The Atlanta Braves made another fine-tuning move on Tuesday, bringing in veteran left-hander Brad Hand from Colorado in exchange for minor league right-hander Alec Barger. Hand joins his ninth big league club – his seventh since the pandemic-shortened 2020 season – where he’ll factor into a righty-heavy bullpen stocked with veterans. (With his latest relocation, Hand is a lock for the Immaculate Grid Hall of Fame, though Rich Hill was not to be outdone and found himself yet another team Tuesday afternoon.)

The Braves, who are just 7-8 since the All-Star break, already had significant pitching help coming by way of the injured list. They activated lefty A.J. Minter on Monday and stand to get Max Fried back soon, with Dylan Lee and Kyle Wright hopefully returning in the coming weeks as well. But Hand gives them another veteran option with just about every type of experience a relief pitcher can offer. After acquiring backup infielder Nicky Lopez – the third Lopez to get dealt at this year’s deadline – for the recently-acquired Taylor Hearn on Sunday, the Hand deal is another low-cost upgrade to a team that is fully intent on making a run at a championship this October. At season’s end, Hand and the Braves have what is now a $7 million mutual option for 2024, with a $500,000 buyout.

Hand’s 2023 isn’t particularly shiny, but some of that is the result of one particularly bad outing. He’s given up 18 earned runs in 35.2 innings over 40 outings, but four of those came on July 2, when he walked three and gave up a grand slam to Jake Marisnick in Denver. Take that line off his game log and he’d have a 3.63 ERA instead of his actual 4.54 mark (next to a 4.03 FIP and 4.07 xFIP), while his walk rate would drop from 10.2% to 8.7%. He’s pretty clearly not the same pitcher he was during an elite 2017-19 run that sent him to three straight All-Star Games, but he hasn’t lost much velocity since those days. His sweeper has been less effective than in previous years and is breaking less, though some of that difference may be a result of an uptick in velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

We all knew the Angels were desperate to add at the deadline. How desperate? Well, how desperate would you have to be to call your ex — two of your exes, actually — on a Sunday night?

The Halos continued their deadline restocking process by reacquiring a pair of their former first-round picks, Randal Grichuk and C.J. Cron, from Colorado in exchange for minor league pitchers Jake Madden and Mason Albright. (No, not the former secretary of state, but I’m gonna keep doing a double-take every time I see Albright’s name until well into his big league career.)

Every big league organization has its own special circumstances and cultural idiosyncrasies, but this trade brings together the two teams that have the best claim to being in unique situations. With Shohei Ohtani three months from free agency, the Angels sit four games out of a Wild Card spot with two teams to climb over. They face time pressure unlike anything most franchises have ever experienced. And the Rockies, well, are the Rockies. Read the rest of this entry »

Figuratively speaking, Bryce Elder is pitching well under par. In 21 starts for the Atlanta Braves, the 24-year-old right-hander is 8-2 with a 3.18 ERA. Killing worms is his M.O. Relying heavily on a modified two-seamer, Elder has a 53.6% ground-ball rate that ranks fifth-best among qualified hurlers. Earlier this month, he was named an N.L. All-Star in his first full big-league season.

When he’s not sinking fastballs, he’s sinking putts. Atlanta’s fifth-round pick in the 2020 draft, the University of Texas product is an accomplished golfer who shoots in the mid-to-low 70s. More on that in a moment.

Elder learned his sinker late in his freshman year of college. He’d thrown a four-seamer in high school, but lacking plus velocity — his heater was, and remains, in the 90-mph range — an adjustment was in order. His pitching coach showed him a one-seam grip, he threw a few off the mound, and the dividends soon became apparent.

The improvement was evident in the numbers. The Decatur, Texas native had a 5.55 ERA as a four-seam freshman. As a one-seam sophomore, he had a 2.93 ERA. As a junior — this in the truncated COVID season — that number was 2.08. Success in pro ball followed, but stagnation was never part of the plan. In a continued effort to get better, the righty subsequently tweaked his sinker grip. Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves made two minor moves on Monday to fill out their bullpen headcount, acquiring right-handed reliever Pierce Johnson from the Rockies and lefty reliever Taylor Hearn from the Rangers. Heading to Colorado are righty relief pitcher Victor Vodnik, our no. 13 Braves prospect a few months ago, and minor league starter Tanner Gordon. The return for Hearn is unknown as of press time, but it’s unlikely the Rangers will be getting a prospect of much significance.

