Related to my comment @37 in the previous thread, I got a few emails from Jay Wigley of Retrosheet, who asks for our help:
I wonder if you’ve ever asked that community (your readers, other Braves fan contacts) whether they have any early 70’s scorecards or scorebooks with scores games in them? I’m a sometime-volunteer for Retrosheet and boy, do we need Braves games from the late 70’s.
…In particular, there is a game in late 1973 that is the ONLY missing game from the whole season. It was a game versus the Astros where Hank Aaron was nearing 714 home runs (I think he was at about 710 at that point in 1973), so maybe if fans who have scored games from Aaron’s run up to Ruth, that might trigger some of their recollections?
But I don’t want to limit their attention. 🙂 We need any/all scored Braves games from 1973 and before. Even if Retrosheet already has one scored account, it’s wonderful to have more than one since some fans capture details that others miss (even the club scorers miss details).
As you know if you’ve been around the baseball internet for a while, Retrosheet is invaluable. Please help if you can! If you want to get in touch with Jay Wigley directly, you can email him at jaywigley at me dot com. Or you can always just email me at the address in the upper right. Thanks again!
One minor (NOT SO MINOR) correction to my email. . .the games needed are all EARLY 1970’s and late 1960’s games, but ANY Braves games scored before 1988 can be useful.
Adam Fisher wasn’t a Braves exec very long.
MLB held a workout to show off the 12 players they took from us, but only 3 showed up.
https://www.baseballamerica.com/international/most-players-skipped-mlbs-workout-for-former-braves-prospects/?amphtml=1
Andrew Tinnish
will be here at the start if not the finish
any more Canadians
we’re talking French and measuring in radians.
Perry Minasian
now assistant GM after minimal persuasion
AA not feeling threatened
made him responsible for IFA debt and…?
It would be hilarious if half or more of the taken prospects were like “fuck it, 100k ain’t worth the trouble” and stayed with Atlanta.
Good read on Teheran’s 2017 season:
http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/21490178/was-atlanta-braves-julio-teheran-good-year-war-says-yes-no-maybe
@2, @5
The article says that the players felt like they weren’t in game shape considering they were in the middle of their offseason. Don’t blame them. You haven’t thrown in 8 weeks, and they want you working out for 29 teams? They can organize their own workouts and keep MLB the heck out of it.
Coming up on the non-tender deadline, there’s a lot of Matt Adams chatter. There seems to be a sentiment that if they tender him a contract, his trade value plummets to little or nothing, and I don’t see how that can be so. If anything, you have some concrete figures to work with, and teams will be just as interested as now. It seemed like in the beginning they’d be able to get a decent reliever for him, so I don’t see why that still can’t be so.
Have a team sign a couple of our lost prospects for peanuts and trade Adams to get them back.
Just say no to trading Teheran. Seriously, where else are you going to spend $9.5M per for the next 2 years with his upside? He was a league average starter last year who averaged #1 starter WAR the 3 seasons previous. And he’s 26, 9 months older than Mike Foltynewicz. If Teheran isn’t someone to build around, who is? If you trade him for prospects, then you prolong the rebuild. If you trade him for established players, you likely get someone with less upside to be as good as he’s been. And you don’t have anyone in the high minors who’s a good bet to join the rotation and be a league average starter by the end of the next year. It sucks, but at the end of the day, they’ve committed to Teheran and have to see it through.
I hold on Julio.
@9 I tend to agree. What ‘level’ of prospect do you think we could even get. Sickels B/B-, good org 20-30. Bad org 10-20?
Or conversely, what MLB level level/type of player do you think he’d bring, if anything at all?
yeah,I agree. I don’t think you can get value in return that offsets his on the field value (please no swap for A level prospects) or the productive value relative to his salary cost.
Chalk up last year to luck, learning a new ballpark and a livelier ball. Of course he could regress and his value could go to zero but that’s a bet you need to take at this point.
Interesting article though
Yes one of the main things I took away was that Julio got beat up by leading the league in just enough homers and probably tried to pitch to weak contact to compensate leading to higher walk totals. He pitched like essentially the same pitcher as 2016, just got worse results. Juiced ball prob didn’t help.
@13 Agreed. A few less walks and a few less homers and we’re probably talking about him as if he just had a little bit of a down year but very much in the team’s plans. According to that article, Baseball Prospectus’ wins calculation thought he had a perfectly fine season.
@13, Juiced up ball and/or STP. We only have one year’s worth of data on park effects but it looks ominous for flyball pitchers.
You know I thought the same thing about STP but the park factors don’t show that actually. Ranked 19th and was below avg for HRs. I think we just went with that narrative (may have just been that all HR were up in baseball and STP was the only new park).
http://www.espn.com/mlb/stats/parkfactor/_/sort/HRFactor
Give Matt Adams a contract and hang on to Julio.
STP sort of leveled out after starting out insanely as if it were a HR haven. We tend to remember the opening barrage and not the fade out (after most normal people stopped watching the team.)
The home team in STP didn’t help the power numbers.
Julio is cheap, has been very durable, and eats innings.
The park factors take that into account I believe. I know it measures the home teams home vs road splits and I’m sure it’s more detailed than that, but the power or lack thereof of the home team should have no bearing on the factors.
@19 LOL, yes.
Yeah I know, I meant that we had some guys start off hot and then really tail off. Kemp was useless the whole 2nd half. Freeman missed a ton of time. Inciarte lucked into a cluster of homers in a short span. STP looking like a launching pad early on, and then falling back to neutral is probably mostly due to our own bats.
We also play in the NLeast with an unbalanced schedule. Not sure if park factors can correct for that or not.
Park factors account for home teams. Park factors account for what teams visit. I’m not sure 2017’s park factors account for the fact that STP’s Statcast strikezone was horribly miscalibrated for the majority of the season, and what effect that had on umpires calling balls and strikes, and thus pitchers getting weird K zones.
I don’t how valuable Julio may be going forward (that is a fascinating article), but trading him now would be the epitome of selling low. Moreover, the Braves’ biggest shortcoming going into 2018, imho, is the lack of proven, dependable starting pitching. Teheran is far and away the most proven of the bunch. That’s a very low bar, of course. I’m as high as anyone on Gohara and Fried, I still have hope for Newcomb, I believe Folty may yet turn the corner and become a top of the rotation starter, and I’m very excited about Soroka and Allard, but Lord knows each one of those guys could fall on his face. Julio’s floor for next season is a lot higher than any of them.
Agreed with @25 in total. The Braves need MORE starting pitching, not less. The plan for the last few years seems to have been “buy cheap ‘innings eaters’ on the trash heap market and hope Julio develops into a ‘true #1.'” That plan has failed for some years running. I think a better idea now would be “buy a ‘true #1’ on the free agent market, because it ain’t my money, and accept that Julio is your ‘innings eater’ at this point.”
New thread.