If the Braves Fail, It Will Be for the Right Reasons
KISSIMMEE, Fla. — Atlanta Braves president John Hart sports a tan this spring, which in itself isn’t particularly strange for someone in the baseball industry. In Hart’s case, the cause is the time he’s spent on the back fields, perhaps his favorite spot in the organization’s Disney-based complex. He rose to front-office prominence via an unorthodox path, having started on a managerial track in Baltimore until Hank Peters identified him as an executive candidate and brought him to Cleveland. He’s spent countless hours evaluating, coaching and encouraging on chain-link fields. It’s where the future is this time of year. But he also loves the back fields of the Braves’ complex this spring because of what he sees. It’s there where a small army of tall, lanky, projectable pitchers resides.
The Braves are the third franchise Hart is attempting to transform into a winner, and this rebuilding approach has been more pitching focused than his previous efforts in Cleveland and Texas. The Braves have four pitching prospects ranked in Baseball America’s top-100 rankings, five among Eric Longenhagen’s top 100, where two more just missed the cut in Sean Newcomb and Joey Wentz.
While the Braves have top-end positional prospects like Dansby Swanson (acquired via trade) and Ozzie Albies (signed by the previous regime), prospect talent acquired under Hart and general manager John Coppolella — particularly through the draft — has been pitching heavy.
I was curious to ask Hart about the subject after having interviewed him previously on the topic of the risk/reward dilemma presented by pitching prospects — particularly those drafted out of high school — back when Hart was an MLB Network analyst and I was a beat reporter covering the Pirates. At that time, I’d asked him about Pittsburgh’s Pitch-22 philosophy — i.e. the notion that most pitching prospects fail, but small- and mid-market teams must develop their own pitching.
The Pirates had made a historic commitment to pitching at the time. In three drafts from 2009 to -11, Pittsburgh expended 22 of their first 30 picks on pitchers. Seventeen were prep pitchers. The Pirates signed 18 of them to bonuses totaling $25.6 million.
Said Hart at the time:
“A truism is if you have 10, you can really count on two of them making it,” Hart said. “I came up in the (1980s) and never believed it. I said, ‘Come on, there can’t be that much attrition.’ Then bang: This guy gets hurt. This guy doesn’t develop a third pitch. … You can never have enough pitching.”
You Aren't a FanGraphs MemberIt looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member. 1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other. 2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off. 3. Dark mode and Classic mode! 4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them. 5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects. 6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.) 7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only. 8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO. 9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members. 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features! We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. In case you didn't read all that, here's the short version. Membership includes:✓Ad-free browsing✓Unlimited FanGraphs & RotoGraphs articles✓Historical & platoon projections✓Leaderboard & player-page stat heatmaps✓One-click data exports✓Customizable player-page dashboards✓Dark & Classic site modes✓Weekly Members-only mailbag✓FanGraphs Walk-Off, your year in review✓Optional homepage photo removal✓Gift articles to non-Members✓Full postseason coverage
Hart’s estimate is pretty much in line with the success rate for pitchers rated as 100 prospects.
Back in 2011, Scott McKinney of Royals Review researched the failure rates of top-100 prospects. In examining Baseball America’s top-100 rankings from 1990 to 2003, he classified 77.4% of top-100 pitching prospects as “busts,” pitchers that either failed to pitch in the majors or averaged less than 1.5 WAR per season in the highest level.
In 2013, Jon Shepherd conducted a similar study for Camden Depot, extending the period of BA’s top-100 prospect lists from 1990 to 2006. The bust rate for pitchers remained a nearly identical, 77.5%, and he found them to be a more risky demographic than compared to position players (66% bust rate). And even among the elite prospects, those ranking 1-20 on lists, he found pitchers were still more likely to fail (51.7% bust rate) than succeed.
Hart knows the risks, yet the Braves have adopted a pitching-heavy approach nonetheless.
All three of the Braves’ first-round picks during the Hart Era have been high-school pitchers. Twelve of their first 14 picks in the 2015 draft were pitchers, and seven of their first eight picks in 2016 were pitchers. I wrote about the Braves’ risk tolerance last month. So, last week, I was curious to learn more about their approach by speaking directly to the key actors involved.
“Part of the reason we focused on pitching is that you need a lot of pitching,” Hart told FanGraphs. “When you go to try and buy it in the market, in the long term, it’s just not really an effective use of your dollars. You start buying starters in their 30s coming out in free-agent market, and you start having extended years, it usually doesn’t end well… When it came time for us to draft or make trades, we felt the best available prospects we could get were pitchers. A lot of guys were position players that we sought after that [teams] wouldn’t trade in some of the deals. When we started doing this, it wasn’t like we had three or four years left on deals of players that were All-Stars. Other than Craig Kimbrel, we traded Jason Heyward and Justin Upton on one-year deals on last years of contracts.
“We are a little pitching-centric and those are the reasons why: it’s cost prohibitive in the market, the attrition rate of what it takes to get there, and ultimately what presented itself in drafts and trades.”
But part of the strategy is also perhaps because of a risk tolerance that is greater than that of most clubs. As Coppolella suggested from the Champion Stadium dugout as the Braves took batting practice last week — a passerby joking about his heavy volume of trades — the Braves appear to be one of the least risk-fearing teams in the industry.
“If we are going to be wrong, we are going to be wrong for the right reasons,” Coppolella said. “We want to fail for the right reasons. You want to fail with upside guys… We have to take some risks. We don’t have as large a market, or the same TV deals, or the same revenues, as teams like New York, Washington and Philadelphia. So if we win, it will be about taking chances on guys with upside.”
Not only have the Braves taken pitchers early and often in drafts, Coppolella notes the Braves have taken the youngest pitchers on the board. The Braves’ 2015 first-rounders, Kolby Allard and Mike Soroka, were 17 at the time of the draft. Rany Jazayerli found back in 2011 for Baseball Prospectus that younger prospects in the draft tend to perform better as professionals.
“We’ve really tried to exploit that,” Coppolella said. “We draft guys that have room to grow, not the finished off college guy. If it’s Kris Bryant, I get it, but many of the best players never make it to college especially with new slotting rules.
“That nice analytics guy you take at the end of the first round, let’s call it what it is… you are going with a lot of safe college picks.”
A player with a higher floor but a lower ceiling.
It’s not just in the draft where the Braves have embraced risk. Consider the Justin Upton trade in December of 2014. The No. 1 asset for which the Braves asked in the returning package was pitching prospect Max Fried, a former first-rounder, who had Tommy John surgery several months prior to the trade.
I asked Hart about taking on that level of risk, not only a recent high-school pitcher, but one whose left elbow had been repaired.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” said Hart from a golf cart, situated near the batting cage covering the home plate area. That was a Hart-ism for saying he fully embraces risk.
