Braves News: Dana Brown interviews with Astros, Chris Johnson’s lucky season, more

It was a quiet day on Monday for the Atlanta Braves and frankly, that was probably for the best. We know that a lot of you out there are in full football mode at the moment, so hopefully this weekend’s results didn’t raise your blood pressure too much.

We continued our prospect retrospective series with Arodys Vizcaino yesterday. Most will remember Viz’s time with the Braves in their bullpen, but there was a time when Arodys was a really exciting starting pitching prospect. Injuries derailed his time with the Braves, unfortunately, but he still put together a fine career and even made a few appearances last year with the Royals.

More Braves News

In news that could impact the Braves directly and, frankly, substantially, it was reported that Dana Brown (the Braves’ scouting director) interviewed for the Astros’ vacant GM position. Brown has been openly looking to move up into a GM spot of late and the Astros would be a pretty sweet landing spot for Dana….other than the whole “the owner doesn’t seem to know what he is doing and is unnecessarily obtrusive” thing.

There are certainly some of you that don’t really remember Chris Johnson’s time with the Braves. I certainly don’t want to spoil the article here, but lets just say that it was absolutely hilarious how much batted ball luck Johnson had in 2013 on his way to making a run at a batting title.

MLB News

We did have a signing yesterday elsewhere in the league, although we wouldn’t quite call it exciting. Jorge Alfaro got nontendered by the Padres after posted a sub-.700 OPS season (82 games), but catchers with any amount of ability will always find work. Boston ended up inking him to a minor league deal.

Also, MLB.com put together a list of seven players that have the most to prove during the 2023 season. If you want a first pass at the guys who could be candidates for comeback player of the year, you could do worse than starting with these guys.