Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the defending World Series Champion Atlanta Braves. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
Kevin Youkilis could swing the bat. In 10 big league seasons, the player immortalized in book and movie form as “The Greek God of Walks” logged a .281/.382/.478 slash line and a 127 wRC+. At his peak, he was one of the best hitters in the American League. From 2008-10, Youkilis averaged 25 home runs annually while putting up a .308 batting average and a 150 wRC+. Over that three-year stretch with the Boston Red Sox, he walked 197 times and stroked 429 base hits.
In the latest installment of our Talks Hitting series, Youkilis — now a part-time analyst on Red Sox TV broadcasts — discussed the art and science of what he did best: squaring up baseballs.
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David Laurila: Let’s start with the nickname you got early in your career. Looking back, what do you think of it?
Kevin Youkilis: “It was interesting more than anything. It’s not something I equated to. I saw myself as a hitter, and the walks just a byproduct of not getting good pitches. Part of the game is that you walk if you don’t get pitches to hit.
“At the beginning, it was a lot of… it was kind of crazy. There were all these media-driven things coming my way. That was the hardest part. I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ It was all fixated on walking, versus the other things I did well.” Read the rest of this entry »
Two major bits of unpleasant injury-related news hit the headlines on Tuesday afternoon. First, the Blue Jays announced that Hyun Jin Ryu, a key cog in the rotation, would undergo elbow surgery that would result in him missing the rest of the entire 2022 season. Over in the NL West, a scheduled CT scan revealed that Fernando Tatis Jr. had not seen enough healing in his wrist to allow him to start swinging a bat. Both of these injuries are of the type that could impact the divisional races.
For both Ryu and the Jays, his sore elbow is a major hit. Jay Jaffe has already touched on the impact to Toronto’s rotation from the loss of Ryu. In his case, there were clear signs of something being not quite right leading up to his initial trip to the shelf. Per Jay:
This is already Ryu’s second trip to the injured list this season. After lasting just 7.1 innings over his first two starts and allowing a total of 11 runs, he landed on the IL on April 17 with what was described as forearm inflammation. Upon returning to the Blue Jays on May 14, he fared somewhat better, yielding just six runs (five earned) in 19.2 innings over four starts, but his average four-seam fastball velocity decreased by about one mile per hour from outing to outing, from a high of 90.3 mph on May 14 to a low of 87.6 on June 1 — a troubling trend.
Back then, the timetable was reported to be at least multiple weeks. Full Tommy John surgery would obviously end Ryu’s 2022 campaign, but we’re far enough into the season that even repair of a partially torn UCL wouldn’t allow him to return in the fall. If he should require the full surgery, his 2023 season would definitely be in peril, with only a late-season return being feasible. He’s a free agent after the 2023 season, too, so there’s a very real possibility that he’s played his last game in a Jays uniform.
I wouldn’t characterize it as good news, but Ryu’s previous Tommy John surgery was a long time ago, undergone in 2004 when he was still in high school, meaning he got most of a professional career out of his first surgery before a possible revision procedure. Unfortunately, in one study, less than half of pitchers needing a second procedure returned to pitch at least 10 games. Read the rest of this entry »
Dakota Hudson shouldn’t be this good. It’s hard to analyze baseball, and pitchers are good for all sorts of difficult-to-comprehend reasons, but look at his numbers. It shouldn’t work. His career strikeout rate is a lackluster 17.2%. He walks more than 10% of the batters he faces. Either of those numbers would be alarming; both together is a recipe for trouble.
Naturally, Hudson is off to another roaring start. His 3.29 ERA is actually worse than his career mark, and it’s still 17% better than league average in this low-scoring year. He’s outperforming every available peripheral by miles – just like he always has. Three-hundred-and-fifteen innings into his major league career, his stat line will make you question what you know about ERA estimators. His FIP is a so-so 4.56. It’s not some home run rate fluke, either; his xFIP is exactly the same. SIERA clocks him at 4.96. xERA, the Statcast version of an ERA estimator, is right in line with everything else at 4.55. And yeah… his career ERA is 3.17. So let’s investigate what the heck is going on. Read the rest of this entry »
Until he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee last July 10, Ronald Acuña Jr. was building a case to win the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award. His season-ending injury forced an already scuffling Braves team to scramble for replacements, but thanks in large part to an outfield reconfigured by a flurry of July trades, the team overcame the devastating blow and won its first World Series in 26 years. With Acuña still recovering from his injury, the Braves got off to a sluggish start this year, but since the calendar flipped to June, they’ve reeled off a 12-game winning streak, the longest in the majors so far. The run has more than cut the division deficit in half and pushed them into a playoff position, and while their 24-year-old superstar right fielder has led the way, he’s hardly doing it alone.
