Aaron Blair against Madison Bumgarner is a mismatch. Giants pre-game radio feed said it and predicted MadBum would breeze through the Braves lineup and take poor Aaron deep. They were right about the former, but Aaron kept the Giants hurler in the park. Not so Joe Panik and Denard Span. The Giants announcers also said Buster Posey, sore neck and all, was in. The lineup, they meant. Everyone everywhere knows Posey is always and forever out.
Our Braves suited up. They played. Ender Inciarte led off with a line triple to center. Adonis Garcia turned a long at bat into a walk, runners on the corners now for Freddie Freeman. Freefanned, leaving it up to yesterday’s hero to produce the run. Matt Kemp’s sac fly to right brought Ender home.
After finding the strike zone, Blair gave up a Posey single, naught else. After one, Braves lead1-zip.
In the Giants second, Brandon Belt tripled to deepest center, then scored on a weak ground out. Panik homered to right. It did not reach McCovey cove. At least there’s that. Madbum struck out looking, tee hee, so after two, Braves now trail 2-1.
Span led off the Giants third with a double off the left center field wall, as Aaron continues to dig the hole. After a bounce out to the mound, Blair busted Posey in the elbow, runners now at first and second. Brandon Crawford lined to Ender for out two, and Aaron fell behind Belt 3-0 before getting out of the mess on another liner to Inciarte. It’s still 2-1 after three, but the Braves bats have been silent since the first.
Jarrett Parker opened the San Francisco fourth with a single, and Panik homered, again to right. The hole deepened to 4-1. Eduardo Nunez singled but was erased at second on a big league block and throw by Anthony Recker. Bumgarner fanned (chortle!) for out two, but Span made it 5-1 with his own home run. The kid may be something someday, but not today.
Tony wrecked Madbum’s consecutive out streak at 12,and Gordon Beckham (!) followed with a single. No runs scored, alas; but Aaron Blair departed, if not forever at least for today.
Ender doubled to start the sixth, and Freddie’s homer shortened the margin to 5-3. Hope is resurrected.
Ian Krol pitched well; Chaz Roe and Brandon Cunniff did not. A walked Posey scored on a Brandon Crawford triple. Belt walked on eleven pitches, putting Giants on the corners with one out. Parker tripled to drive in his second and third runs on the day and pushed the lead back to five. Hope, said Mac, should be avoided. It’s all but gone now at 8-3. Panik’s sac fly and Nunez homer made it 10-3. I despair. The hits kept coming. Conor Gillaspie hit a line drive at Matt Kemp, but he fell down and turned it into a triple, and then somebody else did something else, and the score read 12-3 with Posey at the dish and a runner on second. Buster walked for the second time in the inning. The Giants twelfth hitter of the inning, Brandon Crawford, was up to face the frame’s third Braves pitcher, Ryan Weber. Weber was greeted by Crawford’s single, but the Giants held the runner at third. Didn’t matter. Next hitter, whoever he was, drove him home. Braves tried to invoke the mercy rule, but MLB doesn’t have one. The inning ended with Kemp catching a fly in left. One out of two with the bat is good. Not so with the glove, Matt. Braves trail 13-3.
Gordon Beckham’s meaningless ninth inning homer made the final score 13-4.
Giants scored 13, collected 18 hits, 11 for extra bases. Aaron Blair did not pitch well. Matt Kemp did not field well. Braves deserved to lose and did.
Thanks, coop.
We just REALLY need Wisler to stay on the beam the rest of this year. That way we have 3 slots set and a bunch of youngsters to look at.
I do like the “get 1 upper end pitcher this offseason.” Also, maybe 1 or 2 reclamations. That way if Sims or Newcombe is ready sometime in the first half of next year, you trade your reclamation and are in pretty good shape.
That crap game did not deserve this excellent recap, coop.
RE: krusell on last thread based on comments @ http://bravesjournal.us/?p=15071#comment-2017157
Thanks for the ideas. I think each one of those can easily slide up or down about a half of a point, but no more than that.
