Mallex Smith is a speed burner. He’s also a big leaguer. Atlanta called up the 22-year-old outfielder earlier this month when Ender Inciarte went on the disabled list with a hamstring injury. He’s off to a slow start — Smith has reached base just 12 times in 50 plate appearances — but a bright future lies ahead. The Braves’ 2015 Minor League Player of the Year is coming off a season in which he slashed .306/.373/.386, with 57 steals, between Double-A Mississippi and Triple-A Gwinnett.

A fifth-round pick by the Padres in 2012, Smith was acquired by Atlanta in the December 2014 Justin Upton deal. He talked about his call-up, and his deep appreciation for where baseball has taken him, prior to yesterday’s game at Fenway Park.

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Smith on getting called up from Triple-A: “I got called into the office and that was just to say, ‘We don’t know.’ They said we had to wait and see. I was told I wasn’t going to play that day, and the reason why. It wasn’t until after the game that it was a definite.

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n 1960, when he was playing in the South Atlantic League, Phil Niekro was told that he could pitch in the big leagues if he could get his knuckleball over the plate more consistently. Those words, which came from manager Red Murff, were the springboard to a Hall of Fame career.

“No one had ever told me that before, and it was my motivator,” Niekro told me recently. “It was then that I hunkered down and really worked on my knuckleball.”

Niekro’s younger brother, Joe Niekro, had to wait much longer for similar encouragement. He wasn’t pushed to throw the pitch that made his family famous until he’d been in the big leagues for nearly a decade.

“When Joe came up through the minor leagues, he was your normal, conventional pitcher,” explained Niekro. “He did have a knuckleball, but the Cubs didn’t want him to throw it. When he got to Detroit, they wouldn’t let him throw it. He had a good one, but his managers weren’t comfortable with him using it in games.” Read the rest of this entry »

A plethora of under-the-radar transactions take place every offseason. One you might have missed happened last week when Stephen Fife signed with the Chicago Cubs. The 29-year-old right-hander, fully recovered from Tommy John surgery, was inked to a minor-league deal that includes a spring training invite to big-league camp.

If you’re not a Dodgers diehard, you probably aren’t aware that Fife was one of six Los Angeles pitchers to start 10-or-more games for the 2013 NL West champions. He finished that year 4-4 with a 3.86 ERA, but was unceremoniously left off the postseason roster. Come playoff time, he was told he wasn’t welcome in the dugout, although he could come to the games and watch from the stands.

Originally in the Red Sox organization, Fife came to LA as part of a three-team trade in July 2011. According to Fife, he turned a corner the following season with the help of Josh Bard. The newly-named Dodgers bullpen coach was one of the club’s catchers that season, and he told Fife that adjustments were in order. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, the Braves traded Cameron Maybin to the Tigers for a pair of promising-but-unproven pitchers. Predictably, the deal elicited mostly angst from Atlanta fans. Not Andrelton-level angst, but enough that yet a few more foam tomahawks hit the bottoms of wastebaskets. Put another way, the camel hasn’t collapsed, but his back is starting to sag something awful.

Youth movement in full swing, veterans are packing up almost as fast as the bandwagon is emptying. NBC Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra worded the exodus as such: “The last major league position player left in Atlanta, please turn out the lights.”

As for my own take on the Braves’ new world, let’s just say I’m highly intrigued. Regardless of how you define their strategy – retooling, tanking, whatever – these moves aren’t being made frivolously. Financial considerations aside, no small number of scouting and data-driven projections are driving the decisions. Read the rest of this entry »

John Coppolella has a plan. He also has a goal, which is to help return the Atlanta Braves to prominence. Last week, the 37-year-old general manager – along with president of baseball operations John Hart – made a bold move toward that end. Andrelton Simmons, a gifted and popular shortstop, was traded to Anaheim in exchange for Erick Aybar and a pair of pitching prospects.

The deal wasn’t particularly popular, but that’s not Coppolella’s biggest concern. The Braves are coming off a pair of losing campaigns, and they’ll be moving into a new stadium for the 2017 season. The fan base expects a winner, and that is what Coppolella and Company are working to build.

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Coppolella on trading Andrelton Simmons: “It was a talent-based deal for us. Using scouting and analytics we simply felt the talent level we were getting back in this deal was too good to pass up. We have high hopes, in the short- and long-term, for all three of the players we acquired.

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Matt Klentak is more analytical than Ruben Amaro. Unless you’re a stark traditionalist, that’s a big positive for Phillies fans. Philadelphia’s new general manager – a 36-year-old Dartmouth College graduate with a degree in economics – is committed to bringing one of baseball’s least saber-friendly teams out of the dark ages.

