Friday Mailbag: Could Matt McLain Fix the Braves’ Shortstop Problem?

Plus: Milwaukee’s weird offensive approach, how Atlanta should spend on pitching, contract insurance, agent commissions and the Bobby Cox zoot-suit photo we apparently still aren’t allowed to see.

Welcome back to Braves Today’s Friday Mailbag, where we solicit questions from you, the readers. Doing a mailbag even once, let alone on a regularly scheduled basis, is an egocentric exercise, so I’m grateful to everyone who reached out with questions.

As Jason Isbell sings, “I’m lucky to have the work.”

(If you have something to submit for the mailbag, you can email me at contact@bravestoday.com. Paid subscribers get first priority, but I pull questions from email and social media too.)

Let’s talk about it.

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Out-of-the-box type solutions to SS?

Hunter, social media

Welcome in, Hunter, and thanks for the question.

You want to go out-of-the-box? Give me Matt McLain of the Cincinnati Reds.

First, the defensive question: Can he actually play short? He did in college at UCLA, moving from 3B/CF his freshman year to shortstop for both 2020 and 2021. Baseball America’s draft write-up prior to his first-round selection called out that he was an “instinctive defender who positions himself well (and) gets good reads off the bat,” although they predicted he’d eventually be overtaken at short by a better defender and relegated to either second base or center. He’s played second in Cincinnati due to the presence of Elly De La Cruz, but Statcast says he’s graded out at +1 OAA in his 754 career innings at the position, and if he has an offseason to prepare, he might be better than the slightly-above-average defense he’s shown in fill-in work.

But the offense is the real reason he might be available.

McLain’s debut season in 2023 was everything Cincinnati could have hoped for - he hit .290/.357/.507 with 16 home runs and 14 stolen bases, finishing 5th place in NL Rookie of the Year voting. He made more starts at shortstop than second, getting 53 at short, before eventually settling in at second alongside De La Cruz.

But a torn labrum in his shoulder and assorted cartilage damage required surgery in spring training the following year, and he missed all of 2024. He’s never been the same since, hitting a combined .204/.288/.339. He’s insisted that the shoulder is fine, despite admitting that he occasionally feels it and actually being scratched last August from a game because of soreness in the joint.

The reason Cincinnati might consider moving on is that he’s projected to have a $4M salary in his second of four arbitration years, and coming off a career-worst performance (and with infielders Edwin Arroyo and Cam Collier waiting in the wings), the notoriously frugal Reds might decide to move on and see what they can get for the slumping infielder. They perennially need outfielders and pitching, although they’re unlikely to take Jurickson Profar in a trade. Any groundball-inducing starter would likely be appealing, though, given their bandbox-sized ballpark.

To be clear, I don’t want McLain to be the only option - this works best if Atlanta also re-signs Mauricio Dubón, so they have a fallback if the Braves (or, more realistically, Maven Baseball Lab) can’t fix him over the offseason - but it’s an intriguing buy incredibly low that could pay dividends with three seasons of control.

Other options here this winter could be giving the job to a utilityman, like Edmundo Sosa (free agent) or Ezequiel Duran (trade), converting a second or third baseman like Jackson Holliday, Caleb Durbin, or Joey Ortiz (all via trade), or grabbing a previously under-discussed veteran like Trevor Story (via trade).

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Did you see the Twitter post from Ben Verlander that showed the Brewers are the only team whose average barrel angle at the point of contact is toward the opposite field? Is this the future of baseball?

Noah

I did not, because I have Ben Verlander muted on Twitter (his Ohtani glazing got to be a bit much), but he’s cribbing off of much better in-depth research by Chris Black so I understand the gist of the argument.

TL;DR: The Brewers hitters have both fast and short swings, as measured by bat speed and length of the swing. They’re not focusing on being ahead of the ball, to get the pulled-air contact that analytically driven teams love so much, but rather are willing to accept being late on the fastball to be on time for breaking balls and offspeed pitches.

We’ve seen this done on occasion, most notably by Philly against Spencer Strider in the 2023 postseason. They were sitting slider, content to foul off the fastballs, and so Strider ramped his FB velo up to nearly 100 mph in an attempt to compensate and get pitches by them. (This is also what drove him to incorporate the curveball over the winter).

But this is a full team approach, and one of the side effects is that Milwaukee, as Noah points out, ends up catching fastballs pretty deep in the box and with an average batted ball direction to the opposite field or up the middle. Chris points out the 2025 Blue Jays were essentially doing this same thing in the playoffs, although it felt more coincidental at the time, but it’s definitely an approach that can lead to success.

I’m sure there will be some teams that replicate this, asking their hitters to move towards the back of the box and shorten their swings, but Milwaukee built an offense on this exact premise - their guys are almost always short kings with unusually high bat speed and the patience/plate discipline to maintain the approach through an at-bat.