“You don’t want to be crazy, don’t want to shoot from the hip,” Hart said of taking on risk, “but we did analytics on it, we did scouting reports on it. All the cadre of guys we have working in the front office worked on this deal, as well as the scouts. We went for the upside guy.
“We bought the player, we believe in [him]. We did a lot of research on the surgery. We know who did the work. We felt he had the most upside. We could have traded for two or three guys in that deal, but we took Fried as the lead player. How is it looking right now?”
It’s looking quite good.
Max Fried w a K in the 4th. He strikes out 2 in the inning. Game remains tied 1-1. #romebraves pic.twitter.com/LCtQPdGZxO
— Rome Emperors (@GoEmperors) September 11, 2016
“I think it’s instructive if you look at the Justin Upton trade,” Coppolella said. “Part of the catch in getting Max Fried is that he was hurt. He was going to be out for all of 2015 with Tommy John surgery. Could we have gotten him if he was healthy? Probably not. We kind of went with upside. We didn’t know if he would get back all the way. But we want to fail for the right reasons. That was a leap of faith that we took. What if it breaks again? Should we go with this guy? Well, we went with upside. The biggest thing for me personally is process over outcome.”
The Upton package also included Mallex Smith – flipped for Mariners pitching prospect Luiz Gohara this offseason – and second baseman Jace Peterson and cash savings. Coppolella said they used the cash savings to acquire pitching prospect Touki Toussaint from Arizona by taking on the contract of Bronson Arroyo, Coppolella described the deal as an “NBA-style” trade.
The Braves are well aware that not every pitcher will work out, with Coppolella citing Manny Banuelos as an arm the club acquired but who had faltered. And while the Braves are aware of the industry’s pitching attrition rate, they are also hopeful they can beat it — or at least create the depth that will produce multiple, quality controllable rotation arms.
“We feel that depth is going to go,” Hart said. “I don’t know that I’m quite as stringent on, you know, it takes 10 to get two. But, again, until these guys get here, we’ll see.”
While the idea that a club can beat historical attrition rates when it comes to pitching prospects seems to contain the perils of hubris, Hart said the club has focused on size and delivery in scouting. They’ve targeted prep pitchers in part because they have less wear and tear than a college arm, and they will better know their history compared to a college arm. They drafted a cold-weather arm in Ian Anderson with the third-overall pick last June.
“We didn’t do Jonny Venters, Brandon Beachy and Kris Medlen any favors in rushing them back from Tommy John surgery,” Coppolella said. “Beachy came back nine months. His first pitch was 95 and his last pitch was 81. He hasn’t really been back since… We don’t want guys back in 10 months or 12 months. We want to try and extend it to 15-18. Give them flexibility.”
Coppolella also believes, and rightfully so, that it’s easier to trade from a surplus of pitching than one of position players. So while Hart’s first two successful rebuilding projects in Cleveland and Texas were largely built around position players, the Braves have been nimble and have adopted for this pitching focus due to attrition, market conditions, and a greater willingness to take a risk. Said Coppolella: “We feel like we’ve done all that we could to put the Braves in the best spot possible.”
And if the Braves’ bet on pitching works, perhaps that spot will perhaps soon be at the top of the NL East.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
The Process, Part 2: We Want To Fail For The Right Reasons
Yeah, the whole, If we fail we want to fail because we stuck to our philosophy, does not imbue me with confidence in their rebuild.
I guess that depends on whether you think the philosophy is sound or not.
I’ve had my doubts. As others have mentioned, their infatuation with high risk high upside pitching prospects is not a philosophy I care for. The Braves need to hit on too many prospects to be playing fast and loose with those kinds of odds.
I think it’s sound. It would have been nice if there had maybe been a couple more position prospects, but as they noted, they weren’t going to take position prospects just for the sake of it; they had to be both available and worth it.
I hope some of these high-upside prospects pan out, and given the performance of many of them, particularly at lower levels, it seems like there is a good shot. But the idea of overloading the cupboard to account for prospect attrition generally, and pitcher attrition specifically, is definitely a good one.
All you can do is stick to your philosophy. What is the alternative? Changing directions every year or trying to replicate something that already happened. Those are far worse ideas!
This reminded me of Cam Cameron, which made me laugh: http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-preseason/09000d5d80154651/Cameron-Fail-Forward-Fast
This article conspicuously leaves out the Andrelton Simmons trade. He was another cost controlled position player signed to a multi-year deal well below market value. And all we got back for him was Sean Newcomb, a pitcher with the upside of a glorified swing-man. Nice work there Coppy.
A glorified swing-man? Perhaps you don’t understand upside. Newcomb’s upside is probably a #2 starter. A 55 FV prospect who pushes up near triple digits from the left side, has a good slider and average change. He just needs control to come along, and that’s usually the last thing to develop for pitching prospects. They also acquired Chris Ellis, who was more highly thought of at the time of the trade. Chris Ellis was then sent with Luke Dykstra to the Cardinals for Jaime Garcia. The Simmons trade wasn’t a banner trade, but as the article says, they went after upside. Newcomb’s upside is pretty great, considering how few LHP have that kind of arm.
I understand upside. But I have watched Newcomb pitch and maintain that his upside is that of a Bullpen arm or possible swing-man. If someone else thinks his upside is a number 2 starter, I generally think they are wrong.
Was, not is. At roughly the time of the trade, Newcomb was rated the 19th best prospect in baseball by MLB.com and 24th by Baseball America. Fast forward to their most recent lists where Newcomb ranks 80th and 78th respectively. I said here at the time of the trade that Newcomb could be viewed as a left-handed Archie Bradley and that looks to be largely the case given that he has well below average command and no reliable third pitch. His change is definitely not “average,” and his breaking ball is a curveball rather than a slider.
There is absolutely zero truth to this statement.
The Simmons trade was idiotic, and many said so at the time. I can’t include the links because that freaks out this site’s spam filter, but if you search the titles then you’ll see the articles being quoted. And note that these comments were from the time of the trade when Newcomb was much more highly regarded than he is now.
FanGraphs: Best Transactions of the 2016 Off-Season – “This summer, I ranked Andrelton Simmons as the 30th most valuable trade chips in all of MLB; a few months later, he was traded for a high-risk pitching prospect and an average player in the final year of his contract. Certainly, teams don’t pay for defensive excellence like they do for offense, but no one questions Simmons’ value in the field, and despite the truth that defense peaks early, previous defenders at this level have proven to be quite valuable even as they age. This is the kind of return that you’d expect for a short-term upgrade, but Simmons is signed through 2020 at below-market rates, giving the Angels some real value even beyond 2016. The fact that no one else stepped up to outbid the Angels suggests that the league doesn’t place as high a value on Simmons as the public does, or maybe the industry thinks we’re selling Sean Newcomb short, but from my perspective, the Angels added one of the best shortstops in baseball for a pitcher with a high likelihood of failure.”
