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 ego-centric 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.
On Opening Day 2027, is Profar on the Braves’ Opening Day roster?
Follow-up questions, in the same vein:
If he’s not on the Opening Day roster, where is he?
Is he tradable? I have a hard time seeing a GM of another team explaining to his fan base why he traded for a guy who got popped for steroids the last two years.
Does AA ask the team leaders if they would have him back in the clubhouse?
Does AA just eat his salary? I would doubt that, but given AA’s recent comments about feeling like he had gotten away from considering team culture and clubhouse fit, I’m beginning to wonder.
John “Doc” Saunders
BONUS from Doc, via social media: What’s the competition level like in Venezuela, where Profar’s now playing winter ball?
I imagine that the plan, as of now, is for Profar to be here unless the leaders in the clubhouse tell AA they don’t want him. But the Braves are really in a tough spot here.
As Doc alluded to, AA’s comments about doubling back down on the clubhouse culture likely complicate things. Do the team leaders even want him back, after he virtually vanished after the second suspension? Andruw Jones has talked about Team Netherlands coming back from a workout to the news and Profar had disappeared - his stuff was gone, and he took off without addressing the team, a similar dynamic to Ronald Acuña Jr’s admission on his podcast that Profar changed his phone number and “ghosted” everyone with the organization after the suspension was announced.
But it’s possible that Profar’s early performance in Venezuela might help move on from him. With the caveat that the talent level in the Venezuelan Winter League is not good - I’d put it somewhere between High-A and Double-A - he’s currently 4-10 with a double, four RBIs, and three runs scored. I think the best-case scenario is Atlanta makes a deal to get rid of the player without needing to eat the money owed to him, especially if that other team thinks he can legitimately help and doesn’t require you to take on a bad asset in return. Maybe San Diego would take him back, as he had his best success with the Padres, but what do they have available via trade that makes the major league team better? You’d likely be dumping the player’s salary, at best, but that’s better than cutting him and eating the 15 million.
Don’t you think that we should deal with the bottleneck of fine young shortstops at Triple-A by choosing one NOW for a good long look in Atlanta and freeing up Dubón?
Clay
Part of the problem is that those shortstop prospects are all in Double-A, not Triple-A. Gil and Lodise combined for only 235 at-bats at the level this year, while Southisene broke his wrist when he was hit by a pitch during his lone Double-A plate appearance.
(Gil hit .315/.385/.427 in 143 ABs, while Lodise hit .283/.343/.435 in 92 ABs.)
If we were having a normal offseason and spring training, the Braves would likely invite all three prospects to spring training (Gil and Lodise were NRIs last year) and see if anyone could play their way onto the roster early, but it’s not going to be a normal offseason. I personally feel it’s imperative that the Braves know what the shortstop plan is before the lockout begins on December 2nd, whether that’s re-signing Mauricio Dubón, bringing in J.P. Crawford or making a trade.
It’s just too important a job to leave up to chance and/or to make a decision based on a heater from a youngster who is being asked to jump two levels of the minors. The responsible thing is to figure it out without needing one of those kids to take a leap.
Some people I’ve spoken with do feel that Southisene in particular is a player that could rapidly finish the minor league climb and debut in the second half of 2027, so this problem might resolve itself after the All-Star Break, but I don’t think we can count on that.
My question is, now that the ABS system is the “final say” when there is a challenge for a ball or strike call, do you think MLB will ever just let ABS be used fully as it was originally intended, or do you think the so-called “drama” and “strategy” have taken over? Especially since they were on their “time of game” kick with the pitch clock. This would slightly speed up the game, eliminate controversy, help pitchers and hitters just focus on their jobs, and help the Braves, because most hitters are terrible at challenging.
My point also includes the talk of overhead cameras to judge check-swing calls. If that is a real possibility, that further shows the need for ABS. I really like it when CJ shows umpires’ tendencies, which further proves the need to just let the ABS system work and keep me from yelling at the TV when you can see the pitch is a strike or a ball and either no one challenges it or they challenge it incorrectly.
I thought about this when Austin Riley said in an interview with Mookie Betts on a podcast, “I got to try and hit a hundred, and now I got to be an umpire.” Maybe if the hitter could just focus on hitting, instead of the additional task of trying to make another split-second decision about challenging a call, they could relax a little bit and go back to “see ball, hit ball.”
