Signed by the Braves after a low-rent bidding war, Baker is on the 40-man and will probably get a good chance to make the roster; there’s a lot of competition, but very little of it is established. Baker is 25 and has never pitched in the majors, but with so many kids even a minor league veteran is a welcome shot of experience. Baker’s career ERA in the minors is 3.47, a lot of that in hitter’s leagues. A starter in the Red Sox organization through 2002, the Padres picked him up for Alan Embree in the middle of that season and converted him to relief starting in 2003. He spent all of 2005 in AAA Portland, and led the league in saves but with a 4.75 ERA.
Baker’s control is a little wobbly, but he’s struck out more than a man an inning over his career, more than ten per nine over the last two seasons. So I like that. Gave up nine homers in 66 1/3 last season, which isn’t bad for the PCL, but the year before he allowed only two between AA and AAA. I’ve never seen him pitch, as you might expect, so I’m just going by the stats when I say he’s probably as good as half the guys pitching in major league bullpens. With only Reitsma guaranteed a job with the Braves, he has a chance.
Since I haven’t actually seen Baker (as the Padres train in Arizona and he hasn’t made the majors yet) I asked Jonathan of the Unofficial Portland Beavers Web Page for a scouting report. Jonathan reports that Baker’s primary pitch (as I’d heard) is a nasty changeup, one that “embarrassed” the hitters in the PCL in 2004. He also has a fastball in the low nineties, occasionally throws a curve to keep the batters honest but it’s just a “show-me” pitch. The problems come when he can’t throw his change for strikes, because if the hitters lay off of that and he has to throw his fastball, it gets slammed. This apparently happened a lot at midseason last year and he eventually fell out of the closer’s role and lost confidence. If he’s getting his change over, he can be very effective, and I expect that at minimum he’d be able to give you a few weeks of good relief before the league catches up to him. He might manage to be Greg McMichael, maybe even a rich man’s Greg McMichael. Not too bad given this bullpen situation.
Brad Baker – Baseball Statistics – Biography, Minor League Stats and Baseball Cards
Hey, if we can sign a no-name minor leaguer to a league-minimum contract and get Greg McMichael in return, I’ll subscribe fully to the Church of the Second Spitter.
In fact, I’ll go even further: if that happens, and we have a Greg McMichael in our bullpen, along with the continued development and maturation of Devine, McBride, and Boyer (and even occasional use of James and Lerew), we’ll have a much better pen than last year, and better chances in the first round of the P-word and beyond.
Couple of people who i talked to touted him as mini-hoffman.
The scouting report reads more like mini-Reitsma 🙁
That scouting report is really boiled down (Jonathan gave me a pretty detailed one) but what I can say is that Baker’s strikeout rate is far in excess of anything Reitsma’s ever done, and stylistically he sounds a lot more like Hoffman than Reitsma. Also, like I said in his entry, I don’t know why Reitsma isn’t a better pitcher, because he has the stuff. I am cautiously optimistic.
I was looking at the Gammons link that Mac posted in the last thread and the link to the archives takes you to the 2001 Gammons stuff. Interesting to look through like this little tidbit:
f the Reds will back off Luke Prokopec and take Eric Gagne, they can move Pokey Reese to the Dodgers. There’s been talk in New York of a Gagne-Glendon Rusch deal. But the Dodgers will not move Prokopec, not with Chan Ho Park a free agent, Brown hurt and Darren Dreifort, who has a lifetime 43-50 record. Other than Gagne, the only arm in the Dodger system that could possibly help this year is reliever Kris Foster, who throws 98 mph but has a long medical history
Gagne and Rusch deal?? Wow…If they had made that trade…
Gagne would have probably blown out his arm in two weeks…
I really don’t know because in my book, “Dem Braves” I described McMichael as the one Braves pitcher who I always knew what he was going to throw.
Gagne was a “failed starter” at the time, coming off his third season in the majors in which he’d gone 6-7 with a 4.75 ERA, and was going to be 26. His most-similar pitcher through Age 25 was someone named Art Herring, who went 34-38 only because he got to revive his career during WWII.
He’d just been converted to relief (not closer) at the end of the year, and even then they weren’t sure it would work. Pitchers is crazy.