FanGraphs: Angels Acquire Andrelton Simmons – “Last year, throughout the minors, 578 pitchers threw at least 100 innings. Newcomb had the eighth-highest walk rate. Ellis was 47th, his rate spiking in Double-A. Right there, you get the message — pitchers good enough to be drafted high, but pitchers with real bouts of wildness. They obviously can’t be written off or anything, but it’s easy to understand the optimism and the skepticism.” Also, the overwhelming consensus in the comments section indicated that this was a clear win for the Angels.
FanGraphs: Projecting the Prospects in the Andrelton Simmons Trade – Pretty depressing Mahalanobis comps for Newcomb along with a disappointing KATOH projection.
Washington Post: Why Would the Braves Trade Andrelton Simmons? – “Simmons, as long as he continued to play elite defense, seemed affordable: $6 million in 2016, increasing annually to $8 million, $11 million, $13 million and finally that $15 million in 2020. With revenues and salaries increasing every year – and with the Braves set to move into a new suburban ballpark in 2017, $15 million could well seem like a bargain for a linchpin shortstop.
Isn’t that the kind of player the Braves are going to try to find once they are ready to win again (presuming that they will be)? (Only slightly related: What the heck were the Braves doing signing Nick Markakis last offseason?)
So the gold, for the Braves, must lie in the pitching prospects. And the concern about Newcomb is obvious: In 150-1/3 professional innings, he has 82 walks. (Even in college, at the University of Hartford, he walked 75 in 165 innings.) One scout’s evaluation: “Newcomb will always be a high-pitch-count starter who will end up in the pen because he doesn’t throw quality strikes even though he can touch 96 [mph] and he’s left-handed.”
This, then, would not be the kind of player for which you part with Andrelton Simmons.”
SBNation: Andrelton Simmons Trade Reaction – “What it looks like from here, though, was that the Braves traded a rare, generational defender under team control for the next five seasons for a couple of pitching prospects. Did the Braves get more than the A’s got for three months of Scott Kazmir? Probably. But the fact that we’re asking this question suggests they got an ordinary return for an extraordinary player.”
MILB: Making Sense of the Andrelton Simmons Deal – “Conclusion: Using these figures, to make this trade even, we’d have to take Simmons at his lowest projection and the group of Aybar, Newcomb and Ellis at their highest projections. Every other scenario has the Angels looking like bandits.”
Sean Newcomb is a 50 fv if you go by this site and unless by upside you mean absolute ceiling, I think you are over on that. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/top-32-prospects-atlanta-braves/
“…while my pre-draft projections for him (I thought he had a No. 2 ceiling) have become an unlikely pipedream.”
“He just needs his control to come” will be the Sean Newcomb story when he is 30. The likelihood he is more than a backend starter/relief arm given age and command/control is slim. ATL has done some good things for sure but this trade was a dud
Command is usually the issue that takes a meh arm to being rotation-worthy. Road is littered with failed pitchers that “all they needed was to harness their pitches”.
It annoys me to no end that Forearm’s comment above currently has a +10 rating given that it is blatantly false on several counts. There could be no better example of how utterly useless this rating system is.
I understand what you’re saying. And I agree that right now, the Simmons trade doesn’t look good. However, given Coppy’s continual emphasis on upside, I don’t know how much sense it makes to grade each individual deal. By nature, the prospects with upside will also have a higher bust rate. So there will undoubtedly be deals that he loses. The hope is that the acquired prospects that “hit” their upside ceiling produce wins big enough to offset the losses. It’s obviously too early to really tell if that will be the case.
Again, I’m not saying that the package that he got for Simmons was the right one. Just that by chasing upside like this, I think a higher percentage of trades will look lopsided on both sides at the end of the day. So I think it makes more sense to just evaluate his deals as a whole.
How much would your opinion on his trades change if he had gotten a realistic return for Miller and not have had Dave Stewart to take advantage of?
It’s easy to say that you should just look at them all together, but (at least imo) that doesn’t give a very good idea of how they’ve been. It’s like looking at a shortish career with one big outlier season.
Praise be to Dave Stewart.
As for your question, I think he’s only made two stinkers, and they were stinky, the Olivera trade, and the Simmons trade.
But he has made mostly “good” trades, some are on the smaller side, but they’ve mostly been good: Demeritte, Gohara, Touki, Gattis, Miller (obviously), his first trade of Kelly Johnson, probably a couple others.
There’s also been a couple “ugh, what ever” trades: Kemp, Garcia, Phillips (this one doesn’t really mean much because they gave up literally nothing).
The Kimbrel trade looks pretty meh to bad in retrospect.
Am I missing any? There’s my unsolicited opinion on the matter anyway.
Travis talked about it a lot in the post, but the J. Upton trade looks pretty great right now.
The Upton and Heyward trades were gold. He got incredible value for corner outfielders with one year of control, even if they were stars.
Man, that Kimbrel trade looks awful to me. It looked awful to me at the time, and it looks worse now. The Olivera one was even worse. But I don’t think the Simmons trade was really *that* bad.
Sean Newcomb was an older draftee that couldn’t throw strikes when they traded a stud shortstop for him. That trade was always a poor idea.
This article also leaves out analysis of the Heyward trade, in which Atlanta exchanged one year of Heyward for what eventually became one year of good Shelby Miller, Dansby Swanson, Ender Inciarte, Aaron Blair, and Tyrell Jenkins.
Okay, it’s pretty bad and I agree with everyone the trade didn’t age well but I disagree that it was such a terrible idea at the time. You would have thought that they could have gotten more for Simmons but it’s been weirdly hard to trade shortstops for top-flight players these days. I just looked up the teams SS production in 2015, and I am not sure they would have gotten a better offer.
-They already took everything from the Padres in other deals
-The D’Backs already traded for Segura, and the Rays traded for Brad Miller.
-The A’s had just made Semien the centerpiece of a trade the prior offseason.
-The Brewers, Rockies, Mariners, Dodgers, and Nationals had young guys they didn’t want to block.
-The Reds and Phillies were rebuilding.
-The Cards probably thought Peralta would bounce back, and the Orioles probably thought Hardy would bounce back (and if they didn’t they had Machado). The Rangers had Andrus and Profar.
-The Twins terrible WAR for that year was entirely due to Danny Santana
-The Royals probably should have tried to trade for Simmons but their farm system was just as bad as LA’s.