Ray
I don’t see it changing any time soon because they took a long time to get here.
MLB has tested ABS in some form since 2019. It reached select Triple-A parks in 2022 and expanded to all 30 Triple-A stadiums in 2023. During the 2023 season and the first half of 2024, the first three games of each six-game series used full ABS, while the final three used the challenge system. On June 25, 2024, Triple-A switched entirely to challenges.
As I remember correctly from minor leaguers I spoke with at the time, the problem with the fully automated system was both the lack of nuance and player preference. It turns out that no one really enjoyed the textbook zone always being called, believe it or not. Some of the difficulty comes down to how the zone is defined, where the textbook zone (based on a batter’s stance) produces more walks and fewer balls in play, as well as the fact that human zones start relatively tight but change during the game. East-west pitchers can typically earn an extra inch or two on the inner or outer edge through repeatedly hitting those spots, four-seamers can sometimes establish the “upper rail” rather easily, and those human zones naturally widen in blowouts to keep the game moving.
The league tried 17-inch-wide zones and 19-inch zones in the minors, with those 19-inch zones causing a dramatic surge in strikeouts, as well as trying both the batter’s stance and a percentage of their verified height to set the zone. The 3-D zone was an unmitigated disaster, with certain breaking balls (namely sweepers) barely nicking the edge of the zone at the very front of the plate and being strikes despite being caught in the opposite batter’s box, so they swapped to a 2D zone that’s roughly at the midpoint of the plate as measured front to back.
At the end of the day, only 11% of team personnel (players, coaches, and front office staff) told MLB they preferred the fully automated system, versus 61% who wanted the current challenge system and 28% who voted for no ABS at all. So I get why they went with the challenge system, and I think it’s a good compromise that keeps the “human element” (and catcher framing) in the game while allowing teams to correct obvious mistakes.
(I’d go one step further and have egregious misses, where the ball is entirely out of the zone but called a strike and vice versa, automatically fixed. We have the technology, so let’s fix the obvious mistakes.)
But Riley’s comments are really interesting, as well. I do think that some hitters seem to be suffering from mental overload, where they’re being asked to remember the nuances of the scouting report, watching for a close pitch to challenge, all while, as Riley said, “trying to hit 100.” I’m not shocked that some teams are better than others at it, and someone like Riley, who has struggled with pitch recognition at times, is having an issue with adding one more element to his plate while, well, at the plate.
There are a few ways to address that.
The first is the Yandy Diaz approach. Tampa Bay’s DH actually addressed this in June, telling the Tampa Bay Times that he’d rather focus on hitting than the additional responsibility of challenging. He joked at the time that he might challenge something in the World Series, if Tampa made it that far, but he didn’t. It cost his team 59 strikes over the cost of a season, which isn’t actually that many if you think about how many of those would have actually swung an at-bat - why challenge a 0-0 pitch to leadoff the game?
The second is the approach that the Brewers have taken, which is to buy their hitters as much time as possible to recognize the pitch before deciding to swing. As this phenomenal twitter article from fellow Substacker and Rogers SportsNet producer Chris Black discusses, Milwaukee’s sought-out athletes with short, fast swings, put them as far back in the box as possible, closed their stances, and sacrificed pull-side air power to buy a few crucial extra milliseconds of pitch recognition before needing to make their swing decision.
So, to bring it back to the original question, I don’t think they’re going to move to full ABS, although I do wish they’d add an automated ball/strike call to egregious errors, sort of like how all touchdowns are briefly reviewed in football.
And also, I love CJ’s zone graphics and would love to add that to The Scouting Report’s umpire breakdown section, but I can’t find a free source of umpire heat maps. If this is a big enough want where some free subscribers would commit to converting to a paid membership if we add it, I can reach out to a data source like TruMedia and see if they can cut us a deal.
Do you think it is wise to sacrifice some power for a better on-base average?
Noah
I used to think that, but my thought process has evolved a bit.
After watching last year’s Toronto team, a low-strikeout, high-contact squad, mash their way to extra innings of a World Series game seven against the Dodgers, it feels like the capacity to slug from your on-base guys is more important than asking your whiff-prone sluggers to walk more. I think we’ve seen in Atlanta that the sluggers making a change isn’t not entirely realistic.
