro for some background, then hop back here once you’ve been briefed. Let’s talk about the National League East.

Atlanta Braves

Prospect List / Depth Chart

The Braves have pooled the most catchers in baseball with seven (eight if you count Peter O’Brien and the faint memory of his knee-savers), several of whom are prospects. I think Travis d’Arnaud’s injury history and the implementation of the universal DH makes it more likely that Alex Jackson opens the season on the active roster. I don’t think this would save Atlanta an option year on Jackson since they optioned him in mid-March, and Atlanta’s bench projects to be very right-handed, so he might be competing with Yonder Alonso for a spot.

We’re probably an Ender Inciarte injury away from seeing Cristian Pache play in the big leagues every day. Aside from him, I doubt we see any of the recently-drafted position players (Drew Waters, Braden Shewmake, Shea Langeliers) playing in the bigs this year, and if William Contreras debuts it’s likely because a couple guys ahead of him have gotten hurt. Read the rest of this entry »

Who was better, Jim Edmonds or Andruw Jones?

I asked that question in a Twitter poll earlier this week, expecting that it would be a close call. Centerfielders both, they played 17 seasons each and finished with similar WAR totals (Jones 67, Edmonds 64.5). Making the comparison especially intriguing was the fact that one was clearly the better defender, while the other was clearly the better hitter.

Instead of a nail-biter, I got a landslide. A total of 4,017 people voted, and a resounding 71.4% opted for Jones. Edmonds, despite having a huge edge in wRC+, garnered a meager 28.6%.

My eyebrows raised a full inch when I unearthed these statistical comps:

Edmonds had a career 132 wRC+. So did Wade Boggs, George Brett, Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, Todd Helton, and Billy Williams (among others).

Jones had a 111 wRC+. So did Russell Branyan, Bernard Gilkey, Geoff Jenkins, Adam Lind, Hal Morris, and Neil Walker (among others). Read the rest of this entry »

For a guy who didn’t play at all in 2019, and was right around replacement level the year before, Evan Gattis has been in the news a fair bit this winter. In fact, as much as any of the Astros’ marquee players, he’s become one of the faces of their illegal sign-stealing efforts and the aftermath, a situation he’s confronted with a candor rare among his former teammates, but typical of his time in the majors. Last week, the 33-year-old slugger confirmed that his playing career is indeed over. In his six-year career, the free-swinging Gattis hit .248/.300/.476 (110 wRC+) with 139 homers and 8.9 WAR, but those numbers barely scratch the surface of what’s been one of the more improbable tours through the professional ranks in recent memory.

Within The Athletic’s landmark November 12 report on the Astros’ sign-stealing efforts was a reference to a September 21, 2017 game in which White Sox reliever Danny Farquhar described hearing a banging sound while on the mound. That trash can-based signal was the cue to alert an Astros hitter if a breaking ball or offspeed pitch was coming. Within hours, Jimmy O’Brien of Jomboy Media posted a detailed breakdown to Twitter and YouTube, showing Farquhar facing off against Gattis, with audible bangs anticipating some of the pitcher’s selections. Upon reaching a 2-2 count, Farquhar summons catcher Kevan Smith; the two changed signs, and Gattis struck out chasing a low changeup.

On YouTube, that clip of Gattis receiving signs and then getting hung out to dry once they were changed — compelling audiovisual evidence to accompany the deep reporting of Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich — has been watched over 4.5 million times. Gattis has struck out four and a half million times on that pitch alone. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in December, the Braves signed Cole Hamels to a one-year, $18 million deal, a move that effectively replaced one grizzled, championship-tested southpaw with another, namely departing free agent Dallas Keuchel. As with the former Astro, who didn’t sign with the team until last June, the Braves apparently aren’t going to get a full complement of starts from the former Phillie, as Hamels is well behind schedule due to an offseason shoulder injury, a move that opens the door for the Braves to test their vaunted pitching depth.

