Orgfiller

His fastball velo was down around 2 mph in his rehab assignment, so there's still some rust to work out. He won't be a walk in the park but this is as good a time to face him as any.

I wonder if they'll demote him again. His 2B defense hasn't been good, and the K/BB is ghastly. 1 BB in 48 PAs. The ability to make good contact is there but just about everything else needs work.

And the catalyst for the collapse was Kylometres Straw working a walk from down 0-2 in the count. Battled some foul balls, took some close pitches, and really tired the pitcher out. He wasn’t the same after, gave up the HR to Roden and multiple hard hit balls in a row.

Myles Straw showing insane range there, happy to have him as the backup.

Ok? Thanks for proving my point I guess.

I appreciated the alley oop there. Or more topically, the clean flip to second.

Yeah ironically he did exactly what we were complaining he wasn’t doing before lol. Two excellent swings today, an oppo gapper and a no doubter to RF.

He’s got some filthy stuff, if only his command was more stable.

Fluharty and Little go out there as fake LOOGYs and then dominate the righties while being incapable of retiring the lefties. 200 IQ by Schneider.

Yeah and this lineup in particular is ass with those guys missing.

Dude what is your obsession with the Braves lol. After Murphy it’s pretty mid. Their 6-9 is significantly worse than ours.

Another 14 whiffs for Gausman tonight. Importantly, we saw some whiffs on the splitter this outing.

TIL the Red Sox's AA affiliate have a green monster replica lol.

Martin is a draft pick bust, but considering Pearson and Snider were both top 10 prospects at one point, in particular by the time they debuted, I think they still rank higher on the busts list. By the time Martin reached the MLB he was a 45 FV prospect with an okay hit tool, no power and an iffy defensive home. The book was out on him by his second professional season.

Roden needs to start putting the ball in the air. He has a disgusting > 60% groundball rate, with a 10% line drive rate and a 30% IFFB rate. The ABs themselves haven't been poor and he's making contact, but he's not driving the ball at all. Seems like any pitch low in the zone is a recipe for a groundball, and on high pitches he's popping it up instead. You could at least live with a bit of a slap hitter if he turned a number of those ground balls into soft line drives into the outfield, but he's not doing that at the moment. He needs to work on his swing path badly.

I actually think Clase's power potential isn't all that bad, it's whether he'll really get to it in games. In 2023 as a 21 year old he hit 20 HR with a .208 ISO, and in 2024 with Seattle's AAA affiliate he had 10 HR in 280 PAs with a .176 ISO before the trade. Fangraphs gave him a 50 raw power tool last season. He just hasn't gotten to that power in our org which unfortunately entirely adds up lol. He's quite the sleeper prospect, still hasn't even turned 23.

Nate Pearson is awful 10.38 ERA / 7.86 FIP / 7.99 xFIP 8.2 IP, 7 BB, 5 K, 1 HBP, 2 HR What an absolute bust.

The Braves were literally one of the worst teams in the league heading into this game.

Looking forward to the nostalgia inducing post from Mac 7 years from now.

My god, they just keep throwing Easton Lucas to the wolves. Absurd lineup for a guy who should be needing the offensive support. I suppose the defense is maximized for the most part with Clement, Straw and Lukes all in there.

For sure, my post was essentially indicating that in spite of his power outage to begin the season, he's generally been hitting well and looks like a bit of a copy of his 2024 start. If Vlad is treading water in April with a ~120-130 wRC+ where his expected xWOBA sees him as more of a 150+ wRC+ guy, then we can live with that as long as the power output eventually emerges as the weather warms up.

Silver linings for Vlad: Despite the power outage, he's still putting up a passable 118 wRC+, with a pretty decent .366 OBP which is mostly carried by a high batting average (which xBA actually thinks undersells him). His xSLG is .478, which is over 100 points higher than his actual The major change here has been that he's not really putting the ball in the air all that much, except for a brutal IFFB rate of his few flyballs He's making up for it with a big jump in line drive rate, and he's not actually hitting ground balls at a higher rate than normal. So the getting on base ability hasn't been fluky thus far, he just hasn't been a HR threat at all, barrel rate is down and this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone His oppo % is huge, kind of in a gross way. He's going to the opposite field more often than he's pulling the ball. This could be fine, because he has the raw power to cause damage to the opposite field, but the eye test tells me most of those oppo batted balls are well placed line drives for singles. He either needs to start pulling the ball more, or start launching bombs to the opposite field Given that we've now paid him and he's not going away any time soon, might as well start sniffing the copium, look under the hood and hope that he is that hitting powerhouse capable of carrying our offense. This start for him was essentially the recipe for 2024 Vlad, lots of singles and a decent OBP, xWOBA looking like a real threat waiting to break out with some regression.

Jeff Hoffman is a stud. Best reliever we’ve had in a while.

f*** off Vlad. Such an excellent play by Bo wasted on an inexcusable mistake.