Feb 15, 2017; Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA; A wide view of the field from the press box during Atlanta Braves MLB spring training workouts at Champion Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Reinhold Matay-USA TODAY Sports
Feb 15, 2017; Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA; A wide view of the field from the press box during Atlanta Braves MLB spring training workouts at Champion Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Reinhold Matay-USA TODAY Sports /
Connor Lien has established an elite defensive reputation in the Atlanta Braves system. Will he break through offensively?
Player Profile
The Atlanta Braves drafted Connor Lien out of high school in Florida in 2012 in the 12th round.
Connor McClain Lien was drafted from Orlando high school and the Braves assigned him to the Gulf Coast League in 2012. He hit .228/.352/.282 with no home runs but 15 steals (in 18 attempts!) with a 10.56% walk rate and 27.22% strikeout rate.
He moved up to Danville in the Appalachian League for the 2013 season. Lien played primarily center field for Danville, hitting .226/.298/.401 with 6 home runs, 10 stolen bases, a 5.93% walk rate, and a 29.66% strikeout rate.
Lien spent time in extended spring to open 2014, and there were rumors of injury, but I’ve got it on good authority that his time there was spent to work on contact issues within his swing, and the results were very positive.
He came out of extended spring to spend the rest of 2014 with low-A Rome in the South Atlantic League. He hit .275/.337/.398 with 5 home runs and 16 stolen bases, posting a 6.09% walk rate and 24.35% strikeout rate (a full 5%+ drop in his K rate after the work in extended spring).
Carolina saw Lien’s first full season in 2015, as he continued his one-step-at-a-time progression up the minor league system. He hit .285/.347/.415 with 9 home runs and 34 stolen bases, posting a 6.55% walk rate and 25.6% strikeout rate.
The Braves sent Lien to the Arizona Fall League in 2015, and Lien went through a tremendous cold streak at the plate, though he impressed thoroughly in the outfield. He hit .169/.220/.221 with a home run and 4 stolen bases. His walk rate was 4.88%, but his strikeout rate was a crazy 42.68%.
Lien opened 2016 with Mississippi, but unfortunately opened the season with a broken hamate bone on his first plate appearance of the season. This kept him out, and he did struggle when he returned, which is quite common with hamate injuries.
On the season, Lien played in 64 games, with a .233/.320/.408 slash line along with 6 home runs and 12 stolen bases. He also raced out for 7 triples. His swing had some issues post-injury, which led to a 8.91% walk rate and 32.95% strikeout rate.
Lien came into the Atlanta Braves system as a raw athlete, and he still has the build of a very elite athlete at 6’3″ and 225 pounds, and he’s very well put-together physically, looking like a college free safety as much as a baseball center fielder.
Hitting
Contact (40) – Lien has a very calm stance at the plate, but when he cocks back his hands to swing, he wraps the bat a bit around his shoulder such that he ends up with a fairly long load into the zone.
While his bat head has excellent speed once in the zone, his long arms and solid build leads to more of a lengthy path to his swing, meaning that once he commits to a swing, he can’t adjust extremely well.
His better performances in Rome and Carolina did show him starting his hands farther back and having less load pre-swing, but he still does have the lengthy swing path even then, meaning there will always be some “holes” that pitchers can exploit in his swing path.
Power (50) – Lien’s tremendous bat speed through the zone allows him to generate a significant amount of power off the bat.
Accessing that power consistently is the challenge for Lien as his contact with his long load meaning his bat is often not square on the ball, especially premium velocity or elite breaking stuff.
Eye (40) – While Lien showed better walk rates this season than he’s shown in his career to date (outside of GCL), he also showed more struggle with zone recognition than he’d had in previous seasons.
How much of that was rust after the long layoff from the injury, and how much was due to other things are anyone’s guess, but in reviewing data from Rome and Carolina, you see that Lien does have average zone recognition, but he struggles in pitch recognition out of the hand.
With his longer swing path, he will have to build up excellent pitch recognition skills in order to excel at the major league level for sure.
Base Running/Fielding
Speed (60) – Lien’s exceptional athleticism is most evident in his running. Where he’s “only” graded 60 recently is some over-use of his speed in bad situations.
In his first three minor league seasons across both rookie leagues and low-A Rome, Lien stole at an 80.39% success rate. Since then, with Carolina in 2015 and Mississippi in 2016, it’s been a still-respectable 72.46%, though with his speed, he should be able to do much better.
Lien is a very solid base runner, though he has taken more risks in the last two seasons in that respect as well. Better decision making with his plus-plus speed will allow him to utilize that speed even better.
Defense (70) – With most outfielders, they read balls very well in either center field or a corner. The ball simply comes off the bat differently in center than in either corner, so it’s a different feel off the bat to move to a corner.
Lien is one of the rare guys that gets incredible jumps off the bat regardless of whether he’s playing a corner or center field. His speed allows him to use those jumps to get to balls that few in the entire game can even attempt.
Arm (65) – Lien has one of the elite arms in all of minor league baseball. I did note in a few of his games after returning that he struggled a bit in lining up his body in the same way he was so elite in doing before, which is the only reason he’s not a pure 70. If I were putting a pure number, it’d be a 68.
Lien’s arm is only rivaled in the entire system by Ray-Patrick Didder and Cristian Pache among outfielders.
It’s quite obvious that his arm is elite simply due to the production he’s had, in spite of teams knowing just how great his arm is. Thus far in his minor league career, he has posted 43 assists from the outfield in only ~400 games.
MLB Player Comp
I know this won’t likely excite a lot of people, but the build and skills of Lien are a mirror image of the Astros’ Jake Marisnick.
While Marisnick hasn’t seemed to find a permanent starting role at any point in his career, averaging less than 3 at bats per game simply because he’s typically been a team’s 4th outfielder, he’s been very productive in the time he has on the field.
Marisnick has been a -34.4 offensive runs added in his major league career due to his .225/.268/.339 slash line and 66 wRC+, but he has also brought his team 6.4 runs of base running and 22.8 defensive runs saved (all statistics via Fangraphs metrics), earning 2.4 fWAR over his career in spite of being a very below replacement offensive player.
Even then, while his slash lines have not been great, and his 4.6% walk rate and 27.2% strikeout rate haven’t been stellar, Marisnick is a guy who has 18 home runs and 48 career stolen bases over 1038 at bats in his career, so roughly 8-10 home runs and 20-25 stolen base production over full season time.
I really think Lien could fit that role of Marisnick, one of the best 4th outfielders in the league, with the ability to hold down the fort well when he does start, though obviously I still see some further upside for Lien as well if he can heal well from his 2016 injury.
Lien’s placement to open 2017 will be a very interesting thing. I really hope he has a great spring and pushes his way to AAA as that will nearly ensure that Ray-Patrick Didder is in AA to open the season, allowing for a less clustered outfield in Florida – the proverbial domino effect.
However, with the time missed in 2016, it would make perfect sense to see the team open 2017 with Lien in Mississippi again with a quick bump to AAA with solid performance as well.
