biggentleben

This post basically explains my complete review of the game. Thanks, Chief, for saving me the time of typing it without having researched the actual play calling. The numbers are more atrocious than my eye even caught.

I missed today's game, but scouting the stat lines, I was surprised to see the move so quickly to Smith in the backfield. Wolitarsky outproduced his entire 2014 with today's performance. Boddy-Calhoun with a pick made me happy as well as he's going to have to play up for the defense to really make the impact both on run and pass defense.

I don't think Williams alone is. I love Smith, but the guy to keep an eye on is true freshman Shannon Brooks from Georgia. It's rare for Kill to keep a true freshman skill guy, but even more so a true freshman, which is why I'm keeping an eye on Brooks and Rashad Still, the wide receiver who flashed some good stuff in the TCU game. I think the running back corps will be solid, even if there isn't a single stud in the group.

I still worry about the exterior of the line. The tackle situation was notably poor, yet TCU's pass defense couldn't put together a solid rush consistently. Whether that's the product of poor TCU front 7 or the product of better cohesion among the whole unit. That said, the tackles, when healthy, should be the centerpiece of the line. Josh Campion is a red shirt senior who was arguably the Gophers best lineman last year, but he was out with a concussion for Thursday's game. That put swing tackle Ben Lauer at left tackle, but he had offseason surgery on his knee, and he was not 100%, and it was clear in the first half. Jonah Pirsig might be the best lineman the Gophers have this year, but they had to move him from his comfortable right tackle spot to the left last night. Add in that I believe you'll see a pair of redshirt seniors eventually give way to two very talented Texan brothers at the guard spots, and the team could end up with two draftable tackles (probably 7th round draftable types, but still...) and two all-conference guards along with their redshirt senior center.

On your last point, I don't think the emphasis on Kill's offense is QB, but his QB needs a very solid line in front of him to produce in that offense. Kill finally has "his guys" on the line after being there a few years.

There are 3-5 "good" QBs in college football on a yearly basis that are not complete garbage either the year before or year after. It's the biggest dearth of a position in college football. I think one of the reviews I saw of the Gophers was great. It said on Leidner, "Gopher fans hate him, Big 10 coaches talk highly of him, Kill loves him, and he's above average as a QB in college football." Encouraging game last night, though I wish the Big 12 officials wouldn't have made it so obvious. That said, the fumble through the end zone and the dropped INT that would have likely been a TD hurt. When you're playing an elite team and trying to pull off the upset, you need little breaks like that going your way, not the other way. See: Penn State and Ohio State back-to-back seasons taking down those two when they were rated #2 in the country - on the road, no less.

That's where I'm at. When my wife goes to a game (and she went to 10 as part of our honeymoon this summer, so I definitely got an idea of what keeps her eye at a game), scoreboards are a huge thing. For her, she loves finding the one stat that each park keeps that others don't. A very close second for her, however, would be participating in the "fan experience" things - the YMCA, the wave, kiss cam, etc. I enjoy having my wife come to games with me, so if that's what it takes, then wave on...

Yup.

Then it's done. Since the Braves don't acquire hitting prospects, they'll bypass Sano and Buxton and settle for Berrios for Grilli straight up. He does have a contract for next year, too, so you are getting a very good deal on a non-rental!

What reasonable doubt? He was suspended this spring from either a spring or offseason test. He was part of multiple tests in 2014 with the Braves and didn't get popped. The Braves didn't pursue Santana before he was signed because they didn't have the financial resources to do such. By the time they had freed up the money to make a run at a big contract like that, the Twins had already signed Santana. They offered him the qualifying offer, so they obviously felt he was worthy of a $14M+ annual contract. The Braves decision on Santana was 100% financial, not suspension related.

1. You know when he began using? 2. The Braves nearly lost 90 games last year in Santana's only season with the team. Where was that benefit?

Healthy exchange? Terry Ryan traded his banana for Mike Pelfrey's celery at the team's bag lunch on Sunday.

So then where does the fact that one out of the top ten list of the last 5 years had a walk rate above 11%, and only one in the group 20 years ago sported the same thing? Pitches per at bat are significantly down, strikeouts are up, while swinging strikes out of the zone were up in 2014 and 2013 after coming down briefly in 2012 on a league-wide basis. Players are sitting back for the best pitch of the at bat anymore instead of going after the first good pitch they see. That's not an incorrect approach at its base, but it does often lead to more strikeouts when a batter gets two strikes in on pitches that weren't right for him and all of the sudden needs to protect the zone rather than search for a good pitch.

It all depends on your perspective. Frank Thomas overheard that conversation with Smoltz and the other Braves starters, and when he sat down with Smoltz, he talked about how if the zone was taller while he played, his home run number would have had a 6 in front of it because he loved when a guy attempted to go up the ladder. He also talked about how Tony Gwynn would have been a multiple time .400 hitter with a more narrow zone and added high zone. I think one major issue that has been missed recently is how much the swing and miss hitter has really made pitchers better. Baseball's growing acceptance of the strikeout has certainly allowed for a lot more pitching success. Imagine the context - runner on second, bottom of the ninth, tie score. Dennis Eckersly facing one of the top ten hitters of the early- to mid-90s. Eck could reach back for everything he has, and he would have one hitter with a 15+% strikeout rate - Shane Mack, oddly enough, who is #10 in batting average from 1990-1994 among qualified hitters. One other hitter is above 13%, and four guys had higher walk rates than strikeout rates. Craig Kimbrell or Aroldis Chapman facing hitters 20 years later. One guy has over a 20% strikeout rate, 3 are over 15%, and 7 are above 13%. The only guy who walks more than he strikes out is Victor Martinez, and it's by 0.1%. I'd put the odds at at least twice as high that the pitcher would be able to strike out a top ten hitter in that situation currently as 20 years ago, and I think a big part of it has nothing to do with an expanded strike zone - it's hitters swinging and missing a LOT more.