So maybe the Braves should have just hung on to Simmons, but I don’t think there was another, better deal out there. There seems to be a disconnect right now between the supply of good hitters who can play shortstop and the positional adjustment WAR is using. And, for that matter, even if they got robbed they lucked into Swanson and they wouldn’t have had a spot for him if they hadn’t traded Simmons. So it didn’t hurt them that much.
Does the name Alex Anthopoulos ring a bell. This “process” sounds familiar
As a life long Braves fan, I haven’t been the biggest fan of Coppy. Yes, he appears to have the minor league teams heading in the right direction, but he accomplished this fete through a combination of strip-mining the Major League squad until it was a bottom 3 team in baseball, and lucking into a Dave Stewart in the middle of a stroke. Without Dave Stewart’s issues, the Braves are still easily 4 years away from a competitive season. GMs that can only build a decent minor league pipeline by having the Big league team tank for several consecutive years don’t really impress me.
But they DID make the trade with Dave Stewart. Does that mean nothing to you? They signed arguably the best international FA class in 2016, including the consensus #1 overall international prospect, who is touted as the best international talent since Miguel Sano.
As Hart said previously of the rebuild, “We didn’t tear apart the ’27 Yankees.” This is true. They tore apart a 79 win team with valuable players that they weren’t going to pay beyond 2015. If anything, I would have liked to see what the Braves could have netted by trading Kimbrel without Melvin Upton’s contract attached. If they were in the position to take on money in order to acquire prospects, imagine the haul they could have received for Kimbrel by not attaching him to an expensive nothing. All of the other trades have been really, really sound.
I disagree. There is the previously mentioned Simmons trade and you seem to have conveniently forgotten the ill-conceived Hector Olivera trade. And yes, I know the 2014 Braves were not the ’27 Yankees. But they broke them apart because they didn’t feel like paying market value for the core of that team, and they made this decision immediately after convincing Cobb County to give them a lot of money for their stadium. Tax payers payed them a chunk of cash and they repayed them by tanking for the next two years. I normally wouldn’t bring up this point, but Coppy does the whole crying poor bit in this very article.
Good point. Even I forgot about the Peraza + Wood for Olivera deal.
A ton of teams wanted Olivera and the Dodgers paid a huge amount for him. No doubt it was a bad trade but that is almost entirely hindsight.
If Olivera had been only a 2 WAR player it would’ve been a huge coup because he was only 6 mil per year for like 5 or 6 years. Heck, that’s below market for a 1 WAR player.
Peraza is over-hyped because he’s way more valuable in fantasy than he is irl. He’s looking like a good player but if he had been a great commodity at the time, he wouldn’t have been traded twice. (His ceiling isn’t very high).
The Braves moved Wood because they feared his delivery would result in injury and he only threw 60 innings last year.
Alex Wood and Jose Peraza should provide more than 2 WAR at a combined salaries lower than Hector Olivera this year, and they aren’t in their early 30s. The only way that deal worked out for the Braves was if Olivera was a 3 WAR third baseman. He wasn’t even a third baseman!
Not to mention that if he was a 3-WAR third baseman, his best seasons would have been 2016 and 2017, when nobody outside of possibly the Braves front office thought they would be any good. It was a win-now trade for a win-later team, and as such, didn’t make a lick of sense. The fact that they whiffed so badly on their evaluation of Olivera just made it worse, but it looked iffy from the start.
v2micca is getting relentlessly downvoted, but I agree with most of what he says about the Simmons and Olivera deals. Simmons wasn’t a guy on a one-year deal approaching free agency. Neither were Wood or Peraza. Those were guys with lots of team control at relatively cheap prices. Converting a good surefire long-term asset like Simmons into yet another risky pitching prospect doesn’t make much sense, even if in general prioritizing pitching in the draft and trades does (I’m still not sure about this, but I at least think it’s a defensible strategy.)
This is such a heavy handed take, no offense.
Coppy made that Stewart deal, meaning, he negotiated it. Sure, there was an element of luck but you act like it was entirely that.
Anyone who has played a lot of fantasy baseball, or heck, negotiated deals on *anything* realizes that fleecing other owners is absolutely a matter of skill. There is no guarantee whatsoever that a different GM would’ve gotten as much as Coppy did from Stewart. If you’re going to bash his bad moves (which is fair game) you have to give credit for the good ones and not just call them luck or a stroke, or a stroke of luck.
“There is no guarantee whatsoever that a different GM would’ve gotten as much as Coppy did from Stewart.”
Sure, that’s true. Of course, outside of Dave Stewart, Coppy doesn’t have much history of fleecing other GMs. While there is no guarantee that another GM could have extracted as much as Coppy from Stewart, there is absolutely a guarantee that no other GM would have given up what Stewart did for Miller. The return from the Miller deal represents basically 2/3 of the Braves current position players that are worth mentioning. It was a gift, and it probably had more to do with the Stewart and LaRussa’s well-documented incompetence than it did with Coppy’s genius.
Coppy has done a lot of good things as the Braves GM, and you can definitely say that he’s not afraid to make a mistake, but as far as his trades go, they haven’t been great, overall. The Kemp, Simmons, and Olivera deals all look pretty bad. The Kimbrel deal has looked much worse in hindsight. Even the Gattis deal doesn’t look like a big win, though I do think the Braves came out ahead in that one. The deal for Justin Upton looks better now than it did at the time, given Fried’s development. There are some smaller wins in there, too. Touissaint (again, Dave Stewart doing something that nobody quite understood), Demeritte, and Gohara all look like good deals now. Still, it’s a really mixed bag when it comes to trades, with more bad than good among the high-profile deals (again, excluding the Miller deal), and Dave Stewart and the Miller deal have saved Coppy’s trade results from being much worse.
Of note: John Coppolella wasn’t promoted to GM until October 1, 2015.
The Kimbrel deal was not him. The Olivera trade was not him. The Simmons trade WAS him, but so was the Shelby Miller trade.
I think the organization lost a lot of ground by hesitating to commit to Coppy as the GM rather than an assistant. They basically had to lure John Hart out of retirement (he didn’t exactly want to be a GM anymore), and Coppy was forced to wait another year for…. probably no good reason. Hart was fairly new to the Atlanta front office at that point, and I don’t know that his vision was clear or concise as sound as Coppy’s. Basically, they couldn’t make up their mind, and I think it cost them in a few instances. I’m sure Coppy had a lot to do with the decision making process while Hart was technically the GM, but in the end, Coppy wasn’t the one pulling the trigger.
Coppy was still the architect of the rebuild even if he didn’t have the title. John Hart was there to veto him every now and then, but Coppy has been an instrumental part of every deal since Frank Wren was fired.
There are people who are skilled at negotiating, certainly, but in my experience the far bigger factor in lopsided deals is that one party has absolutely no clue how to value their assets properly rather than a competent individual being talked into a swindling.