If you added up all of the players’ values that we would not miss in the short-term or the long-term, you’d be able to get a couple-few really good players. You could trade 2 of Jenkins/Whalen/Perez (1-2 points in value), one of Mallex/Inciarte (2-3 points in value), Vizzy (2 points), Adonis (1 point), Ruiz (1 point), Markakis (1 point) and then use cash strategically (12 points), and that’s 20-22 points. In this valuing system, that’s a lot of talent you could consolidate down into. Even if you did 2/3 of that and kept the other third, you’re still talking a huge improvement to the 2017 and beyond roster. And you solve your 40-man problems.
coop…masterly…it’s becoming clear that these afternoon starts suit.
it’s with the thought of Sims
that one’s overall enthusiasm dims
whereas with Mauricio
there seems hope velocity alone may prove sufficio.
The problem with signing a free agent starting pitcher is that you end up having to go longer on the deal than you want because of competition with other teams. For example, Doug Fister should get a similar deal to the one Jordan Zimmerman got, IMO, and I’m not sure you want to be paying him for 5 years.
I’d be more interested in the older but still effective guys who you could get on a 1-year deal. R.A. Dickey, Bartolo Colon, Colby Lewis, for example. I wouldn’t be averse to signing Bud Norris again.
It would seem a little odd to throw a bunch of money into a starting pitcher for a longer contract when you’ve just hitched your rebuild on young starting pitching. I’m not sure I’d go for someone as volatile at Dickey or Colon, but I would definitely look at a reclamation project or three. At the end of the day, there are only 5-6 “aces” in all of baseball, maybe 8-10, and there are enough guys in the high minors and up who could easily be a #1 starter for the other 20-25 teams in baseball. Folty, Teheran, and Newcomb all have the potential to be a top-30 pitcher in baseball, and Folty or Teheran could reach that potential in 2017. Plus, if you clog the rotation with too many FAs, you really have negated much of your internal value. I want to get good in 2017, but that’s predicated on the necessity that 4 members of a good rotation are already in the system.
@5 I agree with your sentiments – there are no 2017 free agent SPs (going by the Cots Contracts list) that I’d want to commit big dollars or multiple years to.
All in all, I don’t see much in the 2017 free agent class that would be a great fit for the Braves. Maybe Adrian Beltre on a 2-3 year deal? My guess is that he re-signs with Texas anyway so it’ll be a moot point.
Dramatis Personae
are limited to 40 as certain rules apply
yet oddly no one seems to mind
how many of any one particular kind.
One thing we can use our supposed pile of money on would be imbalanced trades where we take on a big contract and don’t give much back in the way of prospects. I’m not sure which pitchers might fit the bill and also actually be available, but it’s something I’m sure we will explore. The FA market isn’t that compelling so I expect we’ll see a trade or two.
I’m curious where Minter ends up on updated top prospect lists. I think I might put him above some of the kids in A-ball. Seems like he has a real good shot of being a great reliever. Those are worth a good chunk of change these days.
I had forgotten this was his first year. I suppose you discount for injury risk, but 16.2 IP, 29 SO’s, 4 BB’s is a hell of a start to AA.
He pretty much gave up all of his AA runs in one outing. He’s not pitching very often, which I’ve been wondering why. He had gone something like 5-6 days without pitching at one point. But he’s been so lights out that it’d be easier to predict that he will have more value than a lot of our pitching prospects. I just wish he had a little bit more experience under his belt.
RIP Gene Wilder
I think they want to give him plenty of rest this year coming off injury. Seems like a safe bet to be valuable.
Morris, Dirks, and Minter are a pretty lights-out back end of a bullpen for Mississippi. Plus they had Mauricio before we called him up.
Yeah, you were looking at the future yesterday with Newcomb, Morris, Dirks, and Minter pitching. Too bad Newcomb had a bad start.