The 2022 season did not begin well for the defending champions, who posted losing records in both April (10–12) and May (13–15). Those struggles enabled the Mets to build a 10.5-game NL East lead through the end of May, the third-largest in the history of division play (since 1969). Through those first two months, the Braves were outscored by 16 runs, scoring 4.14 per game and allowing 4.46. Their offense hit just .235/.304/.405, but under the adverse conditions that hitters faced early in the year, that was still good for a 97 wRC+. Their hitters did strike out a major league-high 26.2% of the time, but a .292 BABIP (five points above the average for the first two months) and 62 homers (fifth in the majors) helped to offset their contact woes.
The offense was particularly dragged down by the production of their outfielders, who collectively hit just .194/.255/.330 with a 30.6% strikeout rate and a 63 wRC+ over those first two months; from among those numbers, only their slugging percentage wasn’t the majors’ worst (it was 27th). I’ve covered the ongoing saga of Atlanta’s outfield multipletimes; the play of July acquisitions Adam Duvall, Joc Pederson, Eddie Rosario, and Jorge Soler was the key to last year’s turnaround and postseason run once Acuña went down. Duvall and Rosario, the pair that the Braves retained, were among the early-2022 laggards; the latter, who underwent laser surgery on his right eye to correct blurred vision, has been out of the picture since April 24.
Acuña, who did not make his season debut until April 28, the Braves’ 20th game of the season, started in right field just 11 times in April and May, serving as the team’s designated hitter another 10 times. Initially and quite understandably, he showed a bit of rust with the bat, striking out 11 times in his first 28 plate appearances, but he began turning things around with a 5-for-11 showing against the Brewers that included two homers (off Eric Lauer and Corbin Burnes) and a double as the Braves took two out of three at home on May 6–8. He’s more or less stayed hot ever since, and over the past few weeks has played almost exclusively in right field, only spotting at DH.
During the winning streak, Acuña has hit .349/.431/.674 (200 wRC+) with four homers, with three in a two-game span on June 5 (off the Rockies’ Robert Stephenson) and June 7 (two off Cole Irvin, including one that led off the home half of the first inning). On Saturday against the Pirates in Atlanta, he hit another leadoff homer, this one off Zach Thompson, and later raced home from first base on a bloop single into right field by Dansby Swanson, scoring standing up:
Recently, I was listening to one of my favorite non-baseball podcasts when baseball unexpectedly cropped up. Well, the theory of skin in the game cropped up. The idea, espoused by many people but notably by Nassim Taleb, is that actors perform better when they get rewarded for a good outcome and punished for a bad outcome. Want a better doctor? Fine them if they misdiagnose a patient, but give them a bonus for prescribing the correct treatment. Better money manager? Force them to invest all their own money alongside their client. You get the idea.
Anyway, one example of skin not being in the game is a sports team playing out the string. For most teams at most times, sports is a very skin-in-the-game-intensive field. If you hit well, you get paid more. If you don’t, you might get sent to the minors. If your team wins, they make the playoffs. If the team doesn’t win, no postseason. The incentives are straightforward.
At the end of a long season, however, it might not feel that way. If you’re 50-100 in late September, the rewards of a good game aren’t that high, and the cost of a bad game is quite low. If you’re 15 games out in the race, being 16 games out won’t suddenly bring out the detractors. You can think of these teams as having no skin in the game; the result of one game won’t change anything for them. Read the rest of this entry »
Hunter Greene started the 2022 season off with a bang. An audible one, if you were sitting near home plate: Greene topped out at 102.6 mph in his second start of the year, averaged nearly 101 mph on his fastball, and generally looked like an entirely new type of pitcher, a starter with closer velocity.
A funny thing has happened since, though. That fastball didn’t play out quite how you’d expect. After those initial two starts, Greene lost a bit of zip on the pitch, and hitters stopped missing it. He drew 21 swings and misses in his first two major league outings; it took him another six starts to match that total. After walking just two hitters in those first two starts, he walked eight in his next two. It was time for an adjustment.
