Braves News: Fried/Minter arbitration deadline, spring training, more

Well hello there, Atlanta Braves fans! We have a reasonably important day today as it is the deadline for teams and players to file their arbitration figures. The Braves are a file and trial team traditionally, so this also means that today is a relatively firm deadline to avoid arbitration with AJ Minter and Max Fried. Yesterday, we took a look at how much Minter and Fried are projected to get in arbitration.

More Braves News

Spring training is just around the corner and while we knew that official spring training workouts would start up in the middle of February, the exact dates hadn’t been announced for the Braves until yesterday. Workouts will begin on February 16th for Braves pitchers while position players will have their first workouts on February 21st.

We also continued our prospect retrospective series yesterday with Randall Delgado. Delgado and Julio Teheran were prospects around the same time and folks sometimes forget that there were a non-zero number of people that thought that Delgado was going to be the better pitcher. Julio would go on to have a lengthy and productive major league career as a starter while Delgado got traded to Arizona where he was a decidedly medium-ish reliever until 2018.

MLB News

While Bryan Reynolds may want the Pittsburgh Pirates to trade him, they don’t seem to be willing to do so without getting a haul for him. Rumor has it that Pittsburgh is looking for a return in any Reynolds trade that would look similar to what the Nationals got for Juan Soto at the trade deadline last year. Always fun to see teams value their players highly EXCEPT when it comes to THEM actually paying them.

MLB.com put out their rankings of the top 10 center fielders in baseball yesterday. It was certainly an interesting list, but one thing that stood out is that Michael Harris II is already considered a top 5 center fielders in the league. Not bad for a guy that just got promoted to the bigs last year.