The World Series is about to conclude and once it does, the countdown to MLB free agency will officially begin. All players that are not under contract with the current teams will officially become free agents although we will have to wait until five days after the World Series ends for the free for all to begin. You can guarantee that the Atlanta Braves are going to be in the thick of things once the the market opens up.
It is during that “quiet period” of five days, though, that we see qualifying offers given to impending free agents. The only player that the Braves could reasonably give a QO to is Dansby Swanson (Kenley is not eligible since he has been QOed before nor would it probably be a good idea to give him an over $19 million guaranteed deal) and Dansby is going to most certainly reject it to test the free agent waters.
To prepare you for the upcoming free agent market, we posted an article that lists all of the Atlanta Braves’ upcoming free agents along with some notes on the key players as to whether or not the Braves should bring them back for 2023.
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Elsewhere in the world of the Braves, we also had a retrospective on Tyler Matzek’s 2022 season go up on the site. One does wonder what impacts pitching so much in the 2021 playoffs had on Matzek’s arm, but man was that run by the Night Shift something to behold. Here’s hoping that Tyler recovers completely and quickly from Tommy John surgery and we get to see a strong 2024 season out of him.
In site news, we launched a new feature here at Tomahawk Take where we do an Q&A with our readers every Thursday. Don’t think that because you weren’t around yesterday evening that you can’t ask questions now. I will be checking in on that post throughout the day today to answer other questions as they trickle in.
MLB News
Everything remains on hold really until the World Series is done and Game Five went down on Thursday evening. Jeremy Pena carried the Astros offense in the early going with an RBI single and his fourth home run of the postseason. Justin Verlander was far from sharp, but he and the Astros bullpen were able to hold the lead and an insurance run in the eighth made it a 3-1 Astros lead.
That insurance run proved to be important as the Phillies were able to get a run back in the bottom half of the eighth before Ryan Pressly came out of the Houston bullpen to restore order. Chas McCormick made a great catch in center for the second out in the ninth inning and a couple of batters later, Houston closed out the win by the final score of 3-2.
The Astros are now one win away from winning the World Series. They last won it all back in 2017 although not without a fair share of controversy along the way.