Jeff Passan: Atlanta Braves farm system isn’t the best?

Wracking Opinions

Passan does admit that the entire realm of player evaluation is fraught with difficulty, error, subjectivity…. and as Braves’ head scout Brian Bridges once told me, there is always the inherent difficulty of seeing the true story on any player on any given day of observation.

The task is easier when you have a player in your own system and can see him every day, but that still doesn’t end the argument.  Witness this Passan paragraph:

"MLB.com’s ranking of the Braves system, for example, has outfielder Class A center fielder Cristian Pache as a slightly above-average fielder. The Braves believe Pache is the next Andruw Jones defensively, and that tracks with other organizations’ assessments of his glove, and, seeing as center field defense is among the most valued commodities in the sport today, Pache’s standing among the general prospect-watching population does not match that inside the game."

In other words, yes:  we do still think that Jonathan Mayo and Jim Callis have a warped view of the Braves’ system since (among other reasons) others appear to think their view of Pache is flawed as well.

There’s a mention in his piece that some think Joey Wentz to be the system’s best pitching prospect… despite being unranked on major Top 100 lists.  Luiz Gohara is getting a lot of love in some quarters, Allard in others.  Obviously opinions vary wildly, but you would certainly think that such evaluations would speak highly of the Braves’ farm standing.

Beyond those snippets, Passan mentions this noteworthy bit:  that the Braves ‘push their prospects like no other organization’ with more innings from their pitchers and faster promotions, but suggests this practice skews the board in terms of evaluations from others.

In other words, he thinks that the Braves are ‘cooking the books.’

Apparently Passan then chooses to re-level the argument by cutting back on the evaluations, while still declaring the pitching cache of Soroka, Anderson, Wright, Gohara, Wentz and Allard to be the “finest collection gathered by one team in years.”

Here’s the rub:  if any given prospect were to be rushed to another level too soon, you would expect to see poorer performances, difficulty in managing struggles, and perhaps even burns-outs.

That’s just simply not happening with any of Atlanta’s Top 10… nor virtually any of their Top 20+ (no matter whose list you subscribe to).

So anyone not doing particularly well?

• Travis Demeritte is having a down year at AA.
• Max Fried had an uneven campaign, though righted his ship enough to earn a promotion to the majors (2 outings, 3 innings, 0.00 ERA early on).
• Rio Ruiz wasn’t able to stick in the majors.

Excepting others facing nagging injuries, that’s about it… all others of any note are excelling.  Honestly, that’s almost shocking – that most of a team’s top 20 or 30 prospects enjoying productive-to-great years at the same time.

On top of that, some have emerged in a big way:  William Contreras and Drew Lugbauer are mentioned specifically by Passan.  He doesn’t mention Ronald Acuna in that context, but clearly he has been the biggest break-out of them all.  Alex Jackson‘s comeback has been good (.836 OPS at High-A), though AA adjustment has been slow (9 games/38 AB).

But now the pitching results in 2017 have been nothing short of amazing.