After breaking a four-year mini-drought of division titles by winning the National League East in 2018, the Atlanta Braves have been hesitant to make any long-term commitments to improve their roster. Their biggest signing of last winter, Josh Donaldson, was brought in on a one-year deal. They replaced starting catcher Kurt Suzuki with Brian McCann, who also signed on a one-year deal. By the time they brought in Dallas Keuchel, the contract covered less than four months of baseball, and when they made upgrades at the 2019 trade deadline, they did so by adding a pair of relievers with a year and a half of team control left. So far, it’s hard to say the plan hasn’t worked — they added seven wins in 2019 — but there’s little doubt Braves fans will be looking for more serious investments this winter. The free agency period is less than 24 hours old, so there’s plenty of time for Atlanta to make those bigger moves in the coming weeks and months. On Day 1, however, the team stuck with the same plan of short-term roster maintenance.

The Braves signed both outfielder Nick Markakis and catcher Tyler Flowers to one-year, $4 million contracts on Monday. Each move carried with it some payroll trickery; Markakis and Flowers each had $6 million options for 2020, but Atlanta declined them in favor of paying $2 million buyouts to each. Both players still make $6 million in 2020, but the Braves can direct the $4 million in buyouts onto their 2019 payroll, according to MLB.com’s Mark Bowman. Atlanta also declined a $12 million club option to Julio Teheran — who hasn’t reached an agreement to remain with the team — and issued a $17.8 million qualifying offer to Donaldson.

The two signings are identical in length and value, but could come with different expectations for each player. Markakis turns 36 in a couple of weeks. This is the third-straight contract he’s signed with Atlanta. The first came before 2015, a four-year commitment worth $44 million. That deal was something of a dud for the first three years, but in 2018, he turned in his best season in years. He hit .297/.366/.440, with a 115 wRC+ and 2.6 WAR that made him a pleasant surprise for the resurgent Braves. It was his most valuable season since 2008 and his best offensive season since 2012, and was enticing enough for Atlanta to bet $4 million that he would continue to hit well enough to merit a starting corner outfield spot on a contending team.

Instead, Markakis looked like, well, a 35-year-old version of Markakis. His wRC+ dipped to 102, his already-mediocre defense took an extra step back, and he missed six weeks with a wrist injury, culminating in a career-low 0.4 WAR in 116 games. His walk and strikeout rates remained excellent, but his power slid backwards, as did his batted ball luck. The biggest decline came in his performance against lefties. An up-and-down performer in the split throughout his career, he went from a 104 wRC+ against southpaws in 2018 to a 71 this year. His success against righties dropped as well, but only from a 120 wRC+ to 112. There’s some good news in Markarkis’ underlying data — his average exit velocity (91.2 mph) and xwOBA (.349) were both his best marks posted in the Statcast era — but his low launch angle and expected slugging marks put a limit on just how dangerous he can be with his bat, which is clearly the only thing keeping him employed at this age. Read the rest of this entry »

This posting contains two positions. Please note instructions for applying for each position below.

Position: Professional Scouting Trainee

Reports to: Assistant Director; Professional Scouting

Position Overview: The Atlanta Braves Professional Scouting Department is seeking a trainee for the 2020 baseball season. This trainee position will interface with the Atlanta Braves front office as well as the be the main point of contact for the Professional Scouts.

Trainee Program Department Overview: This is an entry-level opportunity that will expose the individual to the many facets of not only the Professional Scouting Department but will provide a strong foundation to begin a career in professional baseball.

