Masyn lost.
Masyn Winn‘s two out throwing error in the top of the 9th allowed the winning run to score and allowed the Braves to salvage a split of their 6-game road trip. Ozzie Albies doubled to left off Ryne Stanek with one out in the 9th and moved to 3rd on a Matt Olson groundout to the right side. Michael Harris II was grazed by a pitch with an 0 – 2 count bringing Mauricio Dubon to the plate. Dubon’s slow grounder was fielded cleanly by Winn, but his throw to catch the hustling Dubon sailed wide right. Raisel Iglesias then picked up his 19th save on 10 pitches.
Even after his challenge confirmed the Harris HBP, Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol was ejected. As near as I can tell, his argument was that he was mad that the Cardinals lost their challenge. Or maybe he was trying to light a fire under his team, or maybe he was just ready to start his All-Star break a little early. In any case, arguing a replay is not a recipe for further participation in the day’s proceedings.
Brewer Hicklen, it turns out, is not a region of rural Wisconsin, but a Major League outfielder who got two hits, including an RBI double in the 6th that put the Braves up 3 – 1. After opener Danny Young allowed 3 two-out baserunners and a run in the first, J.R. Ritchie came on and ate 4 1/3 innings. They were mostly tasty. Ritchie allowed only one hit, that to his final batter, a leadoff double in the 6th. Dylan Dodd relieved and a walk and a single left Didier Fuentes stuck with a bases loaded one-out scenario. After Fuentes struck out Bryan Torres, Ritchie and Dodd were charged with a run apiece when a single by Jose Fermin tied the game at three.
The Braves go into the All-Star break at 55 – 40 and hold a two-game lead over the Phillies in the NL East, and 4 games over the Marlins. Drake Baldwin, Chris Sale, Albies, Olson, and Iglesias will be in Philadelphia Tuesday for the All-Star game. They rejoin the rest of the Braves in Atlanta on Friday against the Rangers, TBA vs. TBA.
I gotta say, their tarps off section was just pathetic compared to ours. After all that hype!
Brewer Hicklen was the feel-good story of the day. At the age of 30, it would take a miracle for him to stick, but he’ll always have some fond memories of his time with the Braves.
I never get tired of those stories.
Tough time in the season. Losses piling up. Injuries piling up. This was a game that looked liked ours to lose.
And yet: In the ninth inning: Dubón hits a grounder to short that the SS backs up on slightly. Does Dubón know that or see that? I don’t know. What I do know is that he is out of the batters box and hustling as fast as he can down the first-base line. Do we know that he wouldn’t have beaten the throw had it not been air-mailed? I don’t. On the TV broadcast, they said he would get a hit, with the E for the throw allowing runner to advance an extra base. Not what it shows in the box score. Whatever. I remember many,many years ago Bill James railing against stuff everybody once thought of as random (like walks! would you believe…?) included errors, as in forcing them. Some players did it more than others. Dubón looks like one of them to me. Really enjoying him this year, everything he does (clutch hitting, hustle, fielding, utility, attitude, interviews).
You really can force errors, and I’ve come to be resigned to the custom that it’s not tried 100% of the time. Does Dubón go that hard if it wasn’t the potential last out of the game, though? I think Dubón does.
What is the verdict on the Braves draft. Gracia gets a lot of positive review over on BP. Looking forward to your thoughts, snowshine.
I would also like to hear more from Snowshine but my short version is we got two guys who can flat out stroke in the first who will sign under slot and then 3 high upside HS arms that will require overslot deals to sign. Overall it is a huge haul of high end talent.
Of course, it was Dubon.
He has already achieved his career high in HRs (10), but his overall numbers (.265/.319/.420) don’t knock you out. Still, if you watch most of the games, you’ll see how he’s contributed big-time in the field (SS/3B/LF/CF) & at the plate. Big plays & big hits in big spots. Getting some serious value from that guy.
Thru all the injuries & the stitched-together rotation, Dubon along w/ Olson, MHII & Ozzie have been the glue that has prevented a complete unraveling. Hopefully, we’ll have a more formidable roster by the stretch run.
Brewer Hicklen should play for the Brewers.
Then his jersey would say…
Brewers Hicklen.
Brewer Hicklen grew up in Huntsville and went to the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is now the fifth UAB alum to play in the majors (though a handful of more prominent players went to UAB first then transfered to the school from which they were eventually drafted, including Michael Harris’s buddy Chandler Simpson and our old pal Chris Hammond).
If you were gonna design a UAB student in a lab, you’d probably call him “Brewer Hicklen.”
