Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Atlanta Braves. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth 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. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) 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 »

Hurston Waldrep is one of my favorite pitchers in the minor leagues. Or rather, he was, because the Braves called him up this weekend and gave him his major league debut on Sunday. Waldrep was the no. 24 overall pick in the draft last year, and I was by no means alone in considering that selection a steal for Atlanta.

A year ago this weekend, Waldrep was pitching the University of Florida to the College World Series; on Sunday, his opponent, the Washington Nationals, was somewhat more challenging. Waldrep’s line in his debut ended up being extremely ugly: 3 2/3 innings, four hits, four walks, only one strikeout, and seven earned runs allowed. Atlanta lost the game 8-5, and Waldrep got charged with the decision, leaving him with a career record of 0-1 and an ERA of 17.18.

Waldrep’s first big league start ended in disaster, but up until the point where it all went wrong, the rookie showed incredible promise. So let’s look a little deeper, because amid the pile of runs, you can see why I’m still so high on Waldrep, and why he could end up being immensely important to the Braves later this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Sunday’s column led with Detroit Tigers infielder/outfielder Matt Vierling reflecting on his days as a two-way player in high school and at the University of Notre Dame. This week’s leads with a former two-way player whose career path took a different turn. A native of Saginaw, Michigan who played shortstop and served as a closer at the University of Nebraska, Spencer Schwellenbach is currently a member of the Atlanta Braves starting rotation.

His big-league debut came sooner than expected. The 24-year-old right-hander was drafted in 2021 — Atlanta selected him in the second round — but because of Tommy John surgery he didn’t take the mound until last year. At the time of his May 29 call-up, Schwellenbach had just 110 minor-league innings under his belt. Moreover, he hadn’t thrown a pitch above the Double-A level.

His two-step call-up is something he’ll never forget.

“They actually told me I was going to Triple-A,” said Schwellenbach. “I showed up in Gwinnett, threw a bullpen, and after I got done they asked if I was all packed up to go to Virginia. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got all my stuff here.’ They were like, ‘Well, unpack your stuff, you’re throwing in Atlanta on Wednesday.’ I was so taken off guard that I didn’t know what to say. It was like, ‘holy crap.’ I called my parents, my fiancee, my brothers, my sister. It was awesome.” Read the rest of this entry »

Max Fried hadn’t yet established himself when I first talked to him for FanGraphs in April 2018. While highly regarded — the San Diego Padres had drafted the southpaw seventh overall in 2012 out of Los Angeles’ Harvard-Westlake High School — he had just a smattering of innings under his big league belt. Fast forward to today, and Fried — acquired by the Atlanta Braves in a December 2014 trade the Padres presumably wish they hadn’t made — is one of the best pitchers in baseball. Moreover, he has been since the start of the 2019 season. With the caveat that pitcher win-loss records need to be taken with a large grain of salt, the 30-year-old hurler has gone 66-23 over the last five-plus seasons; his .742 winning percentage ranks first among his contemporaries (min. 50 decisions). Fried’s ERA and FIP over that span are 3.00 and 3.20, respectively, and in the current campaign those numbers are 2.93 and 3.22.

His hitting also bears mention. In 2021, the last year before the National League adopted the DH, Fried had the highest batting average (.273), on-base percentage (.322), wRC+ (77), and wOBA (.289) among pitchers with 40 or more plate appearances. While not exactly Wes Ferrell, Fried could more than hold his own in the batter’s box.

How has the Atlanta ace evolved as a pitcher since we spoke six years ago, and does he miss stepping up to the plate with a piece of lumber in hand? I broached those topics with Fried on Wednesday afternoon at Fenway Park.

———

David Laurila: You were relatively new to the big leagues when we first spoke. Outside of being older and more experienced, what has changed since that time?

Max Fried: “Honestly, I would say it’s just experience, just constantly evolving and taking from what I’ve learned over the years. A lot of it has been commanding my pitches better, throwing them for strikes and keeping guys off balance.”

Laurila: Baseball Savant has you throwing seven different pitches. Is that accurate? Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Bummer is one of the best pitchers in baseball at one of the most important skills in the game. He’s reached two-strike counts against an impressive 67.8% of opposing batters. That’s among the best marks in the majors – seventh among pitchers who have faced 50 or more batters this year. It makes perfect sense; his sinker is so nasty that hitters take it for strikes or foul it off all the time, so he’s ahead in the count if he’s in the zone.