Major responsibilities:

• Daily updating of roster/magnet boards for all executives
• This will require knowledge of MLB’s eBis2 platform
• Ability to generate specific reports as requested by executives in a timely fashion
• Point person regarding visiting scout tickets
• Main person to oversee Braves scouts’ schedules
• Coordinate annual departmental meetings (travel, accommodation, meals, etc.)
• Produce/send daily player transaction emails to the professional scouting staff
• Attend/scout all home games
• Potential travel to affiliates nearby to scout the system
• First point of contact with the Pro Scouts

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree
• Proficient in Microsoft Word and Excel
• Knowledge of current baseball statistics and analytics used in player evaluation
• Excellent interpersonal, communication, and presentation skills
• Intermediate knowledge of SQL Server
• Possess excellent critical thinking and time management skills
• Ability to work extensive hours as dictated by the Major League season schedule (including weekends and holidays throughout the season)
• Knowledge of and passion for professional baseball
• Must be able to sit for extended periods of time
• Must be able to move throughout all areas and levels of the ballpark
• Must be able to relocate to the Atlanta area
• Commitment from January 1 through December 15
• Must complete a successful background check

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree
• Basic understanding of R
• Previous baseball playing experience

To Apply:
To apply for the Professional Scouting Trainee position, please submit resume/cover letter to proscouting@braves.com.

Position: Minor League Video & Information Intern

Reports to: Minor League Video Coordinator

Position Overview: The Minor League Video and Information Intern will provide a service to an Atlanta Braves affiliate through charting live baseball games and providing video and information to Braves coaches, coordinators, and front office members. This role manages all aspects of the assigned affiliate’s video and advance scouting operation and aims to provide an experience that prepares the ideal candidate for a future role in the baseball industry.

Responsibilities:

• Capture and chart video for each game of the full minor league schedule of an assigned affiliate (home games and team travel to road games, postseason included).
• Manage a network of cameras set up to collect high-quality video from multiple angles.
• Attach, edit, and upload video following each game daily.
• Support the coaching staff/players with ad-hoc video/technology requests as assigned.
• Participate in the affiliate’s advance scouting process and produce associated materials for the coaching staff.
• Attend a portion of the Braves’ Spring Training camp in Venice, FL to undergo training in video and advance information.
• Participate in periodic calls with the Baseball Operations group in Atlanta.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications:

• An understanding and appreciation for diverse cultures and an ability to work effectively and relate well with individuals of diverse backgrounds.
• Self-motivated individual with high degree of responsibility including confidentiality, sense of urgency, and accountability.
• Proactive, organized, and detail-oriented person who can prioritize their workload and follow-through with minimal supervision.
• Flexibility and enthusiasm in attitude and approach.
• Willing to relocate to a Braves minor league affiliate from Mid-March through Mid-September.
• Ability to work flexible hours, including nights, weekends, and some holidays.
• The ability to safely lift and transport equipment weighing 25 lbs. or more.
• The ability to climb ladders and successfully place equipment from variable positions and heights.
• Bachelor’s degree
• Must complete a successful background check.

Preferred qualifications:

• Bilingual preferred
• Programming experience with SQL/R
• Playing experience at the collegiate/professional level
• This is a paid position that includes a housing stipend for the duration of the minor league season.

To Apply:
To apply for the Minor League Video & Information Intern position, please submit resume/cover letter to MLops@braves.com.

The Atlanta Braves are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Atlanta Braves.

Atlanta’s Game 5 loss to St. Louis last week marked not only the end of a season, but also the end of an era, as Braves catcher Brian McCann announced his retirement after the contest. It came without much warning: McCann hadn’t tipped his hand publicly and he certainly could have found work in 2020 had he wanted to play. For a man who mostly kept quiet away from the diamond, his understated goodbye was a fitting conclusion to a great and perhaps under-appreciated career. While at times overshadowed by others at the position, McCann was one of the game’s premier catchers for more than a decade. His steady production at the plate and prowess with the glove made him a star — and an intriguing test case for Cooperstown.

McCann was Atlanta’s second-round pick out of Duluth High School in Georgia in 2002, a prequel of sorts to the club’s strategy of locking down home-state talent in the draft later that decade. High school backstops are a notoriously risky player pool, but McCann bucked the odds and blossomed into one of Atlanta’s top prospects almost immediately. He was one of the best players in the Sally League as a 19-year-old, and he slugged nearly .500 in the pitcher-friendly Florida State League a year later. He then proved equal to the Double-A test in 2005. Fifty games into the season, he’d walked nearly as often as he’d struck out and with good power to boot. Stuck in third place and receiving little production from their catchers, Atlanta summoned him to the big leagues that June. (The minor league skipper who delivered the good news? None other than Brian Snitker.)