If you like the Chevanka trade, then look at the rotation at double-A: Newcomb, Sims, Povse, Weigel, Mader. MLB Pipeline’s #3, #14, #20, and #28 prospects. And admittedly, if Mader keeps pitching how he did since he’s come to Atlanta (20 IP, 15 H, 18 K, 2 BB), then he’ll be in the top-30 before too long.
@17
It’s a disgrace that MLB’s pipeline is supposedly fluid yet Weigel, who owns the best FB in the system, is at 28.
Yes, I was thinking Weigel has to be ahead of Povse for sure, certainly Gant and Whalen, and probably even Sims now. I like Sims, but that walk rate…
I think it’s fluid in the sense that if a player changes teams, they’ll update the systems to place that player in there. And every now and again there’s a random change, but I don’t think they’re evaluating prospects as often as we are. Ya know, because our team sucks.
I demand hourly updates in the prospect rankings
We are paying good money.
In the Jobless Future, prospect rankings will change subtly with each pitch and ball fielded. Minor leaguers will augment their potential future earnings by allowing the public to buy and sell shares in them, and we will spend all day awash in luminous, money-making data.
@15, Mordirkter.
Submitted without comment:
http://www.sportingnews.com/mlb/news/tim-tebow-baseball-atlanta-braves-dan-uggla-suntrust-park/5zhhl5nys6i31ln09r1yyuqw3
I know the above is old news, but I don’t remember anything being posted on this. I know the Braves were watching his workout. I guess we’ll find out if anyone was impressed tomorrow.
Welp, this ol’ dawg’s pulling for that gator. Chase that dream, boy.
I would love to see Tebow do well, but I’m afraid it’s not likely. One scout I’ve heard about says Tebow’s swing is so long it might “take out the front row.” Others say if he hasn’t played since high school, it is highly unlikely he can retrain his muscles to play at the MLB level. The funny part to me was the comparison to Uggla.
I think that it is fairly certain that Dan Uggla is a better baseball player right now than Tim Tebow will ever be.
25 year old Mike Trout passed Dale Murphy in career WAR today. That guy is pretty good.
Tebow might be better than Olivera though.
I saw Dan Uggla play in the NBC tourny in Wichita a couple of weeks ago and was impressed with a play he made on a slow roller that he had to come in on and then throw across his body for the out. He didn’t crush the NBC tourny pitching however. The guy on that team who looked like he could still play in the majors, at least defensively, was Jack Wilson.
@23
perfect original projection…why not?
@30
…if WAR had been a known quantifier in Murphy’s day he would undoubtedly have made the necessary adjustments to keep future whippersnappers at bay.
Seven (7) high school pitchers were drafted ahead of Mike Trout in 2009. Only one of them, Shelby Miller, has accumulated more than 5 WAR.
I just wanted to pop in and note that last night the 2016 pennant race was impacted by Jarrod Saltalamacchia. That’s amazing. Baseball is amazing.
Got a client who’s a FSU grad and Rays fan. He was lamenting that his boy Buster Posey wasn’t taken when the Rays ultimately took Tim Beckham, and I said, “Well, 24 teams passed on Mike Trout if you can believe it.”
When you think about it, that was a franchise-altering event when we took Larry Wayne over Todd Van Poppel. It’s amazing how these individual decisions for franchises can completely alter their competitiveness. I mean, Joey Devine? C’mon.
Also that you could’ve drafted the top 7 high school pitchers if your team had the top 7 picks in 2009, and you would have the league’s worst starting rotation in 2016. Let’s see how drafting 3 of the top 7 goes for us in 2016.
Someone tell Coppy to only draft the guys that will turn into Trout, Chipper, Posey, etc. Much better strategy.
I think you have to give the Angels credit for developing Trout too. He could have gone a lot of places and may not have been as good.
Definitely gotta tip your cap too. Trout has really silenced his critics.
He is in the best shape of his life of course.
@39, it also helps to not use first round draft picks on high school pitchers. When Van Poppel was drafted, there wasn’t the body of data yet to show just how horrible a strategy that is. What it is predicated on with our Braves is that our guys are smarter than all the other guys who thought they could pick winners out of the highly volatile and unpredictable commodity that is high school pitching.