Knowing that, you might be surprised that Bummer’s strikeout rate is roughly league average. He’s one of the best pitchers in the game at getting to two strikes, but he’s actually in the bottom quarter of baseball when it comes to converting two-strike counts into strikeouts. He only does it roughly 35% of the time. The things that get him ahead simply don’t work as well with two strikes. No one’s taking a two-strike sinker low in the zone because they don’t think they’ll be able to do much with it; there are two strikes! Foul balls don’t work to Bummer’s benefit either.

Naturally, Bummer adjusts. He goes sweeper-heavy in two strike counts. But it doesn’t work well enough to turn his huge early advantage into enormous strikeout totals. His sweeper misses bats at a league-average rate, largely because batters don’t often chase it. None of that means he’s a bad pitcher – I think he’s great, and was surprised the Braves were able to acquire him for relatively little – but imagine how much better he could be if he struck batters out at a reasonable clip after getting to two strikes.

That got me thinking about The Strategy, caps intentional. That’s not any strategy; it’s the one that Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discussed all the time on Effectively Wild after the Yankees changed pitchers in the middle of a plate appearance. When reporters asked why manager Joe Girardi had made the switch, he simply said “strategy.” Thus, the name was born, and Ben eventually documented how the tactic was starting to catch on at the collegiate level.

It still hasn’t caught on at the major league level – sorry, Ben and Sam. But I think it should, and Bummer is half of the reason why. Every time I watch Bummer pitch, I’m struck by how easily he gets ahead. If he’s around the plate, there’s almost nothing hitters can do. They make a ton of contact against him, but it’s all topped grounders. That’s just how Bummer works. Hitters are okay going to two strikes if it means avoiding one of those rally-killing double play balls. And he’s been intermittently wild throughout his career, so trying to wait him out has merit.

Pierce Johnson, meanwhile, really only has one move. It’s a great one, though; he throws his curveball 80% of the time and still gets a ton of outs with it. He’s running a glorious 32.1% strikeout rate so far this year. But he’s doing it very differently. Bummer gets to two-strike counts better than almost everyone else in baseball. Johnson is above average, but not hugely so. After reaching two strikes, however, he’s automatic. He’s 15th in baseball when it comes to converting two-strike counts into strikeouts. The reason is obvious – he only throws curveballs, so he must have a pretty good curveball – but that doesn’t make it less true.

For the most part, this just isn’t important. It doesn’t matter how you trace a path to outs; it just matters how many you get overall. Bummer is much worse than Johnson after 0-2 counts, but he suffers much less when falling behind 2-0. His game tends towards grounders, regardless of counts; Johnson’s is about making hitters swing through three curveballs before they take four out of the zone. That 2-0 count hurts more when you’re trying to avoid contact than when you’re betting on it. But at the end of the day, Johnson has allowed a lower wOBA than Bummer so far, and the way they get there doesn’t matter.

What if it could, though? There’s no rule that prevents Brian Snitker from waiting for Bummer to get ahead 0-2 or 1-2 in an important spot and then replacing him with Johnson. A pitcher who got to two-strike counts with Bummer’s frequency and converted them with Pierce’s would have a 39.2% strikeout rate. And that might understate things, honestly.

Imagine getting down in the count against Bummer’s heavy lefty sinker, then hearing time called. You wait two minutes for a pitching change, standing awkwardly on the field or maybe reading some iPad scouting reports, and then bam, you’re facing an over-the-top curveball from a righty. Also, if you miss once, the plate appearance ends. It’s a tough spot to imagine, let alone live through.

That additional strikeout rate is hardly a game-breaking edge. But it’s a non-zero advantage, and baseball teams famously like to take those. And it’s not just limited to Bummer/Johnson pairings, either. Every high-leverage reliever on the Braves puts away hitters more efficiently than Bummer. None of them reach two strikes as frequently. This is a tailor-made spot for the strategy, resilient to who the specific batter is (someone hits curveballs well would be a bad spot for Johnson) and which relievers are unavailable on a given day. It’s not resilient to the requirement that pitchers face three batters during their outings, but Bummer has faced four or more batters in 14 of his 20 appearances this year, so it’s at least technically available to Atlanta in the majority of his games. Johnson, too, is subject to a three-batter minimum. You might not use him if he had a particularly bad matchup due up next. But he has neutral platoon splits for his career, and the Braves have other options as well. The minimum is more of an inconvenience than a dealbreaker.