But Drake Baldwin, especially early in the season (before his oblique injury), did a great job of splitting the difference in exactly the way you’re suggesting. Baldwin, essentially, had two different swings this year — a power-oriented swing, which he reserved for the bases being empty, and a shorter, more patient approach that he went to when runners were on base and doubled down on with runners in scoring position.
Prior to the oblique injury, here’s what he did in those scenarios:
Bases empty: .314/.314/.676, 21.4% whiff rate
Runners on: .371/.365/.500, 20.3% whiff rate
w/ RISP: .390/.381/.512, 14.6% whiff rate
(Yes, the OBP can be lower than the batting average here because sacrifice flies count against OBP but not batting average.)
At the end of the day, I think the solution for Atlanta is having more guys that are adjustable and flexible in their approach, like Baldwin and what Dubón showed this season. Is that something that Matt Olson and Ronald Acuña Jr. can do? Probably. Austin Riley and Sean Murphy? I’m not so sure.
As a result, as I discussed on the podcast on Thursday, adding a source of reliable on-base production is paramount for whoever they bring in to fortify the offense. I just don’t think that the current personnel is all equipped, from a skill-set perspective, to make that trade-off.
An article on baseball expansion: most likely cities, and how would it work regarding player selection?
Michael
Oh man, I could do 4000 words on expansion, but long story short: The league wants to add two teams, which would likely be one in the East and one in the West, and then re-align the divisions to four geographic-based divisions per league. (And yes, I have thoughts on that, too.)
I’m assuming that the Eastern team, based on work done by local groups and MLB’s comments on what they want from these teams, would be based either in Nashville or Charlotte, although I’ve heard there’s a potential ownership group working on something in the Durham/Raleigh area.
For the player selection, we’d be doing another expansion draft, which hasn’t happened in MLB since 1997. At the time, it worked with a three-round system to add 35 players to each of the new teams, Tampa Bay and Arizona.
In the first round, both expansion teams selected 14 players each, with current MLB teams being able to protect 15 players from their entire organization. (The caveat was that players who hadn’t debuted were subject to Rule-5-like conditions to be eligible to be picked, so you weren’t taking their top prospects unless those kids were three or four years into their pro careers and not protected.)
In the second round, teams could protect three more players while the expansion teams got to select 14 more, and three more players could be protected before the third round before those two expansion franchises selected seven more players.
Atlanta lost three players in the expansion draft, all to Tampa Bay, and then traded Fred McGriff to them after the draft concluded.
Make you a deal: once we get into the throes of the lockout and I need content, I’ll do a whole series on expansion: Nashville vs Charlotte vs Raleigh/Durham, who the Braves would protect in a hypothetical expansion draft, etc.
I believe it was Jack Llewellyn who worked with a young Smoltz to transform his career toward the Hall of Fame, but it seems Smoltz discounted his influence and that other players could also benefit from adding the psychological element to their toolbox. Do the Braves have someone on staff who addresses this, and would baseball’s macho attitude prevent a player from seeking help, or would they be ridiculed?
Yonnie
The Braves have worked with Zach Sorensen, a Mental Performance Coach, in the past, although he’s currently working with the Cincinnati Reds, and that change happened in the last two years, I believe. Kyle Wright was an outspoken advocate of Sorensen’s and how he helped Kyle take control of the game’s mental side. It’s a change that allowed him to be freer on the mound.
“That’s when it becomes a game,” Wright told old friend Justin Toscano, then of the AJC. “You’re competing, you’re having fun. And that’s why I feel like all of us first started to play this game when we were young, is you enjoy competing, you enjoy having fun, you enjoy winning.”
I currently don’t know if the team has someone on staff at the moment who handles this, although I’ve reached out to a few contacts within the organization to ask. Sorensen was known for helping players at all levels, from organizational players to the team’s major league stars, and he’s not the only one who has engaged with the team on that front.
Austin Riley’s agent connected him with Johan Martinez-Khalilian, a mental skills coach, prior to the 2023 season. “The mental game of baseball, of any sport, there’s so much to it,” Riley told - you guessed it, Toscano. “It’s way more than being physical and just gifted. The mental side of a (162-game season) is tough. It’s like, why not practice it? Why not? And that’s something I’m learning.”
To answer the unspoken question: No, I don’t know if Riley’s still working with Johan or not.