McCann made his debut at 21 years old and homered in his second game. True to form, he circled the bases quickly and unemotively, not even cracking a smile until he’d reached the dugout. By mid-August, he’d claimed the starter’s job. He finished his first campaign with a respectable .279/.345/.400 line (93 wRC+) and clubbed two more home runs in the NLDS that fall. His quick success prompted the Braves to anoint him their catcher of the future and dispatch Johnny Estrada, an All-Star the previous year, to Arizona for bullpen help.

McCann immediately rewarded Atlanta’s show of faith. In 130 games, he hit .333/.338/.572 (142 wRC+) and led all National League catchers with 4.3 WAR. That kicked off a 12-year run in which he was one of the league’s best-hitting backstops. Over that span, he made seven All-Star teams and won six Silver Slugger Awards. We didn’t realize it at the time, but McCann was legitimately one of the best and most consistent players in baseball at his peak:

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I wrote about some dicey intentional walk decisions from the two NLDS series. One worked and one didn’t, but both of them were decisions managers made in huge leverage situations, and both managers tried to put their thumb on the scale of fate and influence the direction one way or another. Today, I’m going to talk about a decision that didn’t end up mattering nearly as much.

Brian Snitker tried to seize a small edge in yesterday’s Cardinals/Braves game, starting Adam Duvall in the outfield over Matt Joyce despite the fact that Joyce is left-handed and Jack Flaherty is a righty. It looked like a weird decision, one that might swing the game, but of course it didn’t. Nothing Snitker could have done, short of conducting a seance to channel the life force of a young Warren Spahn into Mike Foltynewicz, could have mattered.

The Cardinals scored 10 runs in the first inning, an endless deluge of offense, run stacked upon run. They added another in the second, and by the time Duvall stepped to the plate, our game win probability stood at 1.4% for the Braves, though the system doesn’t work well with such extreme margins. The leverage index of that at-bat was a measly 0.11, and it didn’t get better from there; his subsequent at-bats came with leverage of 0.02, 0.01, and 0.00.

So Snitker tried to make a small decision, and the gods of baseball laughed in his face. That doesn’t mean we can’t analyze his decision though, that we can’t evaluate it on its merits regardless of the actual outcome. If this game was played a million times, the vast majority would be closer than yesterday, and in some of those the difference between Duvall and Joyce would decide the game. Read the rest of this entry »

For a moment, it looked like Will Smith would be the hero. In the bottom of the ninth, sandwiched between the two cataclysmic half-innings that abruptly ended the 106-win Dodgers’ season, they had a brief flicker of hope when with one out and one on, Smith hit a drive off Daniel Hudson that looked as though it might — might — make him the hero, with a walk-off home run that sent the Dodgers to the NLCS. It was hardly implausible given that the 24-year-old rookie had hit two of the Dodgers’ major leauge-leading seven walk-off home runs this year, or that nearly half the drives hit to the specifications of which he struck Hudson’s hanging slider — 100.3 mph, at a 26 degree launch angle — have left the yard over the past five seasons.

It wasn’t to be.

Smith’s drive fell short as, ultimately and in more gruesome fashion, did the Dodgers. There will be plenty of time to dissect the larger situation but for the moment, consider the batted ball, which had a 69% of becoming a hit and a 46.1% chance of going out based on similarly struck spheroids. When it didn’t, it was just the latest in the genre of hold-your-breath moments that wound up producing mutterings that maybe the baseball has been de-juiced this October — that is, that the postseason ball is different from what’s been used in the regular season.