There’s no indication that the Braves are trying the strategy. There’s no indication that anyone’s trying it, really. Caleb Ferguson looks like a candidate for the Bummer role, though to be fair the Yankees don’t have an obvious hammer to bring in after him. Luke Weaver might make the most sense – the problem is that he’s also better at getting to two strikes than Ferguson. Likewise, Anthony Bender is probably the best overall fit – Tanner Scott and Calvin Faucher are nice strikeout anchors – but I can’t quite see the Marlins trying something so strange.

No, we’re probably doomed to see no uses of the strategy in the majors, even as it continues to happen in high stakes college baseball. As an eagle-eyed listener pointed out to the Effectively Wild crew in Episode 2169, TCU manager Kirk Saarloos brought in a new pitcher in the highest-leverage position imaginable this season: late innings, tie game, full count, bases loaded. That’s the kind of initiative I’d love to see in the majors, and only partially because I’ve heard Ben and Sam (and Meg and Jeff) talk about it so much over the years.

Maybe, like me, you find this whole pre-two-strike vs. post-two-strike split fascinating. Maybe you’re wondering who’s the best at each. Here’s a leaderboard, but really, the answer is just Mason Miller. Unsurprisingly, he’s nearly the best in the business at turning two-strike counts into strikeouts, at a ridiculous 68.9% clip. Only Fernando Cruz (70.4%) has done better. But wait, there’s more: Miller is also the best at reaching two strike counts, at 74.8%. That’s ludicrous. The hybridized Bummer/Johnson strategy can’t even recreate Miller’s brilliance.

In the end, that’s probably a good thing. “The Strategy” is interesting because of its rarity, and because it seems like a free upgrade. But the magnitude of that upgrade is tiny – the best way to manufacture a strikeout is to have Mason Miller pitching, not to strategically swap your guys in and out. This plan probably isn’t coming to a stadium near you – but the Braves should do it once or twice all the same, because there’s rarely a situation that calls out for it this clearly.

I think everyone has moments where they wonder just what the hell they’ve done with their lives. I’ve been blessed with the divine spark of human consciousness, and a body to tote those thoughts around in, and what have I accomplished? I had one of those moments recently while I was holding a friend’s baby, trying to make her laugh. What a delightful and important but most of all profound thing, to create a whole other person and cultivate her — from scratch — into a happy adult.

Or the next best thing, creating art. I’ll speak to what I know: music. I’m left in awe of songs that, through dynamic contrast and precision of rhythm and density of countermelody, seem to be carrying that divine spark themselves — the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony, or Typhoon’s “Prosthetic Love.” So much care and emotion went into such composition that it’s hard not to be bowled over by the emotional transference of the artistic process even as you’re astounded by how precisely the pieces have been crafted and how seamlessly they fit together.

Again: What am I doing with my life to show that I value this gift? How am I using this spark to shape the world into a better place? How am I passing this light on to others? This thought burst out and grabbed me recently when I was poking around our site’s pitcher defense leaderboards and noticed something interesting about Josh Fleming. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

The emotional toll of losing Ronald Acuña Jr. to another ACL tear is obvious. The entirety of the baseball world came together to express shock and disappointment at Sunday evening’s news that Acuña would need season-ending surgery for the second time in four years. At his best, Acuña is arguably the most electric player in the game, as we saw last year during his otherworldly MVP-winning campaign, when he became the first player ever to hit 40 home runs and steal 70 bases in the same season. Baseball is simply not as exciting without him on the field.

Beyond that, though, the injury is a devastating loss for the Braves, whose probability to win the NL East — which was already diminished, as Dan Szymborski noted in his column on Friday — sunk by 10 percentage points within a day after Acuña went down. Sure, he was struggling over the first third of the season — he hit just four home runs in 49 games, and his OPS was nearly 300 points lower than last year’s mark — but his importance to the Atlanta lineup is undeniable.