A comment just totally lacking any context whatsoever.
“strip-mining the [sub .500] Major League squad [whose 2 best players were pending FA and whose minor league system was already bottom 3] until it [moved from a bottom half to] a bottom 3 team in baseball [with a top 3 minor league system].”
The pitching heavy strategy and some of the deals are certainly open to question. You can disagree about how good the system is (but not that it is at least pretty good). But wherever the Braves would be without Dave Stewart, they’d be worse without the rebuild.
“GMs that can only build a decent minor league pipeline by having the Big league team tank for several consecutive years don’t really impress me.”
This completely ignores the fact that only 4 of the current top 32 prospects and not 1 current ML SP or position player was an inherited prospect when Coppy took over. The system was a shambles, that was already negatively affecting the ML team.
Even ignoring the fact you call it a “decent” pipeline that assumes it isn’t possible they would be “decent” without the rebuild.
Nevermind the fact that 4 the top 10 (Allard, Maitan, Soroka, Pache) Coppy got without the benefit of the rebuild (all based draft picks or international spots based on 2014 record, other than Maitan for whom the international slots didn’t matter). Weigel, Demeritte, Minter, Cruz, Severino, Dylan Moore, Jonathan Morales, Randy Ventura, all were gotten by Coppy aside from the rebuild. Plus the 2016 comp picks he’d have gotten for Heyward/Upton, and whatever he’d have taken with the other 2016 picks picking 15ish instead of 3rd.
Without the trades they’d have been a mediocre major league team, would still be getting worse, and would have a pretty good young farm system and wouldn’t have ANY help coming until 2019ish (by which time Kimbrel & Gattis would be gone anyway).
The different in the rebuild is system depth and near to the majors players, some of whom may be pretty good (plus Ender and Swanson).
But at least they might have won 85 games in 2015 and maybe 75 or 80 in 2016.
Long story short, you can hate on the rebuild methods, but Frank Wren is why the team sucks right now. Coppy just made it suck a little more and get better a lot sooner. Would someone have done better? I’m sure Coppy isn’t the World’s Best GM, so sure. Has it been successful so far? The early ML results have been mediocre to bad aside from Ender/Dansby, but the vast majority of it is still pending.
I just looked up Jonny Venters, and I didn’t realize that he hasn’t pitched in the majors for 5 years. And he has had 4 TJ surgeries. Damn.
If they fail it will be because they underrated the value of defense, the value of pitcher control, and misevaluating players from outside the Diamondbacks trade. No right or wrong way to fail. It’s arguable that Dave Stewart alone may have made it like 20% higher chance that the Braves plan works
There’s a lot of people annoyed about the Braves commenting here. Let’s look at some of the trades they’ve done:
1) Heyward and Jordan Walden for Shelby Miller, Tyrell Jenkins
2) Shelby Miller for Inciarte, Swanson, Blair
3) Alex Wood and Jose Peraza and Jim Johnson for Hector Olivera
4) Justin Upton for Max Fried, Mallex Smith, Jace Peterson
5) Kimbrel and BJ Upton for Matt Wisler, Cameron Maybin, and a draft pick used on Austin Riley
6) Simmons for Aybar/Newcomb
7) Gattis for Foltynewicz, Rio Ruiz
8) Touissant for a bunch of money
Trading away Heyward and Justin Upton were great moves with only one year left on their contracts, and they got a ton of value back. Trading away Miller was a heist. Touissant was a gift, I don’t know how the Braves lucked into that.
The Wood/Peraza trade for Olivera was a disaster. They gave up Kimbrel to dump Upton’s contract and get Wisler which looks terrible on all fronts now that Kimbrel was traded for double the return a year later, Upton’s a semi-useful player, and Wisler’s future is iffy.
Simmons for Aybar/Newcomb or something like it probably had to happen to clear room for Swanson, although it looked better before Newcomb had another year where he couldn’t hit the strike zone and I think they traded Simmons before getting Swanson. Gattis for Folty depends on what you think Folty’s future will be. It seemed reasonable at the time but looks iffy in hindsight.
So basically, trading away corner outfielders with one year left on their contracts was really well-executed, trading with Dave Stewart was excellent for them, and they’ve made some really questionable decisions trading away controllable pitching. It’s great that they’re stocking up heavily on young pitchers but they seem to have undervalued some of the ones they already had.
From what I can find, they traded simmons in november and acquired swanson in december so it looks like you are correct that they traded simmons before acquiring swanson.
They did have Albies then, though.
Yeah, and Albies looked (and still looks) awesome. I like him over Swanson, although I can’t tell how much of that is because he’s such a unique player.
You are forgetting trading Oliver’s for Kemp where they could have just released Olivera and not had a ageing bad player in COF
The Kemp trade wasn’t bad because he’s a FA after 2019 and even if the Braves are actually good in 2019 they won’t have many financial commitments so it’s not going to matter.
I wouldn’t call it a “good” trade but they gave up nothing and that money wouldn’t have been spent elsewhere so it’s just a big shrug with a little bit of upside.
Yeah I would not have done that. Kemp is awful. They just wanted a guy who hit home runs because homers put butts in the seats. Maybe they saw it as a buy low opportunity but 8.5 mil for 3 years is too much for me to “buy low.”
Don’t forget we also got Dustin Peterson in the J. Upton trade, and there is a decent chance he turns into a pretty good player.
I think Gattis for Folty is likely to work out in the Braves favor. He seems to be at worst a back end starter with five more years of team control.
I actually really like Folty. Sullivan wrote a really good piece on him and his command, and I think he’s looking like a really good get. Someone pointed out to me earlier that last year he was less than a year removed from thoracic outlet syndrome surgery. He’s got a real chance to be good. Of all the trades, he’s probably the piece I like the most. Even more than Swanson, who I irrationally dislike because he’s not Bregman (I am not justified in this).
Excellent piece
The Braves front office is constantly saying that “you can’t have enough pitching”. But they are failing to realizing that you can have too little hitting. To develop a true contender a team needs good pitching, good hitting AND good fielding. The Braves are moving in the right direction, but the system still has major weaknesses. They have no good catchers at any level. It’s questionable if any of their third baseman will develop into good major leaguers. If Freddie Freeman gets hurt, they have no one behind him at any level. They have one good outfield prospect. They lack power hitting at every level. I’m sure the Braves will have a top flight major league pitching staff in a couple years, but whether they will have enough hitting to contend remains a serious question.