Also, Day 1 draft recap via Fangraphs:
Thanks, AAR!
From the AJC: “If you’re tired of the injury bug biting the Braves, just know it could be a lot worse. According to Spotrac, Braves players have spent a cumulative 1,101 days on the IL. That ranks ninth among MLB teams. Not all IL stints are created equal, but the Dodgers, Mets, Tigers and other teams have key players getting hurt like the Braves.”
Via Reddit, the BA analysts discuss our draft starting at ~36:00.
Braves signed Hirschkorn to a $3,997,500 deal, which is… $3,023,800 over slot…
Battery Power has a tracker embedded in their post:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRow2oqbcnYmaP1oKk0qASKIqJzbrvsKa2lKAOCwDIT3cOegr49rHR-fvPfFVFcGd_uHPlhxqHTmj6C/pubhtml/sheet?headers=false&gid=0
I can see those numbers all corroborated by (or perhaps sourced from) tweets by Baseball America’s Carlos Collazo. Interestingly, Cole Dennis signed for less than slot, despite predictions to the contrary.
The MLB All Star Game is one of the most boring sporting events in all of professional sports. Just my opinion!
If all I wanted to do was just watch a bunch of good baseball players answer inane questions, then I’d just – well I guess I’d just worry about myself.
Its funny, as a Kid in the 70s and 80s it was great, but it has become such nonsense now. Really all of them have.
I agree that the baseball All-Star game used to be — or at least it used to seem to be — a real competition. The NL was haughty and proud of its dominance in, what?, the 60s and 70s. There was some serious, hard play. Just ask Ray Fosse. (Edit: Just to convince myself I wasn’t imagining all of this, I looked up the lineups for the 1965 through 1967 games. Mays and Aaron together, with Ernie Banks and Roberto Clemente. And the pitching staffs — all highest-quality starters. Games like the 15-inning 1967 match-up: Some of those superstars were getting 6 ABs!)
I was dubious then very pleasantly surprised by the three-team round-robin that the NBA unveiled this year (young US vs old US vs non-US). I thought that they were going at it pretty darned hard. Kawai Leonard’s performance in one of those games was other-worldly. Credit Wembenyama with a lot of it: Him announcing that he intended to play to win seemed to have piqued the egos of his fellow stars.
Essentially, when interleague play started in MLB in ’97, it pretty much muted the all-star game for me.
Growing up, those rare pitcher/hitter matchups (confrontations that you might only see in a World Series) were mostly what drew me. Watching Tom Seaver pitch to Rod Carew or Jim Palmer pitch to Mike Schmidt was kinda cool.
To a lesser degree, seeing an AL speedster like Campaneris, Otis or LeFlore try to steal second with Johnny Bench behind the plate also was worth watching.
Last night, aside from the Braves moments (Ozzie, Iglesias, Olson), I only stopped the DVR to see Mason Miller pitch to the White Sox slugger Murakami. Otherwise, I watched the whole game in about 15/20 minutes.
The Braves drafted like a team that knows they’re about to lose a lot of prospect depth.
I haven’t seen Tyler Bell’s signing bonus announced yet, but I would except it be much higher than Gracia’s, which is why they probably took him over Bell.
I enjoyed the MLB all star game in the 1960’s. I haven’t watched an all star game in any sport since the mid 1970’s. I started to say I put away childish things, but that would not be true. Just all star games.
Kiley’s new Atlanta top 10 list:
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/47684227/2026-top-10-prospect-rankings-all-30-mlb-teams-kiley-mcdaniel#atl
Very few teams added 3 draftees to their top 10, which probably says something about both the quality of those 3 players… and the quality of our farm system. Kiley had us ranked 26th in his rankings previously. Teams ranked around where we are (Astros, Cubs, Rockies) were also able to add 3 to their top 10 with the draft while one team ranked around where we are (Angels) only added one player to their top 10. Oooof. So I would say that we did about what we could have done with the draft.
It does seem like after graduating a lot of prospect talent in the last several years, hopefully we get a little bit of a reprieve to allow for prospect talent to stack and develop.
The CBS Fantasy Baseball podcast discussed Riley at length today. He just really seems to be cooked, doesn’t he? And we’ve got SIX more years of paying him $22M per. This season is basically lost for him to have any semblance of a good season line. According to my buddy ChatGPT, he could have a 1.000 OPS over his next 120 plate appearances, and he still would only have around a .710 OPS. If he wants a .800 OPS this year, he would have to have a 1.080 OPS over his next 250 plate appearances. Thanks, Chat. Sorry, Austin.
snowshine weighs in