It’s not hard to understand why this notion has taken hold. So far this month, we’ve seen home runs hit at a lower frequency than during a regular season that set all kinds of records for long balls, and scoring rates have fallen as well. In the blur of Division Series games, many a hard-hit ball appeared bound to go out — at least based upon the way our brains have become calibrated to this year’s nearly-numbing frequency — only to die at the warning track. Yet it’s harder to make the case that something is different given a closer look at the numbers, both traditional and Statcast, at least if you’re not Baseball Prospectus’ Rob Arthur, whose model to calculate the drag on the baseball by measuring a pitch’s loss of speed does suggest something is afoot. More on his latest findings below, after I present my own analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

If this afternoon’s contest between the Cardinals and Braves was a game you were interested in watching, hopefully you tuned in early; if you’re a fan of the Braves, or competitive baseball, there wasn’t much worth watching after that. Here was the Cardinals’ top of the first inning:

Things could have gone differently for Mike Foltynewicz. There was an infield single by Paul Goldschmidt; Freddie Freeman committed an error. If Goldschmidt had hit that grounder at an infielder instead of in the hole, or if Freeman had caught Yadier Molina’s gounder, the Braves escape with a 1-0 deficit in the first. That isn’t what happened, though. After a walk and a double, Foltynewicz was done down by four and Max Fried came in to face the pitcher with the bases loaded. Fried walked Jack Flaherty, more damage was done, and by the time the inning finally, mercifully concluded, the Braves’ were in a massive hole, though not until after a wild pitch allowed Marcell Ozuna to reach, and Kolten Wong to score. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Jay Jaffe noted that starting pitching has been carrying a greater load in the playoffs this year than in the regular season and recent postseasons. One really good reason for that is the sheer number of very good starters in the playoffs this October. Take today’s games as an example. Jack Flaherty and Mike Foltynewicz will go head to head this afternoon, followed by Walker Buehler and Stephen Strasburg tonight.

Below, find a table with the NL pitching WAR leaders this season:

Three of this season’s top seven National League pitchers by WAR are set to start, and try to get their teams a series away from the NL pennant. It’s possible we see a few more of those pitchers throw in relief in tonight’s games, as well. Now, look at this table showing the NL pitching WAR leaders since August 6 when Mike Foltynewicz made his first start since returning from the minors:

We could very well see an offensive explosion today, but the scheduled starting pitchers are some of the best in the game this year, with Mike Foltynewicz joining the group over the last two months of the season. Elimination games are almost always exciting, and these ones are likely to feature great pitching to boot.

The postseason lends itself to all sorts of narratives. There are team triumphs and individual stories, but this postseason features something special you might not have noticed: a few teammates who have been playing together for nine seasons or more. When Adam Wainwright took the mound for his Game 3 start against the Braves and threw a first pitch sinker to battery mate Yadier Molina (Ronald Acuna Jr. would foul that first pitch off, but ultimately strike out swinging), it was hard to forget that this may well be Wainwright’s final season, marking the end of a career during which so many of the right-handers best moments have come with Molina behind the plate. That first pitch got me thinking: which playoff teammates have been together the longest?

To answer that question, I turned to the game logs here at FanGraphs to find the first day both teammates appeared in a game together at the major league level. I also looked at how many total games each pair has appeared in together, which includes pinch-hit appearances, pitching in relief, and defensive substitutions. This does not include any time spent on the Injured List and only includes games in which both teammates made an appearance. I excluded the postseason for parity; the data is updated through the end of the 2019 season. So, before the Dodgers and the Nationals and the Cardinals and the Braves play their Game 5’s, let’s take a look at the longest-tenured teammates we can watch this October.

No. 5: Freddie Freeman and Julio Teheran

Debut as Teammates: May 7, 2011

Kicking off our list is the pitcher/first baseman duo for the Braves. These two have been staples in Atlanta for several years now; this year Julio Teheran became the only pitcher in Braves’ franchise history to start six consecutive Opening Days. Freddie Freeman has been at first base for all of them.