But even at the time, Riley discussed how the different ways he was changing his mindset, to focus on learning from mistakes and failures and seeing the positive versus focusing on the negative, allowed him to get better as a baseball player. “I’m definitely seeing some improvements as far as just the way you see things,” Riley told Toscano.
The fact that Wright and Riley have both discussed this work publicly probably answers the question about baseball’s “macho” culture. The stigma has not disappeared, obviously, and I’m assuming plenty of players keep their work private, but teams increasingly treat mental performance as another part of player development instead of an admission that something is wrong with the player.
And if they’re not still working with Mental Performance Coaches, they need to get back on that, ASAP.
An easy question: What spot would you bat Baldwin in the Braves lineup?
Emmanuel
I think the best spot is probably third, ahead of Matt Olson at cleanup. He’s a good enough hitter that he needs to be batting pretty high, but he’s also a slow enough baserunner that I don’t necessarily want him leading off.
The problem is that of the team’s top four hitters, three (Olson, Baldwin, Michael Harris) are all lefties and so if you put Ronald Acuña Jr. back at leadoff, it means either a three-lefty stretch or using a lesser hitter to break up that southpaw run.
Is Harris able to continue making enough contact to offset a low walk rate and hold down leadoff? I think so, but I’d sure feel a lot better if he could get that 3.7% walk rate up even a few percentage points.
The other option here, obviously, is to have the major offensive addition be a right-handed hitter like Seiya Suzuki or Randy Arozarena and use one of them to break up the run. Would probably require bumping Baldwin up to second and taking the speed hit, but then allowing the righty to bat behind him and ahead of Olson and Harris.
I’m sure that whatever Walt Weiss picks as the optimal lineup, it’ll get tweaked based on matchups and how hot (or cold) each respective hitter is performing at that time.
Is Olson’s consecutive-games streak hurting the team? I seem to remember Murphy’s production declining with his similar streak until his hand injury. Although I don’t seem to remember Murphy’s big production returning, it did seem the streak prevented him from taking a day off to get some rest that may have helped. I also seem to remember Ripken slipping as he became beholden to his streak. These streaks are cool, but at what point do they only benefit the player and harm the team?
Yonnie
I don’t really know if we’ll get an answer to this, truthfully, as Olson feels like the kind of guy who could have had surgery after the season, and we’ll just never find out about it unless he volunteers it at spring training.
I agree with you that it feels like he’s playing through small, nagging stuff at times and could probably use a day, but clearly isn’t going to take one because of the Iron Man streak.
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to ask Olson to sit when he’s capable of playing. But I also wouldn’t be heartbroken if some minor issue forced him to take a weekend off and ended the conversation. Once the streak is gone, every day off can be evaluated on its own merits instead of carrying historical weight.
But to answer the larger question, I think these sorts of streaks only become a problem if the player’s clearly diminished or injured but on the field anyway, and Olson’s not at that point. His batting average was down this year, although in line with his career norms, and he topped 40 homers for just the second time in his career. I don’t think we’re quite there yet with the streak being a problem.
I don’t know if you have answered this question, but other than SCR (Steep Canyon Rangers), what other bluegrass/jamgrass bands do you like or would recommend? I love the Infamous Stringdusters!
David
If the Stringdusters are your anchor point here on the exploration, I’d try Railroad Earth, Greensky Bluegrass, Leftover Salmon and Yonder Mountain String Band. Punch Brothers and Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway lean toward the progressive side, while Billy Strings and Kitchen Dwellers bring more of the jam-band vibe to it.
If you want something with artists you might already know, Chris Stapleton did a lot of work with his bluegrass band the SteelDrivers before getting into more of the solo act stuff, while Sturgill Simpson has two bluegrass albums (Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) with an amazing group of backing musicians that have been referred to as “the Hillbilly Avengers”.
Can’t go wrong with any of that.
Truth be told, I do listen to bluegrass at times, but believe it or not, it’s not my #1 go-to genre.
I’m actually a big fan of classic country, everything from Hank Williams Sr. to the outlaw country of the 70s (Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, etc.) I still sing a lot of 80s/90s country around the house, as that’s what I grew up on, and have taken a liking to the Bakersfield sound (which, for those who don’t know, is a sub-genre of country music from the 1950s named for the region of California where it originated). Give me all the Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam and Merle for that, with Merle’s crossover meaning he gets more than his fair share of run in my house.
I also, much to my wife’s surprise, enjoy Outkast and even trap beats. I contain multitudes, David.