The Rise and Fall of Outrage Culture

Whether it’s Baseball America, Keith Law, Kiley McDaniel, Fangraphs, MLB, the 2023 Braves farm system is rated at the very bottom of the barrel…and it likely deserves it.

I had a friend whose father worked at the Budweiser brewery as an engineer for 25 years. One day, he asked his father how the brewers crafted the beer Natural Light. His dad replied:

“They start with Budweiser, using high quality ingredients, then move on to Michelob with what’s left of the grain, then move to Bud Light with what’s left after Michelob, then move to other beers. When all decent beers have been brewed, Natty Light is the closer and it’s mostly sawdust.”

Former Budweiser Engineer

So…. yes, 5 years ago the Braves farm was Budweiser (as a serious beer snob, this comp really bothers me, but I’m sticking with it… St. Bernadus ABT is truly the king of beers, though), and at this point, the Braves farm has become the worst beer on the planet, Natty Light… according to the gurus. And while I’m not saying they’re wrong, think about this for a moment… Was there any other team in MLB that were more positively impacted by their prospects than the 2022 Atlanta Braves?

10.5 fWAR from the farm sounds like quite an achievement, especially one that was considered to be in the bottom 6-7 on most lists. You’d be hard-pressed to find better results.

I’ve thought long and hard about this…the problem in terms of rankings. While it’s mostly the unknown, it’s also that the list isn’t fluid. It’s created in the offseason and doesn’t really change, at least to the public, for over 1/2 a year. It’s an outdated system, especially with

  • All of the newly developed offseason workouts chock full of immediate data to help a player.
  • The ability for a pitcherto develop a pitch in one offseason or a hitter to correct a swing flaw using immediate high tech feedback.

If scouts and pretend scouts want to truly rank farm systems, I think there are some things that need to change:

  1. An offseason list after all Fall and Winter Leagues are complete. Some dudes become DUDES in the AFL.
  2. Less focus on depth of a system, and more focus on valuing players of real impact. When discussing top-tier talent, those guys are the players that could become perennial All-Stars. However, the next level isn’t like a B in school compared to an A. It’s more like a C-. That first tier is elite talent, big game changers, but the next level just doesn’t equate to the grades given in these prospect lists. Braves had serious top-tier talent in Spencer Strider and Michael Harris II, but they were outweighed by “deep systems” chock full of players that will be hard-pressed to produce 4 WAR over a career, much less 3/4 of 1 season.
  3. Stop trying to put a value on a player that no one has seen (here’s looking at you Kevin Maitan). IMO, each player on a list needs real eyes on them in games at game speed, not a scouting report that’s passed to another scout passed from another scout that said he had light tower power. In our system, Ambioris Tavarez was a big IFA signing a few years back and he’s now played in 29 games and still no one really knows anything about him other than he was a big IFA signing. To my point, NO ONE should be putting a value on Tavarez because it’s just a dude passing info to another dude that saw him hit once and thought he looked ok. The sample is just too small.
  4. Pride: Pride killed Keith Law’s Braves top prospects list for years because he was blindly stubborn to the adjustments that Austin Riley was making in the minors. This happens way too often in the sport and it goes both ways. These dudes that write their lists don’t want to admit fault cause they feel like they’d lose face, but admitting fault is admirable, especially when it comes with no “but” or “however”. I’ve always felt it’s best to admit wrong and change my thought process rather than staying the course of ignorance. There’s no reason Spencer Strider’s fast rise to stardom should’ve come as such a surprise to most people that follow MLB considering his 2021 numbers that saw him start at Low-A, move to A+, then to AA, then to AAA, then to the bigs. I mean, the dude ONLY struck out 13.6/9 in the minors while walking 3.4. Someone, somewhere, in some midseason or end of season list should’ve seen that promise, said “that dude’s going to be a stud”, and had the cojones to throw him in the top 10 in their top prospects list.

Don’t Tread on Me…Pretty Please

Maybe snowshine can counter my argument, tell me how stupid I am, and to just let it go, but doggone it, this crap and these lists that truly mean nothing, really irk me when they’re soooooooo wrong.

With the high end talents of Strider and Harris, and still plenty in the pipeline before THIS offseason’s tradeapalooza, the 2022 Braves farm was probably deserving of a top-10 ranking (at least midseason), and I’ll gladly die on this hill and be buried on said hill with my 61 Braves fitted hats.

But the 2023 list…yeah, we definitely deserve it, until the surprises start showing up again.

And they will.