You guys seem to be coming around to my side of things about our smartest guys in the room.
Drafting HS pitchers never works, except when it does.
high school pitching
is giving rise to a good deal of bitching
as would any comparable purview
if given the acquired advantage of deja, deja vu.
@13
Gene Wilder..lovely guy.
On Terri Gross this lunchtime they were replaying a part of a 2005 interview where he recounted in glorious detail every nuance of the filming of the beloved ‘What a lovely pair of knockers’ scene from Young Frankenstein. Both ended up in hysterics, there is no age to something as pure, as wondrously silly as that.
Didn’t say it never works. Surely you realize I’m not so obtuse? Drawing to an inside straight can work, but that doesn’t mean it’s generally advisable.
Drafting in baseball is as inexact a science as there is in sports. Anybody might work out, and anybody might not, which is why over 1000 players get drafted each year. However, there are some trends we can intelligently comment on. One of those trends is that high school pitchers have the highest bust rate out of the four major player types (HS pitcher, HS hitter, college pitcher, college hitter).
I guess, in our smart guys’ defense, if you draft nothing but HS pitchers you probably have better odds of finding a high ceiling one. Also you have better odds at being horrible for a decade. Our odds there were already high anyway, so, it is what it is.
Also, if you never draw to an inside straight, you’ll never hit one
We’ve gone all in holding 2-7 off suit. (or whatever your favorite Evil-Wren-wrecked-our-farm poker analogy might be…)
Dallas Braden is at Tebow’s workout. Said his arm was probably a 30-40 and his throwing mechanics from the OF were bad, however he did hit a few that haven’t landed yet and he probably would have had projectable 70 power.
He won’t make it but like my former next door neighbor Daniel Murphy, I doubt it will be from lack of effort.
I don’t think you’re obtuse at all. Perhaps I was too glib. My apologies.
I just don’t like these post hoc just-so stories about the draft. Of course it’s easy to tell the superstars afterwards, and of course you’d pick differently if you had the benefit of hindsight (not to mention that these stories often conveniently omit signability concerns). Some first-round HS pitchers turn into Kershaw, others into Van Poppel. If you never take a HS pitcher in the first round, then you’ll be one of the idiots who passed on Kershaw. If you take a guy who doesn’t work out, then you took that dud when you could have had Trout. Either way, there’s a just-so story waiting to be told.
Yeah, I try to avoid that sort of hindsight bias. We will look like geniuses when Allard and Anderson are our Johnson-Schilling dominant duo, but it’s still objectively more risky to make that kind of bet than to bet on college bats.
Tim Tebow and Chipper Jones are my favorite athletes, and it’s not even close. They both went to HS less than an hour from me, so I had heard their legends before they ever became pro athletes. I actually played against Tebow when he played CF for Nease HS, and he was a tremendous baseball player. I was, sadly, pro-Tebow as a NFL QB for a little too long, and my admiration of him knows few bounds.
But this ain’t happening. I don’t think it’s a publicity stunt, I think he legitimates wants to embrace a new challenge, and it’s been known to many that he loves baseball. But I think his ceiling is Scott Thorman… maybe. He doesn’t have the speed to play outfield, and while he may be a halfway decent three true outcomes guy, he won’t hit enough to play first in the major leagues. I think he will probably make it to AA, but I don’t think it goes much further than that. I’ll still love him as if he’s throwing jump passes, a beautiful deep ball, and taking on Eric Berry in the secondary.
@55 – I’m with you on your post and also am a big fan of Tebow. My only question is that you say he doesn’t have the speed to play OF. Wasn’t he clocked at about 4.7 in the 40? Even if it’s a 4.9, wouldn’t this put him faster than most left fielders and about 40% of right fielders? It seems to me that OF has a lot to do with the path you take to the ball. I would imagine a year in the minors could help him improve on that aspect dramatically. I may be missing things completely and still agree that AA is probably his ceiling, but do you really think he doesn’t have the speed for left?
