Atlanta Braves minors: End of season recap of the 2019 Florida Fire Frogs
By Clint Manry
An end-of-season recap covering all seven Atlanta Braves minor league teams from the 2019 season: Florida Fire Frogs.
In this series, we’re covering each of the seven Atlanta Braves minor league levels, evaluating each club and its top performers.
If you’re interested in jumping to previous recaps:
Today we move on to the Florida Fire Frogs, the Atlanta Braves’ High-A club, which wrapped up their 2019 season on Thursday, August 29 — the Florida State League was canceled prematurely, due to hurricane Dorian.
The team
The 2019 Florida Fire Frogs finished the season in last place in the 6-team FSL North division, thanks to a 25-41 first-half record and a 29-41 second-half mark (54-82 overall record).
The run environment in the FSL took a hit in 2019, losing production in runs per game and total home runs:
Overall League
- 2018: 4.21 R/G, 954 HR
- 2019: 3.84 R/G, 896 HR
Consistent with the league-wide trend, the 2019 Fire Frogs also saw a drop in runs per game and total home runs, finishing with 3.32 R/G (2nd lowest in the League) and 59 home runs (3rd fewest); though the yearly drop was minute, only losing 0.1 R/G and 10 total homers from last season to 2019.
As you would expect from a team that has trouble scoring runs, Florida’s 2019 team-batting average ranked last in the 12-team league (.230 BA). The 2019 Fire Frogs also finished with the 2nd-most strikeouts (1,162) and worst OPS (.619) amongst their counterparts.
It’s rather shocking just how poor the offensive numbers were league-wide in the FSL, in 2019. The league slashed just .242/.313/.353.
Unlike the group of Atlanta Braves’ rookie teams, who could at least hold their own in the stolen base category — the Fire Frogs could not.
Florida was one of the least aggressive and least successful teams on the basepaths, stealing only 51 bases all season (2nd-fewest).
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though, Florida did end the 2019 season as an around-average team when it came to taking its walks. The Fire Frogs finished with 375 walks — good for 8th-most in the FSL (small victories!).
The pitching side of things wasn’t too great either, but nor was it awful.
Florida ranked in the bottom third in ERA (3.72) and strikeouts (1,079), but the Fire Frogs gave up the second-lowest home runs as a pitching staff, surrendering 54 home runs.
The difficulties of scoring runs in the FSL, in 2019, were extremely apparent when looking at the leaderboard for team ERA. Not one single team finished the season with an ERA above 3.98, with the best ERA belonging to the Charlotte Stone Crabs (2.77).
One thing Florida’s pitchers were very good at in 2019 was pitching complete games. The Fire Frogs finished with 11 such instances where it’s starters went the distance, five more than the second-ranked team. Florida also had 6 shutouts by its pitchers, also the most in the league (only three other teams had one).
So it wasn’t all bad for Florida. The fact that it was so hard to score in the FSL, coupled with the Fire Frogs’ inability to hit homers, resulted in the offense putting a lot of pressure on it’s pitching.