Monday’s game, an 8-4 loss to the Nationals, provided a look at what the Braves’ offense will look like without the reigning MVP. The good news was that third baseman Austin Riley returned after missing 13 games with an intercostal strain, but it was clear that this was not the same unit that last year drew comparisons to the 1927 Yankees. Second baseman Ozzie Albies replaced Acuña in the leadoff spot, with Riley sliding to the two-hole and DH Marcell Ozuna, who’s been the team’s most productive hitter this year, moving from fifth to third in the order, ahead of slugging first baseman Matt Olson. After that, things drop off considerably, though it helps that catcher Sean Murphy is back from the oblique strain that kept him out since Opening Day. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the start of the season, the Atlanta Braves were the consensus pick to win the NL East. While it wasn’t unanimous – try getting a few dozen writers to fully agree on something – 22 of 25 FanGraphs writers predicted the Braves to win the division for the seventh straight season. Sportsbooks offered odds on Atlanta that had an implied probability of 75-80% for winning the division. ZiPS projected the Braves to win the most games in the majors and gave them a 63% chance to take the NL East crown. But as we approach the end of the first third of the season, it’s the Philadelphia Phillies who are on top of the division with the best record in baseball. The team’s six-game lead over Atlanta isn’t an insurmountable barrier, but it’s still a comfortable cushion for this point of the season. So, how concerned should the Braves be? And how long do they have to overcome their rivals and keep their division streak alive?

Frequently, when I discuss surprise first-place teams at this point of the season, I compare the situation to a hypothetical foot race between Usain Bolt and me. It goes without saying that Bolt is a much faster runner than I am, to the degree that he’d probably beat me in a race hopping on one foot. But what if he gave me a head start so I could get a sufficient lead? How far ahead would I have to be to have a chance to hold off the world’s fastest man? Uhhh, 10 steps from the finish line by the time he starts running might get it done. Obviously, this isn’t the perfect analogy, because even if Bolt is the Braves of running, I certainly am not the Phillies. But you get the idea: At some point in the season, a division race becomes a question of time, not talent.

First things first, let’s take a look at the current simulated ZiPS projected standings, through Thursday night’s games.

Well, at least if you go by the ZiPS projections, Atlanta fans aren’t getting the happiest version of this tale. ZiPS still thinks the Braves are the better team, but the margin has narrowed considerably. What was a 10-win gap in March has thinned to just a hair over a three-win separation per 162 games (20 points of winning percentage, to be exact). In fact, the Phillies are now projected to have an almost identical probability of winning the division as the Braves did at the start of the season, despite Atlanta’s aforementioned 10-game edge; as I remind people, the future is almost always far more uncertain than you think.

This is actually an impressively durable change, which further complicates matters for the Braves. Projections for teams don’t usually move quickly because, well, baseball history says they shouldn’t. ZiPS has been doing team projections since 2005. If all you had to go on to project the last two-thirds of a season was a team’s preseason projection in ZiPS and the team’s actual record for the first-third of the season, the best mix based on two decades of projections is about two-thirds ZiPS and one-third actual record.

The offenses tell much of the story, so let’s start with Philadelphia’s offense. Here are the differences between ZiPS preseason WAR and the current projected final WAR. The latter consists of the WAR already on the books and the rest-of-season projections. Remember, this already includes all those grumpy old regressions toward the mean.

That’s eight players projected to finish with at least a half-win more than at the start of the season. Castellanos is the only Phillies player whose projected WAR is now a half-win worse, but the projection systems didn’t expect much from him going into the season anyway. None of the hitters who are smashing the ball right now are expected to turn into midnight pumpkins. Even Bohm, the infielder ZiPS was most suspicious of, is now in the top 10 for most projected WAR added for 2025. And it’s not shocking that Harper, Realmuto, Turner (who is currently on the IL), and Stott are projected to maintain their strong starts.

As for the pitching, we projected the Phillies to have the second-best rotation in baseball, so their awesomeness is hardly surprising. Philadelphia’s stars have more than balanced out some of the outfield question marks and its depth hasn’t truly been tested yet, except for Turner’s injury — and as Jon Becker noted in his morning column on Tuesday, Turner’s replacements in the lineup, Sosa and Kody Clemens, have excelled in his absence.

As for the Braves, their vaunted offense has come out rather impotent. They rank seventh in the NL in runs scored, which isn’t disaster territory, but Ronald Acuña Jr., Matt Olson, and Austin Riley have all been just barely above league-average hitters this year. Sean Murphy has been out with an oblique injury that he suffered on Opening Day, but that’s been less of an impact because Travis d’Arnaud has been solid as the everyday backstop. Things might be a lot worse right now if not for the performances of d’Arnaud and Marcell Ozuna.