I agree with everything else you said, but I don’t even think they will have a top pitching staff. While the quotes from John Hart correctly note that pitching prospects are inherently more risky than hitting prospects, they don’t acknowledge that some pitching prospects are even more risky than others. Anderson, Fried, Newcomb, and Touisaint struggle to throw strikes, and no pitching prospect profile has been more consistently overrated than the guy with potentially great stuff and no idea where it’s going. Allard looks like a relatively safe middle of the rotation guy and Soroka should become a decent 4th/5th starter, but after them you have a ton of question marks. Fried is someone I’m cautiously optimistic about and Anderson still has plenty of projection, but in my opinion the Braves do not have a top ten collection of pitching prospects. Swanson, Albies, and Maitan are the strength of their system.
Yeah. I don’t understand where the idea that they’re just going to be able to fill out their rotation with solid pitchers (I’ve seen fans comment that ‘#2s as the worst case scenario’) comes from.
The fv of all of these pitchers pegs them as middle of the rotation at best (55FV = #3/4). So not only would you be betting on beating the attrition rate of 75% (you need 3+ pitchers to fill out the rotation and they don’t have 10 top 100 pitchers), but you’d also be betting on the fact that those that do beat that would exceed their FV likely outcomes and instead of putting up that 2-2.5ish WAR level, they’d be pushing towards 4.
It is extremely rare to get a system to produce 3+ high quality pitchers at the same time. I think the Mets are probably the best example of this, but even they’d fall short of the idea of filling it out with #2 types.
What I find really interesting about Hart’s comments is that they appear to be focused intently on decreasing the risk of pitcher injuries (“focused on size and delivery,” prep arms with “less wear and tear”) while not paying much attention to performance risk factors. There’s not a ton of use in having a healthy pitcher if he can’t throw strikes.
They’ve also gone after pitchers with previous injuries. And the #1 predictor of future injuries is past injury.
I don’t understand where this idea that the system is super light on hitting comes from. Even excluding Swanson, the Braves have four top 110 bats (Albies, Acuna, Maitan, and Pache). I don’t think it’s hard to imagine Acuna and Albies as both top-20 in mid-season lists, either, with Maitan not far behind. How many systems can even top just those 4 guys?
The acquisition process for the top hitting prospects in the system hasn’t been as notable as that for the pitchers, but it’s foolish to assume they aren’t there just because you might not have heard of them.
Albies has a strong hit tool but no power while Acuna has a good but lesser hit tool with some power, yet a decent portion of value for both comes from their defensive abilities. Pache’s value is even more heavily on the defensive side. As Robert said, aside from Maitan there are not any future major league corner outfielders, corner infielders, or catchers in this system. You can only sign the guys you can sign, so that’s not necessarily something the Braves did wrong, but it’s a fair concern. Fortunately it looks like the type of bat-first player they don’t have is becoming much less expensive to acquire.
Maybe they’re counting on building their lineup through free agency. Money saved on young pitching can be spent on not-as-young hitting. Perhaps they take a run at Harper/Machado/Donaldson/Blackmon/Dozier/Pollock after 2018?
The main question is how quickly/well Maitan moves, because I could see them making a major run at Machado if they aren’t convinced by Maitan. I would definitely make a big run at Harper if I were the Braves. He’ll put people in the seats and is pretty young at that, and they might even be good enough to go for a wild-card spot by then.
Liberty Media isn’t spending enough for any of those guys, but as mentioned above, the depressed market for bat-first players does play into the Braves’ hands.
“While the idea that a club can beat historical attrition rates when it comes to pitching prospects seems to contain the perils of hubris…”
How does that apply to the Braves? They’re openly aware that they are going to fail 8/10 times on prospects like this. Hart even says so in the quote before that line in the post.
“I don’t know that I’m quite as stringent on, you know, it takes 10 to get two”
Not quite as stringent… Sounds like he’s thinking 10 might get 3 or 2.5. Not exactly a big difference.
He’s saying there might be some wiggle room on those percentages by employing certain strategies. He might be right, we really don’t have the info to challenge it.
That’s your interpretation from not being privy to the actual conversation that took place and thus without context. Even ignoring that, 2.5 or 3 is better than 2 from 10, which would be beating historical attrition rates. This is literally what it says.
It will be interesting to see how they address their outfield when Kemp and Markakis are out of the picture. Not much talent on the farm in that area.
There will always be bad and old outfielders out there. Maybe they go after Gerardo Parra (assuming his option is declined)
They are pinning their hopes on Pache and Alcuna right now. Like I said, the Braves need a lot of prospects to turn out for them.
So, they’re pinning their hopes on a top-50 guy and an 18 year old that just missed the top 100. What would a system with good outfield prospects look like?
I wasn’t bagging on Pache and Alcuna. I actually like both of them quite a lot. Just acknowledging the inherent risk in both players as they are still reasonably far away from being big league ready. We need both of these guys to pan out as the Braves currently don’t have a ton of good options behind them.
A mixture of low lvl and close to mlb players with a mixture of high floor vs. high ceiling players. I get it that that’s easier said than done, but that’d be my example of what a team with good outfield prospects look like. It’s nice to dream on upside, but on it’s own, it’s not a very good plan for success.
If those two work out, that’s great, but what is the realistic success rate of those types of OF prospects when you take their age into account? It helps to have some pretty decent floor players who can cover your ass if one of those two should bust. Those type of players aren’t sexy at all, but they’re very useful in filling in a team. Just look at the cardinals over the years. They have been great at filling in holes with young players who are good enough.
And if you are expecting to hit on both of these ofs, what is the probability of that occurring. They bust out at like 60% or so? So you’re looking at less than a 20% chance that they are both successful? It’s low. I think that’s v2micca’s point.
Coppy said they won’t drop major FA dollars on a #1 SP, but he didn’t rule out spending big on a bat unless I missed it.
What kind of puff piece BS is this? There is no “right” or “wrong” way to win in MLB, cut this corny bullcrap out. It’s all luck – and the Braves got lucky with Dave Stewart seemingly wanting to go out of his way to make them good by sending them all his top draft picks for not a lot of value in return.
Less Travis Sawchik posts please, fangraphs.
I don’t like the title either, primarily because I don’t think Hart’s avowed approach is “right,” but your first and last sentences were out of line.
Don’t like it? Don’t read it and leave it for us that truly appreciate the addition of Travis.
iVaya con dios!
So the Braves can hope to be like the Mets without being able to afford Cespedes?
Not quite. The Met’s pitching staff is a pretty unrealistic expectation from the Brave’s collection of pitching prospects. I think the ceiling for this group may be matching the Cardinals minus Alex Reyes.
No, the hope for this group rests on Freeman being able to continue to pump out 4+ fWAR seasons into his mid 30’s, Enciarte hitting enough while maintaining elite defense, Swanson and Albies becoming a solid combination up the middle and at least two more position prospects developing into above average major league players.
That should give the Bravos about a 4 year contention window before Coppy and Hart blow it up again as they seem incapable of maintaining a minor league pipeline without tanking.