Klentak’s approach is information-driven. He came back to the word “information” again and again when we spoke at this week’s GM meetings in Boca Raton.

“Philosophically, I am very much of the mind to use all of the information to make every decision that we make,” Klentak told me. “I’m not a huge fan of operating under any sort of absolutes, but I want to make sure that we’re managing all of the information as well as we can.

“In order to use and manage all of the information, we have to have that information in the first place. We’re going to make sure – particularly this offseason, as we’re rolling things out – that we are bringing in the best data, and the best people to analyze the data, that we can. We’ll incorporate all of that into our decision-making process.” Read the rest of this entry »

Keith Law did not like this week’s trade (ESPN Insider article) that saw Touki Toussaint and Bronson Arroyo go from the Arizona Diamondbacks to the Atlanta Braves. It’s not that Law didn’t like the trade from the perspective of one team or the other. It’s that he didn’t like the spirit of the trade, period: it was, indisputably, a swap of contracts instead of an even exchange of on-field talent.

What does a league look like where plenty, if not most, trades are motivated by their financial implications? Well, it’s not the end of the world: this is what the NBA has been about for years. The NBA combines baseball’s almost entirely guaranteed salaries with a soft cap, like baseball, that, unlike baseball, is restrictive enough that even mid-market teams can unwittingly bump up against it. “Expiring” contracts — or, inefficient deals with less than a year remaining on them — have been a long-coveted NBA asset: salary albatrosses are willingly taken on precisely because they will end quickly enough for the team to have an even more valuable asset — space and flexibility underneath the cap — in time for the offseason free-agent market.

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Nick Markakis isn’t clearing fences. In his first season in Atlanta, the erstwhile Oriole is without a home run in 294 plate appearances. Despite the paucity of power, he’s been the Braves cleanup hitter in 31 games. Don’t scoff. Markakis has a .314./.404/.407 slash line batting out of the four-hole, Overall, he’s slashing .298/.393/.361.

Even so, he wouldn’t be hitting fourth in a perfect world. Manager Fredi Gonzalez has limited options when he fills out his lineup card. Going into last night, only the Phillies (40) had homered fewer times than the Braves (41) this season. Freddie Freeman has a dozen dingers, and after that it’s basically banjo city.

“Other than Freddie Freeman, he’s our best hitter,” Gonzalez told me earlier this week. “When I first put him there, it was to put a good hitter behind Freddie to protect him a little bit. We want someone who’s going to give us a good at bat, no matter if it’s a home run or a double. I think he’s our best option.”

Markakis used to provide more punch. In nine seasons with the Orioles, he had 141 circuit clouts. Part of that was homer-happy Camden Yards, but it’s not as though Turner Field is a graveyard for fly balls. Off-season immobility is likely contributing to his power outage. Read the rest of this entry »

The designated hitter rule has been in place in the American League since 1973. Some like it. Others would prefer that pitchers swing the bat. They do in the National League, and that’s part of the debate. Does it make sense for the league to play with different rules, or should there be uniformity?

I asked five pitchers, five position players, and five coaches/managers – many of whom have experience in both leagues – for their opinion of the DH rule. Here is what they had to say.

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Steve Buechele, Rangers bench coach: “I think the DH is good for baseball. The pitcher hitting is the purest form of the game, but having a DH adds to the excitement. Some of the DHs out there are players people pay a lot to watch.

“We’ve done it for so long now, and I’m OK with that, but I wouldn’t mind seeing both leagues go with it at some point. It’s not a priority for me, but I’d like to see it be consistent.”

Clay Buchholz, Red Sox pitcher: “I think it will eventually happen in both leagues. A lot of money is paid for starting pitchers, and many of us aren’t comfortable hitting. Everybody is a competitor, so when you hit a ground ball, you want to run it out. Guys get injuries running the bases.

“I’d be in favor of having the DH in both leagues. It would make baseball better. I think there should be uniformity, but only if the DH was in both leagues.” Read the rest of this entry »

This interview was conducted in September 2012, but that doesn’t matter. The topic was his career, and Andruw Jones was weeks away from his final game. Contextually, nothing has changed in the two-plus years that these words went unpublished.

The longtime Atlanta Brave hit 434 home runs, but his legacy is defense. He won 10 straight Gold Gloves, and few center fielders have played the position with as much style and grace. Jones didn’t age particularly well, but in his prime, he was an outstanding player and an absolute joy to watch. Read the rest of this entry »