This past Saturday, the Braves defeated the Phillies by a score of 5-3, earning their 87th win on the season and clinching the National League East title. Needless to say, this was unexpected back in March, when the Braves entered the year with a 3.2% chance of reaching the playoffs. Then again, there were a lot of unexpected developments in Atlanta this year. It was clear entering the season, for example, that Ronald Acuna possessed considerable talent; it was less obvious, however, that he’d become one of baseball’s best so soon. It was perhaps even more unlikely that a 34-year-old Nick Markakis would earn his first All-Star selection, although that happened as well. The list of surprises goes on. Johan Camargo, Mike Foltynewicz, and Anibal Sanchez: each of these actors played an important role in the Braves’ early arrival on the national stage.

Now the minds of both fans and the players themselves turn to October baseball. While there are some legitimate reasons to regard the Braves as a long shot — the Astros, the Dodgers, the Indians, the Red Sox, you get the idea — they do still have a 2.9% chance of winning the World Series. Throw in the fact that playoff baseball can be especially random, and we could be sitting here in a month lauding World Series MVP Kevin Gausman.

The Braves do enter October with questions beyond their youth. Most of these questions relate to their pitching, especially their bullpen. In terms of both run prevention (19th in adjusted ERA) and peripherals (18th in adjusted FIP), the relief corps has been middling. The midseason acquisitions of Brad Brach and Jonny Venters for international bonus money have yielded some returns, as the two veterans have put up a combined 0.8 WAR. However, if the Braves hope to slow down baseball’s best offenses in the late innings, they’ll be relying on two rookies with very similar arsenals.

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The Braves have won plenty of games, and Ronald Acuna has hit plenty of homers. A common analytical writer trick is to open with an anecdote, to suck readers in before hitting them with statistics. I am a common analytical writer, but for this intro I want to focus on a Ronald Acuna single, leading off a game the Braves lost. And honestly, I don’t even care so much about the single itself. The Braves lost to the Cardinals on Monday. Acuna led off the bottom of the first with a ground-ball single off Miles Mikolas. The ball was hit well enough, but to understand what Acuna has already become, it’s most important to look at the process.

Acuna took a first-pitch strike. Happens sometimes. Especially leading off games. Mikolas throws an awful lot of strikes. Acuna was behind 0-and-1, but then he took a close fastball for a ball.

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Charlie Culberson isn’t enamored of the nickname he’s picked up this season. Complimentary as it may be, it’s a bit much for a humble utility player from Calhoun, Georgia — especially one who knows that the idea of “clutch” has largely been debunked. Which isn’t to say he’s been irrationally dubbed.

His overall numbers this year are solid, but they’re nothing to write home about. In 287 plate appearances, Culberson is slashing .280/.330/.494. It’s his flair for heroics that has led to the sobriquet “Charlie Clutch.”

“I had the couple of walk-off homers back in May and June, and people just kind of ran with that,” explained Culberson, who is in his first season with the Atlanta Braves. “It sounds good — it works well with the two Cs — but it’s not something I would give myself. I think you’re going to come off as a little conceited if you put ‘clutch’ next to your name. And if you think about it, it’s kind of a pressure thing. ‘Clutch’ is a pretty strong word, especially in sports.”

I pointed out to Culberson that the walk-off bombs aren’t the only impactful hits he’s had this season. In 71 plate appearances with runners in scoring position, he’s slashed a healthy .375/.437/.641. With two outs and runners in scoring position, those numbers — in a small sample size of 32 chances — are a stupendous .464/.559/.786.

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Bobby Wilson has caught for 16 seasons — nine of them at the big league level — so he knows pitching like the back of his hand. Particularly on the defensive side of the ball. With a .577 OPS in exactly 1,000 MLB plate appearances, the 35-year-old hasn’t exactly been an offensive juggernaut. But his stick isn’t why the Chicago Cubs acquired him from the Minnesota Twins this past Thursday. They picked him up for his receiving skills and his ability to work with a staff.

The quality and style of pitching he’s seeing today aren’t the same as what they were when he inked his first professional contract in 2002.

“The game is ever evolving, ever changing,” Wilson told me a few weeks ago. “I’ve seen it go from more sinker-slider to elevated fastballs with a curveball off of that. But what really stands out is the spike in velocity. There’s almost no one in this league right now who is a comfortable at bat.”

In his opinion, increased octane has made a marked impact on how hitters are being attacked.

“If you have velocity, you can miss spots a little more frequently, whereas before you had to pitch,” opined Wilson. “You can’t miss spots throwing 88-90. If you’re 95-100 , you can miss your location and still have a chance of missing a barrel. Even without a lot of movement. Because of that, a lot of guys are going to four-seam, straight fastballs that are elevated, instead of a ball that’s sinking.”

But as the veteran catcher said, the game is ever evolving. He’s now starting to see more high heat in the nether regions of the zone, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Note from Eric: Hey you, this is the last one of these for the year, as the minor-league regular season comes to a close. Thanks for reading. I’ll be taking some time off next week, charging the batteries for the offseason duties that lie ahead for Kiley and me.

D.J. Peters, CF, Los Angeles Dodgers
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 4-for-7, 2 HR, 2B (double header)

Notes
A comparison of DJ Peters‘ 2017 season in the Cal League and his 2018 season at Double-A gives us a good idea of what happens to on-paper production when a hitter is facing better pitching and defenses in a more stable offensive environment.

Reports of Peters’ physical abilities haven’t changed, nor is his batted-ball profile different in such a way that one would expect a downtick in production. The 2018 line is, I think, a more accurate distillation of Peters’ abilities. He belongs in a talent bucket with swing-and-miss outfielders like Franchy Cordero, Randal Grichuk, Michael A. Taylor, Bradley Zimmer, etc. These are slugging center fielders whose contact skills aren’t particularly great. Players like this are historically volatile from one season to the next but dominant if/when things click. They’re often ~1.5 WAR players who have some years in the three-win range. Sometimes they also turn into George Springer.