The Rockies have traded RHP Pierce Johnson to the Braves for a pair of minor leaguers, per source.

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) July 24, 2023

If these turn out to be the biggest trades made over the last week of July, it would be a mighty disappointing deadline, but the Braves get what they wanted here. Their bullpen hasn’t exactly struggled this season — it’s second in FIP, WAR, and ERA — but adding a bit of depth while they still can has a lot of appeal to it. Through graduations and trades in recent years, the top of their farm system is kind of shallow at the moment, so internal reinforcements would be a bit trickier. Not helping matters is that they currently have five relievers on injured lists, four of them on the 60-day IL, and basically have no additional relievers on the 40-man roster left to call up in a pinch without shoving a starting pitcher in there.

Johnson is probably the safer bet of the two pickups, and I don’t necessarily mean to damn him with faint praise considering the season he’s had so far. Even in a Coors Field environment, an ERA of six is not what you like to see, and even the FIP in the mid-fours hardly screams “pitcher you’re going to use in high-leverage situations.” Johnson took over the closer role when Daniel Bard had to step away from baseball temporarily earlier this season. He only blew a couple of saves before losing the gig last month, but his walk rate this season — never his strength — led to a lot of adventures like you’d see from Fernando Rodney in a down year. Johnson’s saving grace, and almost certainly the reason the Braves valued him, is that he misses bats and throws hard; if carefully managed, he can be an asset to the ‘pen. Read the rest of this entry »

Jazz Chisholm and Jean Segura caught my attention while they were playing catch prior to a recent Miami Marlins road game at Fenway Park. Unlike their teammates, the duo was trading tosses underhand, windmilling their throws like fastpitch softball pitchers. Moreover, they looked good doing it. Their motions were smooth and easy, their deliveries firm and accurate. Having never seen professional baseball players do this, I was very much intrigued.

Standing nearby was Jennifer Brann. Now an analyst with the Marlins, Brann had excelled on the mound at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland prior to being hired by Miami two years ago. I asked her if she had seen them do so previously.

“I’ve seen Segura mess around a little bit, but I’d never seen Jazz pitch underhand like that,” Brann told me. “It was cool to watch. They knew what they were doing, especially Segura; he threw a rise ball and a changeup. But Jazz looked pretty good, too.”

The following day, I made it a point to approach both players in the clubhouse to find out if they had any softball experience. It turns out that they did.

“My grandma was a professional [fastpitch] softball player,” said Chisholm, who grew up in Nassau. “She played for the Bahamas National Team. That’s what really got me into baseball — I learned a lot of my baseball skills from softball — and she played until she was 60, too. She was just superhuman.”

Chisholm played fastpitch growing up, in part because the sport is played in Bahamian high schools, while baseball is not. (He did play Little League baseball.). Having attended a K-12, he began competing against upperclassmen as a sixth grader, both as a shortstop and a pitcher. Chisholm subsequently moved to the United States at age 12, thus ending his competitive softball days, Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third 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 I 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 »

Buck Farmer is flying under the radar while making an impact in Cincinnati. Baseball’s hottest team went into yesterday having won 12 straight games, and the 32-year-old reliever had pitched in seven of them. Moreover, the Reds had been victorious in 14 of the last 15 contests he’d appeared in. Over those outings, Farmer was credited with two wins and a save while allowing just a pair of runs in 15 innings.

He’s been solid from the start. On the season — his second in Cincinnati after eight in Detroit — the Conyers, Georgia native has held opposing hitters to a .188 average while logging a 2.41 ERA over a team-high 35 appearances. Consistently pounding the zone with a three-pitch mix, he’s issued just 10 free passes while fanning 33 batters in 37-and-a-third innings. By most statistical markers, he’s never been better.

Farmer credits Cincinnati’s pitching program for much of his success.

“I think it’s the development here,” Farmer replied when asked what differentiates his current and former clubs. “[The Tigers] were starting to change over to a more analytical approach before I left, but I don’t think they’d quite made that adjustment yet. When I came here, they were already tuned in. DJ {Derek Johnson] and the other coaches are fully invested in us. They want us to grab a little bit more here and there, and that includes taking what we’re good at and trying to make it great.”

