Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball on the pro side and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I’m starting with the National League East. Players who have appeared in big league games are covered below, as are a few players who have been at the offsite camps all season. The results of changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team.

Atlanta Braves

In an August post, I talked about how I was moving away from hitters who swing recklessly but failed to mention that I’d slid Drew Waters from the back of the 55 FV tier — around 50th overall — down to 76th overall, near a bunch of the high ceiling/high variance hitters grouped toward the back of the top 100.

I also slid Kyle Wright (now a 40+ FV — I know he has graduated off of other publications’ lists but even after counting his time on the roster I still have him classified as rookie-eligible, though perhaps I’m miscounting?) and Bryse Wilson (45+ FV). Both of them are throwing hard (Wilson up to 96 over the weekend, Wright up to 97 yesterday) but because they’re of the sink/tail variety, their fastballs don’t have margin for error in the strike zone and both of them too often miss in hittable locations. Each has the secondary stuff to start, but neither has seized a rotation spot even though Atlanta desperately needs someone to. Read the rest of this entry »

With half of the season in the books, the Atlanta Braves are holding down first place in the National League East. In this season of expanded playoffs, that translates to a 92.4% chance of reaching the postseason. Accordingly, they’re buyers at the trade deadline, with an eye towards shoring up their postseason rotation. To that end, they made a deal with the Orioles today, acquiring starting pitcher Tommy Milone in exchange for two players to be named later:

Atlanta #Braves Acquire Tommy Milone: pic.twitter.com/y2mO0iyqgp

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) August 30, 2020

Wait, Tommy Milone? He’s an odd addition to a team that looks like a lock to make the playoffs; Atlanta is looking for players to help in the postseason, not help them get there, and Milone is more the latter than the former.

They’ve struggled mightily with rotation depth, however, as expected starters Mike Soroka and Cole Hamels are on the shelf with injury. Hamels could theoretically return for the playoffs, but that’s iffy at best, and Soroka is out for the year. Ten different players have made starts for Atlanta this season, hardly the stability they’d hoped for. Milone can, if nothing else, provide them with bulk innings. For a pitching staff that’s already running out Robbie Erlin, Josh Tomlin, and rookie Ian Anderson, that’s quite valuable. Read the rest of this entry »

With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of last night’s game between the Braves and Phillies, the visiting Phillies were holding on to a two-run lead. Dansby Swanson stood on first base with Adeiny Hechavarría on second. Freddie Freeman was facing off against new Phillies acquisition Brandon Workman. In terms of compelling endings, this is pretty close to what you hope for. One of the better hitters in the game had a chance to hit a walk-off home run to end the game, while making an out would mean victory for the other side. Freeman did get a hit, pushing a double into the gap, but the game ended when Swanson was thrown out at home trying to score the tying run. The play, already compelling given the game state, was made more interesting by two factors:

1. Andrew Knapp might have blocked the plate in violation of the rules designed to prevent collisions at home.
2. Swanson decided to try to score the tying run on the play, but made the final out instead.

Before getting to the collision rule and whether Knapp was where he shouldn’t have been, let’s first consider Swanson’s decision to attempt to score from first base. While Freeman hit the ball pretty far, it was cut off by Roman Quinn. One of the fastest runners in the game, Quinn got to the ball in the gap before left fielder Andrew McCutchen. While McCutchen’s arm strength isn’t terrible, it isn’t much more than average, while Quinn has thrown an easy 87 mph pitch from the mound, and made this throw earlier this month:

Read the rest of this entry »

Dayton Moore’s roots remain true. The Kansas City Royals GM broke into professional baseball as a scout — this with the Atlanta Braves in 1994 — and to this day, talent evaluation is as much a part of his M.O. as anything. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been an evolution. Much as Moore’s job title and employer have changed (each in 2006), the scouting world has changed as well. Moore recognizes that, and to his credit has refused stay stuck in the past. A combination of old school and new school, Moore prefers to think of himself as neither. In his own mind, the 53-year-old front office executive considers himself to be in school.

———

David Laurila: You have a background in scouting. That’s a part of the game you’ve always championed.

Dayton Moore: “Scouts have always been the backbone of an organization. It’s a legacy in our game. I’ve always felt that area scouts and minor league managers are the most important part of every organization, because of their connectivity with the players. Every player in this game is here because of the vision of a scout. The scout then turned that vision over to player development, and it was up to the minor league manager to improve upon that vision.

“Of course, the front office and the instructors — the coaches and roving instructors — are involved in that process. But again, every player’s story begins with the vision of the scout.”

Laurila: What you tell me about some of your early scouting experiences?

Moore: “When I started as an area scout, we did tryout camps all over the country. Part of our responsibility was to run those camps in rural America, and in urban America. We spent most of our time in those areas, because there weren’t as many structured leagues there. Legion baseball, Babe Ruth baseball, and Little League baseball, were all well-formed in suburbia. Read the rest of this entry »

An exciting pitching matchup on Monday between the defending National League Cy Young winner and the NL Rookie of the Year runner-up turned grim in the third inning when 23-year-old Braves right-hander Mike Soroka suffered what appeared to be a leg injury while coming off the mound on a groundball.

Braves starter Mike Soroka leaves today's game after falling to the ground while attempting to cover 1st base. He was helped off of the field. pic.twitter.com/gJC0Dt3Xcz

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) August 4, 2020

The injury was rather apparent in zoomed-in, slowed-down videos shared on Twitter shortly after — I won’t link them here, you can find them yourself if you really want to — and within hours, the Braves confirmed the worst. Soroka tore his achilles tendon, which will cause him to miss the rest of this season and, depending on his recovery, possibly the beginning of 2021 as well.

Losing Soroka, 23, to a serious injury like this is awful. He was second in NL Rookie of the Year voting a year ago after throwing 174.2 innings and posting a 2.68 ERA, 3.45 FIP, and 4.0 WAR. That ERA was good for fourth among qualified starters, while his FIP was 14th. He didn’t get many strikeouts — he had the 14th-lowest K/9 rate in baseball last year — but instead pitched to contact, and was quite successful at it. He had the sixth-highest groundball rate among qualified starters, and according to Statcast, was in the 84th percentile in barrel rate allowed, the 65th percentile in exit velocity allowed, and the 60th percentile in expected slugging percentage. Underlying data didn’t necessarily believe he was the Cy Young contender his ERA portrayed him as, but he was still rated as a solidly above-average pitcher across the board — no small feat for someone who pitched most of the year at age 21 while attempting to buck some of the game’s most popular pitching trends.

This year, however, there was evidence he might be falling more in line with what modern pitching instructors are preaching. Soroka was a sinker baller last year, throwing the pitch 44.6% of the time, while his four-seam fastball rate was just 18.7%. In a small sample of starts this season, however, those two had converged. According to Statcast, in his first 13.2 innings, Soroka had thrown exactly 59 sinkers and 59 four-seamers. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

———

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 »