Consider that adjustment made. In his last seven starts, Greene looks like a top-flight major league starter again. He’s striking out a third of the batters he faces, walking less than 10%, and pitching to a 3.20 ERA (and 3.47 FIP) beginning with his May 10 start against Milwaukee. He’s going deeper into starts. And after the Brewers tormented him for five home runs on May 5, he’s allowed only five in these last seven starts over nearly 40 innings of work. How has the starter with the fastest fastball in the game done it? Exactly how you’d expect – by de-emphasizing his fastball and leaning on his best pitch, an upper-80s slider. Read the rest of this entry »
For as much slack as Tyler Anderson and Tony Gonsolin have been picking up in the Dodgers rotation lately, the news that Walker Buehler will miss a large chunk of the remainder of the season is a gut punch. The 27-year-old righty departed Friday night’s start against the Giants with elbow discomfort — his second early exit in a row — and after undergoing an MRI on Saturday was diagnosed with a flexor tendon strain. He will be shut down completely for six to eight weeks before restarting a throwing program, all but guaranteeing that he won’t see major league activity again until September.
Buehler struck out the side in the third inning on Friday night, but via MLB.com’s Juan Toribio, he “noticed something was bothering him after throwing a breaking ball” during the frame. While he made it through that inning and the fourth, his discomfort increased. Said manager Dave Roberts afterwards, “Certain discomforts you can manage through, where this one tonight, clearly he felt that any more could potentially be damaging.”
Coming off the best season of his career, Buehler had not pitched well lately, though he said on Friday that he didn’t believe the injury was linked to his previous woes. His overall 4.02 ERA (100 ERA-) is the highest of his career excluding his cup-of-coffee 2017 stint, and a full run per nine above his career mark, while his 3.83 FIP (96 FIP-) is only his second time above 3.16; he was at 4.36 in 2020, a season during which he made just eight starts due to recurrent blisters on his right index and middle fingers. Read the rest of this entry »
Ezequiel Tovar came into the season ranked as the No. 4 prospect in the Colorado Rockies system. Despite being just 20 years old, he might finish it in the big leagues. In 229 plate appearances with the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats, Tovar is slashing .317/.393/.579 with a 165 wRC+. Moreover, he has a dozen home runs and has swiped 16 bases in 17 attempts.
His calling card is his glove. Described by our own Eric Longenhagen as “a no-doubt shortstop with balletic defensive footwork and a well-calibrated internal clock.” Tovar had received similar rave reviews from MLB scouts in the Arizona Fall League. And that was before he blossomed with the bat.
I asked Yard Goats manager Chris Denorfia about the offensive strides that have elevated Tovar’s profile.
“Coming into this year, I was told that there was some chase on down-and-away sliders,” said Denorfia, who played 10 big-league seasons. “But I haven’t seen what everybody was talking about. Somewhere between the Fall League and this spring, he’s made this developmental jump. Something clicked to where he’s recognizing situations where pitchers are going to try to get him to chase. Whether you call it slowing the game down, or just having enough reps, he’s made that adjustment. It was probably the one thing that was holding him back, which is kind of weird to say, because he was only 19 last year.”
The discipline is reflected in the numbers. Despite being one the youngest players in his league, Tovar possesses a 9.6 walk-rate and a 22.3% K-rate. When you add his improved pop to the equation, it’s easy to see why speculation of a call-up — premature that it may be — has begun to grow legs. Read the rest of this entry »
I thought this week couldn’t get any better. I got to write about bunts, one of my favorite things to do, and about the Giants picking up tiny edges, another personal favorite. I got to write about Yordan Alvarez and how people underrate him; now I can cross that off my yearly to-do list. But Thursday took the cake. Have you seen this nonsense?
"When was the last time you saw somebody intentionally walked on 1-2?"
I love writing about bad intentional walks. I love writing about bad managerial decisions. But I can’t really wrap my head around this one, hard as I try. Let’s try to do the math, such as it is, while keeping in mind that no amount of math is going to make this make sense.
Let’s start at the top. Trea Turner is an excellent hitter, and Bennett Sousa is a lefty. Turner boasts average platoon splits for his career. Sousa has hardly pitched in the majors, so let’s just consider him an average lefty. With a runner on second and two outs, passing up an excellent righty hitter against your lefty pitcher is standard operating procedure. Read the rest of this entry »