@55
Funnily enough I lived in the Nease community and actually got to know TT a bit. He is the most authentic athlete of all time, IMO meaning there is 0% phony about him in a world when even the nicest athletes have some things you’d say, eh about.
If he was a little younger, I’d say through just iron will he might make AAA, but even I am skeptical but hopeful.
I secretly wish the Braves would sign him.
I think Tebow has the speed to play a corner OF, however bad routes will be the problem. His ceiling is a DH with power. Floor is SEC network
I didn’t think that a 4.7 40 would cut it in the outfield. If you mashed, then sure, you can play LF like Matt Kemp, but I figured he’d have to be plus defensively to carry his bat. I mean, I ran a 4.8 40 in high school and I did NOT have very good range.
As for his age, I’m not sure that’s really that important. He’s a young 29, and he’s in excellent shape. It’d be like Chris Weinke or Brandon Weeden getting a late start on their pro career. I think it’s the time away and the re-training part that would do him in (and his overall physical skills).
I know next to nothing of substance of Tebow’s football career other than he didn’t quite have the talent to make it as a QB…but was there ever any discussion about him moving to another position, perhaps TE?
@60
Guy wanted to play QB. He didn’t want to play in the CFL, and he didn’t want to play TE or H-back. He wanted to be an NFL QB, and he probably felt like he earned the opportunity after his time in Denver. People say he’s selfish or not a team player or vein, but why beat up your body for something you don’t have a passion for when you can already make more money on the SEC Network? It’s a no-brainer for me. The guy has earned the right to do whatever he feels is the best use of his time.
I so very much want us to sign him and look forward to seeing him in Rome next season.
ububba…
Could you update for us on the Conforto situation in NY pse? Still DL? There’s been press Collins has lost patience with him…is he now considered to be a below average outfielder? Clubhouse problems? Any chance he could be pried away? For me he was last year’s Trea Turner. Thanks.
These fellas aren’t playing like stiffs tonight. Julio’s pitching well too.
I don’t care if the guy was safe, that was a heck of a play by Swanson. That guy’s a gamer.
I do find it admirable that Tebow refused to work on the Sabbath.
Great pitching through 8 for JT + Jose Ramirez! Man is it nice to watch Braves’ pitching on a day they’re executing well.
I tell ya, my wife is an amazing woman. Not only did she let me name our first dog Chipper, she’s letting me pick the name of the second dog, and she’s ok with it being another baseball player!
She actually likes Dansby, but she also likes Mallex. If you were to pick a name, you would want to go with Dansby, right? Dansby is much more likely to be with Atlanta long term, and I don’t want to have the name of a player who doesn’t play with the Braves anymore. I was lucky that we got Chipper after the real Chipper retired, but I’m going to have to go out on a limb. I think Dansby is safer than Mallex, right? Braves Journal, please help.
Okay, this is pretty funny: https://mobile.twitter.com/OldHossRadbourn/status/770765345384722432
With M-Braves down 3-2 in the ninth inning, Albies… lead off the inning with a home run. His team won 6-3.
My prediction of Dansby’s first 38 ABs:
“How about 8 for his first 38 with 4 BB, 11 K and a double for one of this hits. Throw him a SB, too.”
In the real world, Dansby had 11 hits in his first 38 ABs. with 2 BB, 8 K, and one double. He has one SB. (He’d go 1 for 2 with another double in his remaining ABs in tonight’s game. I only tabulated the first 38 ABs to match Bregman’s extended slump to open his MLB career.)
More hits, fewer walks, fewer Ks, roughly the same OPS. I totally nailed it on doubles and SB. Anyway, kid’s holding his own at the plate. Good for him.
Braves sure choked away that big lead in the race for the #1 spot in the draft quick enough.
NIce job, John R. How about next year after 600 ABs?
Recapped.
@68, Name it Withrow.