Teheran was initially left off the Braves’ Division Series roster but when Chris Martin suffered an oblique injury, Teheran took his place. Now both he and Freeman are trying to push Atlanta into the Championship Series for the first time since 2001, though they’re likely both hoping for better individual performances in Game 5; Freeman, perhaps still hampered by an elbow injury, is slashing just .125/.222/.313 with a 38 wRC+ in 18 postseason plate appearances, while Teheran took the loss in Game 4 after giving up a walk-off sacrifice fly to Yadier Molina that scored Kolten Wong.

Total regular season games together: 200 Read the rest of this entry »

After watching the Cardinals and Braves compete for four games, it seems fitting that the series would be tied up 2-2. In three of the four games, the losing team had a win expectancy of at least 80% while in the fourth game, Cardinals ace Jack Flaherty allowed just a single run in the first inning before a homer in the seventh gave the Braves a 3-0 lead that proved too much for a mostly struggling Cardinals offense. In a series this close, the team that blows the lead will inevitably lament the moments they let the lead get away, but in Game 4, the Braves lost not because of a lead they relinquished, but because of a lead they failed to solidify. The Braves refused to put the Cardinals away, or alternatively, the Cardinals relievers came up big when they needed to, and now the teams head to Game 5 for a shot at the National League Championship Series.

Before we get to those blown chances, we should briefly discuss how the Braves got the lead in the first place. The Cardinals were limited to one run off Dallas Keuchel in the first game of the series as Keuchel went off-brand, throwing just 24 two-seam fastballs in his outing. Though Keuchel walked three and struck out none in four and two-thirds innings, he did enough to keep the Cardinals off balance and induced 10 groundball outs, plus two more outs on a double play, and the other two outs on liners. In the first inning of Game 4, Keuchel went back to relying heavily on the two-seamer, but the Cardinals laid off the pitch, even as a strike. Paul Goldschmidt took two sliders for balls, then a two-seamer for a 3-0 count. After a 3-0 sinker for a strike, he hit a changeup out of the park. Up next, Marcell Ozuna took a first-pitch sinker for a ball and then crushed an inside cutter to put the Cardinals ahead 2-0.

Atlanta got a run back in the third before Ozuna hit another homer in the fourth off a slider to give the Cardinals a 3-1 lead. Read the rest of this entry »

After narrowly escaping his ineffectiveness in Game 1, the Carlos Martinez Octobercoaster caused St. Louis to yack up a pivotal Game 3 at home, and cede a 2-to-1 NLDS series lead to the Atlanta Braves. A three-run Braves’ ninth on the back of three hits and two walks spoiled a timeless, if sometimes harrowing, 7.2 shutout innings from 38-year-old Cardinals starter Adam Wainwright, and sent 47,000 fans home in stunned silence.

Up until the twist, Planet of the Apes-y ending, St. Louis had maintained a loose grip on a 1-0 lead first captured on a second-inning Matt Carpenter sac fly, enabled by an earlier Marcell Ozuna double. Throughout the six innings that followed, the Cardinals survived several well-struck fly balls that momentarily stopped the collective heart of Busch Stadium, before they died at the warning track and fell harmlessly into the waiting glove of Dexter Fowler. A Ronald Acuña Jr. laser in the third (107 mph off the bat), a Nick Markakis golf shot (100 mph) in the fourth, and a hanging curveball to Matt Joyce (102.5 mph) in the seventh all amounted to nothing more than a few seconds of concern.

Then came the ninth inning. A leadoff double by Josh Donaldson (who was replaced at second base by human blur Billy Hamilton) immediately put the tying run in scoring position. Consecutive Martinez strikeouts forced Cardinals manager Mike Shildt to make a two-out decision. Either a) have Martinez face lefty-hitting catcher Brian McCann, or b) walk McCann so Martinez could face the right-handed Dansby Swanson, who had doubled off of Wainwright earlier in the game. Shildt chose to face Swanson, who obliterated a first-pitch hanging slider and tied the game on his second double. Adam Duvall followed with a less emphatic, but more significant, single that plated Rafael Ortega (who ran for McCann) and Swanson. Read the rest of this entry »