For Farmer, that meant reworking a pitch that has become a lethal weapon. Augmented by a four-seam fastball and a changeup, his slider has flummoxed hitters to the tune of an .091 average and a .212 slug. His whiff-rate with the offering is a heady 45.3%. Read the rest of this entry »

Charlie Blackmon is heading down the home stretch of what has been a productive career with the Colorado Rockies. A little more than a week away from his 37th birthday and in his 13th season with the club that drafted him out of Georgia Tech in 2008, the left-handed-hitting outfielder has stroked 1,646 hits, 572 of which have gone for extra bases. Boasting a .296 career batting average — Coors Field has certainly benefitted him — he topped the Senior Circuit in that department in 2017, when he hit .331. Only Todd Helton has played more games in a Rockies uniform.

Blackmon, who is currently on the injured list with a fractured hand, sat down to talk hitting when Colorado visited Boston earlier this month.

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David Laurila: Prior to the 2017 season, I talked to you and one of your then-teammates for a piece titled “Charlie Blackmon and Chris Denorfia on Launch Angles.” What are your thoughts on that subject six years later?

Charlie Blackmon: ”Yeah, so launch angle is something people were really excited about a little while ago. I think that’s a way to reverse engineer a really good hit or a home run, right? It’s taking a dataset and saying, ‘Guys have a higher slugging percentage when they hit the ball in the air,’ and then basically find out that 31 degrees is their optimal angle. I mean, it’s like taking something you already knew was good and saying, ‘Well, now I’m going to try to hit it 31 degrees.’

“Adding lift to your swing is going to put the ball in the air, but I didn’t really like how people were going about it. Now I’m seeing that change. I think where the game is from a pitching perspective, even compared to five years ago, is very different. If you look across the league, I would bet that the amount of strikes thrown in the upper third of the zone has more than doubled. I would say that 70% of the pitchers in the league consistently throw high fastballs, whereas it wasn’t long ago that everybody was trying to throw down and away. There has been a big shift in pitching philosophy and fastball-location philosophy in the past few years.” Read the rest of this entry »

Games are shorter this season due to the pitch clock, which means that starting pitchers are usually throwing an outing’s worth of offerings in less time than they typically did in previous years. Whereas a quality start of seven innings and 100 pitches might have taken two hours and 15 minutes in the past — this before a call to the bullpen — it can take as little as an hour and 45 minutes in 2023. Those times will obviously vary, with the effectiveness of the opposing pitcher playing a major role, but the fact remains that such an outing now regularly takes place within a more condensed time frame.

How different is this for starting pitchers? Moreover, is throwing that number of innings and pitches in a narrower time frame harder, or is it actually easier? I’ve asked those questions to several pitchers since the start of the season, with their answers sometimes extending to other aspects of the new pitch clock. Here is what they’ve had to say.

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Shane Bieber, Cleveland Guardians: “Good question. To give you a real response on the impact… we’ll probably see at the end of the year after a great big body of work. Right? The number of quality starts, or whatever you want to call them. But for me, personally, I’m not finding much of a difference. I work pretty quick, especially without runners on. Last year, I think I was the second fastest without runners on base. Maybe the first. Wade Miley works extremely fast, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in March, I used the Rockies’ signing of Brad Hand as an entry point into an interesting trend: the Rockies were stockpiling soft-tossing lefties. A couple weeks later, I went to Scottsdale and talked to Austin Gomber. And now I’m writing about the Rockies’ pitching staff again. And not their erstwhile no. 1 starter (Kyle Freeland) nor their closer (Pierce Johnson) nor the guy who was supposed to be the closer (Daniel Bard) nor the hard-throwing setup guy with the goofy slider (Justin Lawrence). I’m writing about Brent Suter, another finesse lefty. The most soft-tossin’ lefthander in all the land, as a matter of fact.

Why? Because I can, mostly. If you’re tired of reading about the Rockies’ bullpen, write your Congressperson. They can’t stop me either. But also because Suter seems to have cracked it. This 33-year-old, whose fastball is so slow passing motorists would give it the finger for holding up traffic in parts of Texas, has been one of the best relief pitchers in baseball this year. Read the rest of this entry »