This is just wrong. When has Coppy blown up a minor league pipeline before? The answer is never.
When he took over our farm was garbage. There was nothing to blow up, and he wasn’t a GM before that.
having a GM (Edit: President) that “fully embraces risk” should scare the hell out of Braves fans.
Value is found by mitigating risk, not absorbing it.
I disagree. Value is found where the risk/reward calculation at the marketplace level is incorrect and you can buy low or sell high on an asset that is improperly valued in the market. The Braves clearly think the true future value (including risk) of the pitching prospects they have acquired is higher than their perceived future value (including risk). You can argue whether they are correct or not, but embracing/absorbing risk makes a ton of sense if the price is right.
I agree entirely.
But you really think that in an industry where hundreds of millions of dollars hinge on the health of a single UCL ligament that risk is undervalued?
I am a Braves fan, and I like John Coppolella in particular, so my eyes are wide open to my potential bias here. BUT, I just don’t see how anyone can condemn the Braves “build around pitching” philosophy. I certainly see how the individual trades could face scrutiny as I don’t agree with a few myself even as a fan of this front office, but here are a few things I think need to be more fully considered/explored before saying it is a poor philosophy with such certainty:
1. We don’t see the inner workings of the trade negotiations. It seems to me that with all of the talk about position player prospect risk vs. pitching prospect risk, that teams would be baking this into their internal prospect valuations. In other words, when choosing between players on the table in trade discussions, teams likely have the choice between a more talented higher variance pitcher or less talented lower variance hitter who both have the same projected true future value (i.e. accounting for talent and risk). As a mid to small market team, I think there is a reasonable argument to prefer the asset that has a higher ceiling even with the additional risk. Also, the reliever valuation boom of recent years does nothing but add value to pitching prospects as the “back up plan” to starting is now more valued.
2. Compounding issue #1, the public facing prospect lists have traditionally (in my opinion) overrated upside and underrated risk. So any analysis of prospect values within a certain bin (top 10 hitter, top 10 pitcher, etc.) will carry that same bias. That means while a public prospect list may suggest the #14 overall prospect who plays 3B is nearly equal in value to the #13 overall prospect who is a LHP, a lot of the recent prospect evaluation work that is now licensed at FanGraphs clearly shows this is NOT the case. While this was a big public breakthrough, I would argue teams in the trade marketplace likely already viewed these two hypothetical prospects in different future value tiers where the hitter is much more valuable. With people like Eric here and other public facing prospect analysts now more accurately incorporating risk into the future value ratings and top prospect lists, over time I bet the public prospect lists will more accurately reflect the inside baseball prospect lists and the risk portion will properly downgrade the future value of pitching prospects to a place where a publicly ranked 55 FV pitcher is worth the same in the MLB marketplace as a publicly ranked 55 FV hitter.
3. Some people argue that aging curves may be changing in the game in favor of older hitters holding onto more value than previously expected post-steroid era. I’m not sure I believe this yet, but regardless, I think it is fair to say no one is arguing the same for pitchers. Even with current curves, it is clear the value curve by age for a pitcher averages trending straight down with a peak right around their debut. I don’t think it is unreasonable to prefer to stockpile as many team controlled young pitcher seasons as possible if you believe hitters age more gracefully.
4. Along with #3, I’ll be interested in an analysis of the ROI in free agent spending over the last 3-5 years between pitchers and hitters. Anecdotally, recently it feels like an average ~30 year old position player (Josh Reddick) is cheaper to buy in both AAV and years than an average ~30 year old starting pitcher (Ian Kennedy). Projections would give us an idea, but I’d love to see something looking back once we are far enough out to have seen the lifespan of some of these recent deals. I think there is a solid chance Coppy and co. believe it is easier and more efficient to buy hitting than buy pitching in the free agent marketplace. I’m not sure how anyone could definitely prove this is wrong (or right) in today’s MLB. If it is right, then this strategy starts to look a whole lot better.
5. With respect to the valuation of hitting prospects over pitching prospects, there is likely some value in “zigging” while everyone else “zags” as well. I don’t love this line of thinking in general, but I do think it has merit in specific applications and that it is possible that this is one such application.
I may try to dive into some of this thinking in more depth in a follow up Community Blog post, so please poke holes in this so if I do write it I can be more thorough!
I haven’t looked into this, so it may not be an issue, but with regard to your “maybe hitting prospects are more valued” (which I absolutely believe is the case) – why are the braves still using their top picks on prep arms then? If it is more expensive to acquire position prospects, wouldn’t it make more sense to go position player then unless there is a pretty big gap in talent available at that pick? Probably something worth exploring if you are going to go more in depth on the zig when zag thing.
1. While I agree that both potential and risk will be factored into such calculations, I believe the much bigger issue is the gargantuan variability in perception of the traded assets. Dave stated at the time that Simmons must not be valued that much if that was the best offer that the Braves have received, but any fantasy owner knows that sometimes people accept what ends up being a drastically worse offer because they incorrectly perceived it to be “the best.” I don’t think the Braves traded Simmons to the Angels because no one offered them anything better than Newcomb, I think the Braves had a much higher opinion of Newcomb than anyone else, and that opinion has turned out to be a gross miscalculation. In any two-party trade, the assets exchanged depend on the perceptions of the two parties. It doesn’t matter what any other party not involved in the trade feels about those assets.
2. As counter-intuitive as it may be, some teams will be like Hart and place more value on pitching precisely because it is so difficult to acquire and develop. It’s akin to why people play big money lotteries rather than the smaller ones that they are more likely to win, as the payoff if you are successful is so dramatic. But ultimately a lot of this will come down to what a particular organization needs. If you’re flush with hitting, you’ll probably seek out pitching and vice versa.
3. You have this backwards. Pitchers as a whole are not affected by age nearly as much as hitters, as the pitching aging curve is largely flat until 30 or so. Velocity declines somewhat earlier, especially for starting pitchers, but performance itself stays pretty stable.
4. I’m inclined to agree with this part given that so many bat-first players signed for amounts well below expectations. That being said, not every free agent pitcher is able to cash in, as Ivan Nova and Jason Hammel can attest. On the whole, I’d still guess that buying free agent pitching is more expensive in $/WAR than hitting.
5. I don’t know that recent history supports this narrative, as the major prospect trades have been fairly evenly split between being centered around hitting prospects and being centered around pitching prospects. The top ten draft picks over the last five years have also been a perfectly even split of twenty-five hitters and twenty-five pitchers.
Thanks for the reply!
1. I agree with you, it goes back to scrutinizing the specifics of each deal rather than the strategy though. I can see an easy argument that Newcomb wasn’t worth Simmons, but not sure it is as easy to say that they shouldn’t trade Simmons for a pitcher.