I do think in the macro sense, based on folks I’ve talked to in and around the game, contact over power is a trade-off more teams are interested in making. I don’t know if anyone can replicate this specific approach to Milwaukee’s level of detail (or effectiveness) without five years to draft and develop a roster for it, but the general concept of sitting on spin deep in the box and thinking opposite field will likely be one of the next directions the game shifts.

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How do you construct an effective pitching staff? How much should be invested in the bullpen versus starters? What’s the optimal projection for innings coverage between starters and bullpen? Can and should the Braves move optionable pitchers up from their system to increase flexibility and coverage, rather than signing DFA’d veterans, trying them, and DFA’ing them? If starters basically cover 50–55% of innings, shouldn’t the investment follow that coverage?

Tom

Dang that’s a good question, and there’s a lot of ways to break it down. Let’s work backward.

In 2026, starters covered 56.91% of a given team’s innings. The Mariners led baseball at 63.62% of their total workload covered by the rotation, while the White Sox were at the rear with 46.83%. Only two teams had less than 50% of their innings covered by the rotation, while only six had more than 60%. The Braves finished at 58.37%.

The interesting thing here is that Atlanta spent more money on their bullpen last season than they did the rotation, with the relievers taking roughly 56% to 59% of the total payroll allocations that went to arms. That’s a bit of a fuzzy figure that I did on the fly, as several Braves starters all pitched in relief, like Martín Pérez, Reynaldo López, and Grant Holmes, but the Braves typically run an expensive bullpen and didn’t have any highly paid starters outside of Chris Sale and Spencer Strider, who accounted for a majority of the $26.81M on the injured list. The Braves relied heavily on pre-arbitration and low-cost depth starters to eat innings, essentially.

That’s not always been the case. As recently as 2024, Atlanta’s starters were more expensive than their relievers, $56.8M to $45.98M.

But in baseball generally, starters are the ones who make the big bucks. Atlanta’s particular inversion of that formula stems from Alex Anthopoulos not supplementing the rotation with free agent spending over the last few seasons.

I’m probably a bit unique in that I’m not concerned with paying for relief innings, because I’m trying to buy as much certainty as possible. The $/WAR formula breaks down with relievers, as they’re usually not delivering enough WAR individually to make the comparison hold up on any free agent contract. Smart teams look at it from the perspective of dollars per Win Probability Added, though, with the Dodgers and Braves being on the forefront of this.

Tom does touch on a big issue, though - the Braves haven’t had enough optionable rotation innings in recent seasons, requiring waiver claims and subsequent DFAs as those out-of-options veterans need to be cycled out for a fresh arm. This is mostly an indictment of the previous wave of prospect pitchers, where Atlanta took “safe” college options like Ryan Cusick, Jared Shuster, and Beau Philip. The next wave, led by JR Ritchie and Owen Murphy, is starting to reach the majors now and should provide for more flexibility and adjustability as they acclimate to the bigs over the next two seasons.

In general, most teams are paying $20+ million for at least one starter, if not two, while exceeding $10M on the third and building the back end with either pre-FA guys or lower-paid veterans. The exceptions, like Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia are what stand out here because they’re paying two or three (or, in LA’s case, FOUR) of those >$20 million contracts.

I personally am fine paying for upside/ceiling, but the idea of paying a guy to be a back-end, take-the-ball-every-five-days starter is a bit anathema to me. Get those out of your farm system and pay up for the stuff, whiff, and ace potential.

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Premium subscriber Yonnie’s got a few in a row here:

How do teams use insurance policies? For instance, do they insure every contract, and how can those policies benefit a team, such as in the case of Profar—did it free up money to sign other players—or players who play only a small portion of a big contract, such as Hamels, or a pitcher out for a year and a half following Tommy John surgery on a big two-year deal?

What you need to know about sports insurance policies is they’re typically reserved for the larger guaranteed contracts on a team - think $15-20 million plus - and they run through a specialized underwriter like Lloyd’s of London. The premiums historically have varies from 3% to 10% of the insured value, depending on the player’s age and their position. (As you can imagine, pitchers are expensive.)

These policies typically are only approved after the player passes an extensive medical underwriting review, and they usually reimburse a significant portion of the player’s salary to the team if the player is unable to perform; they rarely cover 100% of the deal. This payment back to the team does not lower the player’s CBT hit, importantly. It’s separate and outside MLB’s payroll calculations.

These policies include temporary disability after a waiting period that can stretch for multiple months (depending on the policy), reimbursing the cost of the player’s salary after that deductible window is complete. They also kick in if the player suffers a career-ending injury, covering a large portion of the remaining guaranteed money on the contract.