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No team plays a completely balanced scheduled over the course of a season. Some divisions, naturally, are better than others. Because intradivisional games account for roughly 40% of the league schedule, there is necessarily some irregularity in the strength of competition from club to club. Interleague play, which represents another 10% of games, also contributes to this imbalance. Given the sheer numbers of games in a major-league campaign, the effect of scheduling ultimately isn’t a major difference-maker. Talent and luck have much more influence over a club’s win-loss record. In any given month, however, scheduling imbalances can become much more pronounced.

Consider this: at the beginning of the season, just one team featured a projected gain or loss as large as three wins due to scheduling. The Texas Rangers were expected to lose three more games than their talent would otherwise dictate. Right now, however, there are eight teams with bigger prorated schedule swings than the one the Rangers saw at the beginning of the season — and those swings could have a big impact on the remaining pennant races.

To provide some backdrop, the chart below ranks the league’s schedules, toughest to easiest, compared to an even .500 schedule.

The Diamondbacks have a pretty rough go of it. Outside of five games against the Padres, the other “worst” team they play is the San Francisco Giants. They have one series each against the division-leading Astros, Braves, and Cubs along with a pair of series against both the Dodgers and Rockies. If Arizona were chasing these teams for the division or Wild Card, their schedule would present them with a good opportunity for making up ground. Given their current status, however, it just means a lot of tough games down the stretch.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Bryse Wilson, RHP, Atlanta Braves
Level: Triple-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 12   FV: 45+
Line: 8 IP, 1 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 13 K

Notes
Bryse Wilson touched 97 several times last night and sat 93-95 late in the outing. He pounded the zone with his fastball (72 of 98 pitches were for strikes) and blew it past several hitters up above the strike zone. His slider (mostly 83-85, though he lollipops some slower ones into the zone for first-pitch strikes) flashes plus but is mostly average and is only capable of missing bats when it’s out of the zone. Wilson’s changeup is fringey and firm, without much bat-missing movement, but the velocity separation off of the fastball is enough to keep hitters from squaring it up, and it’s going to be an effective pitch. The entire package (Wilson’s physicality and stuff) looks very similar to Michael Fulmer and Wilson’s delivery is much more graceful and fluid than it was when he was in high school, when scouts thought it would impact his ability to command the fastball and possibly move him to the bullpen.

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The Braves won again on Tuesday, extending their lead in the NL East to two games. And now, there’s nothing especially remarkable about beating the Marlins at home, but for me, it’s more about how the Marlins were defeated. Trevor Richards took the mound, after a scoreless top of the first. His first pitch was thrown to Ronald Acuna Jr.

Acuna hit a home run. He’s been doing a lot of that. Just after TV came back from instant replay, Richards threw his second pitch, to Charlie Culberson.

Culberson also hit a home run. Short of sustaining some kind of injury, Richards’ first two pitches couldn’t have gone any worse. They both turned into the worst possible outcome, and there was something symbolic in that. Not so much as far as Richards is concerned. It’s more about the Braves, and how they’ve been hitting. The Braves this year have been more than happy to jump on the first pitch. They ambushed Richards on Tuesday, and that wasn’t the end of it.

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Braves rookie Ronald Acuña has been on a tear lately. On Monday against the Marlins in Atlanta, the 20-year-old phenom did something that only three other players have done in over a century: lead off both games of a doubleheader with a home run. In the opener on Monday afternoon, the makeup of an August 1 rainout, Acuña clubbed Miami starter Pablo López’s fifth pitch of the game, a center-cut 93 mph four-seamer, an estimated 414 feet to center field:

Acuña later added a two-run double in that contest, which Braves went on to win, 9-1. In the nightcap, he hit the first pitch of Merandy Gonzalez’s first start, also a well-centered 93 mph four-seamer (jeez, kid, watch the tapes) an estimated 441 feet to center:

The Braves took that one as well, 6-1. With that pair of homers, Acuna etched himself in the record books:

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If you haven’t heard, Freddie Freeman is good at baseball. He’s currently second among first basemen by WAR and wRC+, behind only Matt Carpenter in each case. Since 2016, he’s recorded a 150 wRC+, good for sixth-best in baseball over that span. Nor is his more recent success unprecedented. Freeman ranks 29th in career WAR for active hitters, with only five players having produced a greater WAR figure than him (30.0) in fewer plate appearances (4,793): Josh Donaldson (35.6 and 3,757), Paul Goldschmidt (34.8 and 4,521), Mike Trout (62.6 and 4,547), Giancarlo Stanton (37.7 and 4,613), and Buster Posey (39.1 and 4,658). (All numbers current as of Wednesday.)

This news isn’t exactly earth-shattering for anyone who frequents the pages of FanGraphs. We have known this since Freeman’s breakout season in 2013. Despite that, however, it seems like there’s an increase in Freddie Freeman appreciation recently. Some of this is likely due to the fact that the Braves are — somewhat unexpectedly — fighting for a playoff spot. The Home Run Derby also helped his nationwide notability, even if he didn’t perform particularly well. Google seems to confirm the newfound recognition, as Freddie Freeman searches are up notably the past two years.

As noted, though, Freeman has been an extraordinary talent for a while now. He hits for average and power, is a good fielder (he ranks third in UZR for first basemen since 2013), and is a good runner for a first baseman (fourth-most baserunning runs since 2015). However, to add to all these skills, there is one thing that Freeman does better than anyone else in baseball, and it’s this one thing that helps put him in position to succeed.

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