2. Agreed again, and I like the lottery analogy. I think there are some good reasons for preferring the “large lottery” tickets if you are a mid/small market club.
3. We disagree here. To me it looks like everything goes the wrong direction at 25/26. Granted more slowly at first, but the arrow is generally pointing down on a pitcher once he reaches/adjusts to MLB.
4. I’d point out that track record and healthy matter too, which I think hurt those two specifically (Nova & Hammel).
5. This makes sense to me as teams need roughly a 50/50 blend of hitters/pitchers on the roster. I see what you mean though, maybe a team that prefers hitting or pitching over time rather than a roughly 50/50 blend is actually the outlier? So maybe both the Cubs and Braves are abnormal.
Velocity does start to decline significantly right around that 25/26 season you mentioned, yet FIP doesn’t cross a 0.25% decline until age 30. Age isn’t irrelevant for pitchers, but the data clearly shows that the pitcher aging curve is much less pronounced than the hitter aging curve.
Not sure where the hitting is going to come from. They have a few chips in the minors but not many. They can flip some pitchers but I just don’t see them getting large returns on minor league arms. The free agent class in 2018-2019 will be nuts, but with the Yankees clearing over 75 million in payroll before that free agent class I see them as the biggest players for Machado and Harper if neither re-ups with their current team. There should be plenty of solid contributors between now and when the Braves pitching reaches the final years of arbitration. I just have a feeling they are going to be forced to acquire older injury prone players, platoon players, projects, or hitters that are further from the majors than they would like to.
Best of luck to them.
There are a lot of good hitters in their system. They’ll probably be okay.
Yeah, they have a few. But most have an ETA of 2019 or 2020. The Braves need to get through 2017 and 2018 with Swanson then sign him to a 5/year deal or so if he preforms. Otherwise he’s a FA after 2021. Freeman is also a FA after 2021 with his current contract, they need to get an extension done now since they aren’t a big money team and if Freeman continues to play at this level or improve he’s going to command way more than the Braves would normally be comfortable spending on a single player. I’m thinking by then he’d command high 20’s maybe even 30’s. As it is right now the Braves are looking at a potential 2 with the possibility of a 3 year window with the current team. But again that’s saying that the prospects develop on schedule and that they do develop into solid pieces. Lots of variables. Still kind of wondering why they haven’t tried to trade Freeman already. He’s going to be making 21 in 2018 and 2019 then 22 in 2020 and 2021. That is a quarter of what the Braves usually spend right there. They rarely spend over 100 million.
Anyone who thinks the Braves’ front office hasn’t done a very good job (v2micca) is wrong/has crazy expectations. Would you rather they kept Heyward and Upton for $185 & $133 million? They put up 1.6 & 1.4 WAR last year. The Braves would be pretty screwed if they’s signed those guys to those deals.
They have had a 3 year playoff drought, not 10 year. They’ve assembled what most believe is the #1 farm system in baseball. They have 9 prospects in FG’s top 100, 4 are hitters.
All GM’s will have some good trades, some bad trades. Some players will hit, some will miss. You can’t do better than #1 system in baseball though.
They have trades, free agency, current minor leaguers, and future drafts to try and add more bats. They aren’t frozen in time and only have players currently in their system to fill out their future lineups.
Neat comment, Sully!
It might be pointless to do before we see how some of them turn out, but if you concede that a rebuild was necessary (hint: it absolutely was), I’d love to see someone do an “alternative reality” deep dive for what the Braves could’ve done differently, step-by-step, to rebuild. Really difficult to do with trades, because how can an outsider know what other offers were available, but one could at least dig in for comparable traded players and what they were traded for within a certain window, and conclude that the Wood/Peraza trade was horrible, the Simmons trade looks bad, the Kimbrel trade looks not-great, the Upton trade looks pretty good, and the Heyward and subsequent Miller trade make my mouth water. And so on.
But the drafts would be a little easier to analyze in hindsight. And again, it’s too early, because hardly anyone from these respective drafts have made the majors yet, let alone just Braves guys. But just for fun, I don’t see anyone obvious the Braves should’ve taken instead of either Allard or Soroka in 2015. Maybe Walker Buehler, who went between the two, and ironically was a TJ survivor at the time? 2016 is pretty complicated because you have to look at the 3 prep pitchers and the manipulation required to sign all 3 sort of as one haul, but it’s fair if your opinion is they should’ve just taken Corey Ray or Blake Rutherford or whoever your favorite prospect from that draft is at #3 and then taken the best signable players with the later picks.
In another bit of irony, going back to 2014 (Frank Wren’s last draft), the Braves spent their first pick on Braxton Davidson. Who was selected with the very next pick? Michael Kopech. Probably could’ve used that high-risk prep pitching philosophy on that one.
Anyway, someone remind me ~2022 to put the leg work in on this.
Corey Ray got ~125k more than Anderson, would that have stopped them from getting other prep arms later on (assuming he signed with them for the same amount he signed with the brewers for)?
I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly, but wasn’t Kyle Lewis pretty well thought of at the time of the draft too, and he signed for less than 4m, so they would have had money there too.
For sure. I think the best way to do it when analyzing in hindsight would be to look at the money everyone signed for, look at our total pool amount, and go fill that out with the optimal group of players. Even Rutherford, who slipped because of signability issues by all accounts, ended up signing for $3.2MM ($800k less than Anderson).
Of course the big variable besides sheer amount is getting the players to agree to those amounts in advance of the draft so that you are confident about what group of players you will be able to draft and sign.
TLDR; guess we’ll see!
I think there’s something a lot of people are missing. It’s that it is really hard to find a #2 starter, but way easier to find a #5 starter. The Braves philosophy isn’t that they’re stockpiling questionable pitching, it’s that they’re stockpiling a questionable pitching with a chance to be great. Since you’ve got a 50/50 shot of your pitching prospects blowing out their arms anyway, they figure they might as well go for the highest-upside options and hope some of them work out and fill out the back end of their rotation later.
Their hit rate is going to be low, maybe even lower than normal, but they think they’ll make up for it by hitting big on the ones that make it.
I would not do this. I like the Cubs strategy of building a young core of awesome position players and figuring out the rotation later, even if that means I would have more back-end starters than I would like. But I think it is an interesting team-building strategy that I would not dismiss out of hand.
Something that struck me was ‘it’s easier to trade high level pitching prospects than positional players’
Seemed backwards at first but it makes sense, unless it’s a hyper athletic SS or CF who could be moved lots of prospects would be blocked. It is dangerous to sell out too much for a ‘process’ but if the plan is to accumulate then deal off you have to like your chances of knowing your guys better than the team trading for them.