Up and down, absolutely, but side to side, not so much. Now you can have one game anomalies, but the zone umpires are graded on when they're reviewed has gotten taller (by expanding up and down, not just one direction) and leaner in the last decade. Heck, Maddux and Glavine joked with Smoltz at their HOF induction about how with the current strike zone, he'd have been the much better pitcher because of his ability to pitch above the belt.

I'm curious how Graham's velocity is "surprising". It's certainly not surprising the Twins or anyone who's ever scouted him. He's routinely hit triple digits on the radar gun when he cuts it loose and pitches in the high-90s even as a starter when healthy, but there's the rub - and why he was available in rule V - he is rarely healthy because he throws so hard every single pitch, which is why he hasn't had a full minor league season in his career.

Even asking such a question at a press conference is a fine.

...but his title is not General Manager. If you want to call him the baseball operations guru of Atlanta, then that's fine, but General Manger is not his title. The rewrite would be something like "A comparison to the Cleveland Indians of the 1990s under general manager John Hart, now Schuerholz’s President of Baseball Operations in Atlanta, is instructive." That would be accurate.

He's really not, though. He has John Coppolella doing a lot of the work and then Hart signs off on it. Regardless, he has other duties either above and beyond or completely outside of General Manager, and that is the direction many teams have gone. It's disingenuous, if not outright misleading, to call him the GM

I do find the timing of the book odd as multiple places (Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus, to name two off the top of my head) have come out and discussed the reduced role of the GM in the modern game, and how that change has happened slowly, but is complete at this point. Heck, the write up has a blatant misrepresentation, and I'm hoping it's in error, not in order to attempt to prop up the position of general manager. John Hart is not the Atlanta GM. There is no Atlanta GM. Hart is the President of Baseball Operations, which is not what the article above represents.

This either shows how useless GMs are, or how poor the way we evaluate GMs is (or both). Ask any intelligent Braves or Royals fan what they think of Schuerholz, and the response will not be positive. Most Braves fans want him far away from the organization now as he simply cannot keep his hands out of things, and rarely does it end well. Basically, if you believe the 1990s Braves are any sort of positive for John Schuerholz, the research needed for a book like this was not done and certainly evident of my lack of need to spend money on the book...

Bobby Cox was the GM who built the team that started the run, and he was the one that orchestrated many of the biggest moves of the era, including trading for Fred McGriff and bringing in Andres Galarraga. Schuerholz basically was given reigns on only a couple drafts in the whole era, being told that Bobby's development team was who he would listen to in the draft. His first draft was his last one that he was given full reigns on, and he selected Mike Kelly instead of Bobby's development team favorites Doug Glanville and Manny Ramirez. That was the last draft he was allowed to pick his own guys without having Bobby and much of the scouting/development team in the room. Bobby lost some of that power when Ted Turner left, but Liberty Media brought him back in to a position of prominence when they removed Frank Wren this offseason after multiple people told them that Bobby was the driving force in developing the 90s teams, not Schuerholz. I won't even get into the blow up he did in Kansas City that was only finally recovered from recently.

I think I would take 25 current GMs over John Schuerholz. I think anyone giving him credit for the 90s Braves hasn't taken the time to really research how the team was built and run during that era.

From a big, big J.R. Graham fan, I'll give a bit of a profile for you: He's not going to be back to the 100-mph. The Braves have been quite quiet with his medicals after the first major shoulder surgery, and it's harder to get firm information in the minor leagues, but there are some writers in Mississippi who believed Graham had as many as 3 cleanup procedures in the shoulder and one other "major procedure" other than the first procedure. Graham's stuff has always been very, very hittable. His fastball is very heavy, and he got a lot of his outs by guys not being able to square up his stuff that seemed to sink differently on every single pitch. His sinker this last year was extremely predictable, and at times it was very straight. This has been an issue since 2013 for him, which does explain his jump in hit rate over the last two years. Many point to his FIP the last two seasons, which has been around 3.25 over a time that he sported roughly a 5 ERA, specifically citing his higher BABIP levels in the last two seasons, but much of that has to do with Graham's batted balls changing profile. He still isn't giving up home runs, but his balls were being squared up much more and driven, and specifically by right handed batters. A guy who typically sported a huge differential between righties and lefties completely reversed course in 2014, and RHB hit .311/.372/.424 off of Graham after he'd never allowed better than a .626 OPS against righties in his minor league career to that point. The final nail in the coffin for the Braves was when Graham was placed into the bullpen this year, a move he fought strongly against, and then proceeded to fail terribly, giving up nearly a 1.000 OPS in his relief innings. Yes, very small sample size, but a guy who had a profile of Derek Lowe just two years ago before the shoulder stuff simply couldn't get guys out anymore, and the Braves didn't protect him accordingly. I think if he's going well, he's a ground ball machine who will be a huge asset in a bullpen, but if 2014 Graham is what's expected going forward, the Twins may choose to DL him and stash him for a year while encouraging yet another procedure on his arm. The first thought I had when I saw the Twins had picked him rather than Martin was that they were going to do as the Braves will do with Daniel Winkler this year, and keep him on the major league DL all season to then allow them to put him into the minors in their system in 2016 and bypass Rule V issues.

As far as a reliever, Martin might be the better option. He was a highly-thought-of college reliever who went before most thought he would in the draft as a reliever because the Braves wanted to make him a starter. He's really a AAAA guy as a starter, but with his control and movement, reducing him to 2-3 pitches instead of 4 and putting him in the pen would make him a very good reliever.