I should add that McMichael, like Baker, was a minor league journeyman (though unlike Baker I don’t think he was ever much of a prospect). Also, McMichael was pretty sensational as a rookie. He had a 2.05 ERA (league context was 4.05) and struck out 89 in 91 1/3 IP. Now, there are differences; McMichael had better control, and Baker throws harder. But both primarily relied/rely on a changeup.
And though I did not know this at the time I wrote the above, the Braves have compared Baker to McMichael.
Mac, I remember the Braves compared Bernero to McMichael during last year’s spring training as well. So, I am not sure if being compared to McMichael is a good thing or not…
Eek.
Maybe they compare everyone to McMichael. Bernero pitches off a changeup, but other than that… The key difference is that McMichael had a good strikeout rate in the minors (after the Braves made him into a reliever) and so has Baker, while Bernero’s hasn’t been that good, and at times has been poor. Also, he’s more homer prone than the other two.
Because he didn’t throw hard, you don’t think of McMichael as a strikeout pitcher, but his career K rate was 7.89 per 9IP, which is a good deal better than Bernero’s minor league rate (7.14) and head and shoulders over anything he’s done in the majors. Baker’s K rate as a reliever is over 10, which is about what McMichael’s was in the minors in that role, probably a little better.
Ha, I clicked on the link in Mac’s last comment and at first was like, ‘What? The Braves didn’t play today. It’s only Feb. 2….Oh.’
Here is another interesting deal Gammons wanted to see back in 2000 (Giambi, huh? Odd…):
San Diego deals Phil Nevin to Atlanta for SS Wilson Betemit and LHP Odalis Perez. The Braves desperately need help for Chipper Jones, especially with Javy Lopez a free agent, and Nevin is one of the best right-handed hitters in the business. Betemit is a future star who could allow D’Angelo Jimenez to play second, but the Braves want to keep winning as long as Greg Maddux, Tim Glavine and John Smoltz are what they are. There’s a lot of Jason Giambi talk in Atlanta, however.
When I think about Trevor Hoffman, I immediately become a 12-year old girl after watching Titanic for the first time.
Trevor… he’s so dreamy… he’s so invincible… and he can buckle the knees of a grown man with the world’s most dominant changeup…
If only we could trade for him, we’d win the World Series.
Here’s another bit from Gammons:
Rookie. I have objected to Japanese stars being included as rookies, out of respect for the Japanese Major Leagues. Tracy Ringolsby makes this compelling argument: that veterans of the Negro Leagues were classified as rookies, and it is the Jackie Robinson Award. So Ichiro and Pujols win, easily, with all due respect to C.C. Sabathia, Alfonso Soriano and David Eckstein in the AL, Jimmy Rollins, Roy Oswalt and Adam Dunn in the NL. Ten years from now, someone will ask how Dunn didn’t win the award.
Anyone asking why Dunn didn’t win the award now?
Adam Dunn is an absolute OBP machine. If we could have landed him last year it would have surely helped since the only person hitting the Astros pitching was Andruw.
Yeah, but he’s not exactly Albert Pujols.
Gammons also said that 2001 would be remembered as the year that Adam Dunn came up to the big leagues.
A little bit of gung-ho baseball optimism, I guess, to remind us that life would go on after September 11, but that comment always struck me as a little too ridiculous for words. Even now, I can’t adequately make fun of it.
I saw Dunn play at AA. Everyone in town knew you had to go see him, because he was only going to be here for a few weeks. It was like one of us going to play with 6 year olds.
I have started a Yahoo fantasy league with a draft on Feb 19 at 2:00
the ID# is 6029 and the Password is smoltz.
If you need help getting in email me everyone is welcome! I will post this for a few days there is room for 20 people. Mac if you want to help pass the word along, that would be great!
I’m in.
I saw Dunn play at AA. Everyone in town knew you had to go see him, because he was only going to be here for a few weeks. It was like one of us going to play with 6 year olds.
Adam Dunn never played at the AA level.
Yeah he did in Chattanooga
12 HR in 39 games
http://cbs.sportsline.com/mlb/players/playerpage/174678
I stand corrected. I wonder why his Chattanooga line is missing from The Baseball Cube.
HTML links don’t work? Oh well, I’m sure you all know how to get there.
HTML links work. You didn’t have an href in the anchor tag.