Ever see a news story about a team reaching a settlement with an injured player to pay out the remainder of the contract? The team’s usually willing to cut a deal to pay them the Permanent Total Disability amount immediately, which they’ll get from the insurer, to get out of needing to pay the difference between that amount and the full guarantee.

Notably, the policies almost never cover pre-existing conditions - no one’s insuring Spencer Strider’s elbow or Ronald Acuña Jr’s knees - nor are they covering short-term stints, declining performance, or non-baseball injuries.

Also, if you’re doing something the team deems dangerous in the contract and get hurt, the insurance won’t pay and they’ll usually withhold your salary, too. Giants outfielder Harrison Bader crashed while allegedly riding a scooter drunk through the streets of San Francisco in July, which the team deemed unnecessarily risky, and suspended payment of his salary while investigating the incident. The two parties are reportedly close to a settlement to resolve the matter, and he’s expected to rejoin the team next spring.

(PED suspensions aren’t something that’s covered by insurance, but the Braves weren’t on the hook to pay Profar during his suspensions anyway.)

I don’t know much about Atlanta’s insurance situation - teams do not talk about this stuff on the record - so I can’t give any specific insight as to what we do and don’t have insured, although I’ve been told by agents before that the Braves aren’t very aggressive in insurance markets for their stars.

How much do agents make from a player’s contract, on average, as a percentage? What happens to that agent’s cut if the agent is fired—Freddie Freeman, for example—while the contract still exists? Does the new agent benefit from the already signed deal?

MLBPA, as you can imagine, has very specific rules about this stuff and actually regulates the language of the agreements between agents and players.

But to be short: If you negotiate a player contract or represent a player for an arbitration award before being fired, you get paid that specific commission amount (usually between 3-5%) on the same schedule as when the player gets paid, even though you got fired. Players have challenged that before and an arbitrator (Turner v Jones is an applicable NBA case here) ruled that firing the agent does not absolve the player of the responsibility to pay the agent for their services.

Now, if you fired your agent and then your new agent negotiates a new contract or renegotiates your current one, the fired agent does not receive a cut of the new deal, as they were not representing you when it was signed. The old deal, once it’s superseded by the new one, stops paying commission to the old agent, and the new agent collects.

If there’s ever a dispute about anything involving agent compensation, the MLBPA has a formal and detailed agent regulation process and its rules send the dispute to a neutral arbitrator to be resolved.

Is there a potential scenario you envision where a player could request a challenge against himself or his team? For instance, a missed third strike that is called a ball becomes a passed ball, and the player runs to first and is safe instead of having another ball added to the count. Another possibility: a storm is imminent, and a team wants to reach official-game status rather than have a lengthy delay, missed flight, or makeup date.

To address the specific premise directly, an overturned ball becoming strike three would retire the batter even if the original pitch was dropped and/or went to the backstop. So no, challenging a random ball call into a dropped strike three wouldn’t allow you to advance to first if you beat the throw.

Outside of that, I can’t really think of a scenario where an ABS challenge against the call of a ball for a hitter (or against a strike for the pitcher) would make sense. I don’t think it’s technically against the rules, but the dropped strike three rule being overridden by a challenge means it’s not worth it.

Years ago, I heard that Cox, Pendleton, and the other coaches took a photo of themselves in zoot suits for fun, maybe when Cox retired. Is that true, and if so, when can we finally see that photo?

This is a true story. According to now-retired Braves beat writer David O’Brien, who graciously answered a text for this, the coaches returned from a road trip to Milwaukee back in 2010 while all decked out in zoot suits. The backstory here is that the coaches were doing a private photo in commemoration of Bobby Cox’s last season, having bought the suits on a whim while traveling through Milwaukee. The Braves ended up sweeping the Brewers with a blowout in game three, which prompted Bobby Cox to push for the coaches to wear the suits on the bus and plane home.

Per reports at the time - shoutout to the AP for finding these newspaper clippings for me - Terry Pendleton was in a lavender suit with a purple hat, vest, and shoes, while Cox himself was wearing a bright orange pinstriped suit.

Sadly, to answer the question, no picture has ever been publicly seen.

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What does your perfect Saturday look like when the Braves aren’t playing?

Jared

Well, the Braves almost never have off days on Saturdays, so maybe write that down.

But seriously, even during the season, we frequently tried to have what we called a “Johnny Cash morning” every Sunday. Cash famously said his idea of paradise was “This morning, with her, having coffee,” with “her” referring to his wife June Carter.

I frequently took my Sunday mornings on the back deck with my wife and a cup of coffee, even in season. There were times I wouldn’t even come inside to do a live stream for The Scouting Report, just publishing the written version (that I wrote before she woke up) from my phone once the lineups were out for the day.

You gotta find the little moments, you know?

Enjoy your weekend, everyone.