Atlanta’s current place in the standings is the fault of its underperforming stars, not its complementary talent. And that’s what makes it tough for the Braves to turn things around with a few trades, as they did in 2021 before surging to win the World Series. It’d be one thing if the problem were someone like Orlando Arcia, because the Braves wouldn’t think twice about benching or trading him to acquire a better shortstop. But when it comes to Acuña, Olson, and Riley, all Atlanta can do is wait for them to catch fire. What adds to this general feeling of helplessness is that the team’s biggest problem on the pitching side is Spencer Strider’s season-ending UCL injury. Even if the Braves were to try and swing a trade, their farm system is one of the weakest in baseball right now and only a few teams are currently out of contention. Major reinforcements aren’t on the way anytime soon.

The good news for Atlanta is that its stars are capable of breaking out of their funks at any moment, but the longer it takes them to turn things around, the more time the Phillies have to pull away. To get an idea of how much time the Braves have left, I took the current projected standings and had ZiPS simulate the rest of the season with both teams posting the same record going forward (for the sake of the example, I’m going with a 94-win pace) to see how quickly the divisional probabilities would change. Without picking up ground but also not losing any, Atlanta would slip to two-to-one divisional underdogs by June 10, and hit the three-to-one spot on the last day of the month. If this continues to the morning of the trade deadline, the Braves would find themselves with only an 18% projected chance to win the NL East, while the Phillies’ divisional odds would climb to 81%. (The Mets would still retain a few tenths of a percentage point.)

Let’s be clear: Despite the relatively gloomy outlook for Atlanta, a six-game deficit heading into Memorial Day Weekend is not insurmountable. In fact, the Phillies have the same divisional odds now as the Braves did two months ago. That said, for the first time since 2011, the NL East is the Philadelphia’s division to lose.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Chris Sale pitch like an ace — or it had been, until recently. For the first time in more than half a decade, the 35-year-old lefty is dominating hitters on a routine basis. On Monday night in Atlanta, Sale turned in his third consecutive scoreless start, shutting out the Padres for seven innings while striking out nine, and helping the Braves halt a four-game losing streak.

Sale allowed just five hits, didn’t walk a single batter, and went to a three-ball count just twice (he retired both hitters). Only in the fourth, when Donovan Solano and Ha-Seong Kim hit back-to-back two-out singles, did the Padres put two men on base against Sale. Solano took third on Kim’s single, and then Kim stole second, but Sale escaped the jam by getting José Azocar to fly out. San Diego mustered just five hard-hit balls, which together amounted to two singles — a 95.9-mph one in the first inning by Jurickson Profar, and a 108.2-mph scorcher in the second inning by Manny Machado — plus two groundouts and a fly out. The last of those, a towering 104.9-mph drive to left center by Kyle Higashioka, would have been a home run in 28 out of the 30 major league parks according to Statcast, but at Truist Park it was a routine warning track out to left fielder Adam Duvall.

Meanwhile, Sale generated 18 whiffs, seven apiece with his four-seamer and his slider, and four with his changeup. He had a 35% called strike and walk rate, and got the Padres to chase on 37% of his pitches outside the zone, consistent with his season rate, which is also his Statcast-era high. All but one of his strikeouts came on pitches out of the zone, most of them on the outer edge; six of them were swinging (three sliders, two fastballs, one changeup) and two were foul tips, while the other was a swinging strike at the top border:

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. After taking a week off to recharge and travel, I was itching to watch some baseball this week, and the sport delivered. After spending last week in New York, I had the city on my mind, and the Mets delivered with some exciting series against the Braves and Phillies. There was good rivalry action out west, too, with the Dodgers and Giants squaring off. And of course, there’s that classic rivalry, Tommy Pham against the concept of ever taking a single play off. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe for the inspiration for this series. Let’s get right into it.

1. Max Effort Every Time

Tommy Pham is my favorite baseball player. To be clear, I don’t think he’s the best baseball player. I’m not sure that I, personally, would want him as a teammate, even. He’s too intense for my laid back view of the world. But his maniacal drive is absolutely delightful to watch, and it’s particularly delightful now that he’s on a team that is absolutely not competing for a playoff spot this year.
Read the rest of this entry »