Recall that after a stellar first three months of last season (2.98 ERA, 3.59 FIP, 99.2 IP), Hamels left his June 28 start with an oblique strain, and after missing five weeks, he struggled upon returning. Lasting five innings or more in just four of 10 starts, he was touched for a 5.79 ERA and 5.29 FIP while losing a bit of velocity (0.9 mph per PitchInfo) and swing-and-miss, and made just one start after September 16 due to shoulder fatigue. Still, thanks to a much-improved changeup, his full-season 4.09 FIP and 2.5 WAR were his best marks since 2015, and he reportedly generated interest from at least 13 teams before signing with the Braves.

The shoulder is apparently still a problem. As camp opened on February 12, the Braves revealed that the 36-year-old lefty “irritated” (manager Brian Snitker’s word) his shoulder doing weighted ball exercises over the course of the winter, was going to be behind schedule, and would be reevaluated in three weeks. Ten days later, after undergoing treatment from Dr. Keith Meister of TIM Sports Medicine and Orthopedics in Dallas, Hamels described what sounds like garden-variety shoulder inflammation:

“I know I’m behind the 8-ball,” he said. “But once I knock (the inflammation) out right away, I know I’ll be able to be the best pitcher I can and put up good numbers.

…“It hit a point where I couldn’t get past (the pain),” Hamels said. “Soreness is good but you have to know what’s good and what’s bad. I wasn’t feeling as good as I thought I should and I couldn’t overcome it without asking the right questions.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Generally speaking, exactly how much money baseball teams make on an annual basis isn’t public knowledge. We can take a look at the sale of MLB franchises and know that when they are sold, teams generally make 8% annually after accounting for inflation. Profits are more difficult to decipher because owners don’t want to disclose just how much money they make, though they are sometimes quick to trumpet an operating loss. The absence of many owners claiming losses is arguably deafening, but in addition to that silence, the publicly traded Braves report their revenues every year. Over the last two seasons, they have provided Liberty Media with nearly $150 million in profits.

Baseball ownership hasn’t traditionally been an avenue for massive yearly profits. In 2001, MLB self-reported unaudited numbers to Congress after MLB’s antitrust exemption was threatened. They had announced that two franchises might be contracted, and that drew the ire of the elected representatives in Washington. It’s fair to take these numbers with a grain of salt, but on average, teams lost around $5 million per year from 1996-2001. MLB did not have a great television contract during that time, but revenues have skyrocketed since then, with significantly better TV deals (both locally and nationally) along with increases in attendance and ticket prices.

Even so, when Liberty Media purchased the Braves in 2007, it wasn’t necessarily an expectation that the club would turn a profit every year, at least according to Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei a year ago. It was that lack of profits that made many speculate that Liberty wouldn’t be holding on to the Braves for a long period of time, but they’ve had a change in philosophy, with huge profits affecting their previous strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

After an impressive 4.0 WAR season in 2019, 22-year-old right-hander Mike Soroka is set up to become the ace of the Atlanta Braves pitching staff. Soroka started all 29 games he appeared in last year and ranked 14th overall in FIP, with a 7.2 K/9 against a 2.1 BB/9 rate. Soroka induced grounders on over 50% of the contact he allowed, with a .206 GB BABIP (league average is .242 ). It’s a mixed bag of success when it comes to groundball pitchers, and Soroka ranked sixth overall in groundball rate last season (one spot behind his teammate Max Fried). Of the top 10 grounder rates in 2019, Soroka’s ERA was second to Hyun-Jin Ryu’s.

Soroka isn’t really a strikeout pitcher (142 strikeouts in 174.2 IP), but he does have a good mix of above-average pitches and velocity that keeps hitters wary. Soroka already does a pretty good job spreading out his arsenal, especially when ahead in the count and with hitters facing a two-strike count. Soroka’s repertoire has a few great pairing options, and if sequenced properly in the right game state, it could make the youngster dominant.

Let’s start by examining his arsenal. Soroka throws a two-seamer, a slurve, a four-seamer, and a firm, fading circle changeup. All four are demonstrated in the following isolated pitch overlay:

Read the rest of this entry »