It wasn't exactly a banner day yesterday for the Atlanta Braves as they lost an important piece of their front office, although it was a welcome promotion for him. Dana Brown has been the Braves' scouting director for several years now and has helped usher quite a bit of talent into the organization via the draft during his tenure.
However, when one is good at their job, that means other teams take notice. Dana has been connected to general manager openings in the past (notably including the Tigers' open position this past offseason), but he finally got the big job as the Astros ended up hiring him away from the Braves for their GM job. All indications right now are that Ronit Shah, the Braves' current assistant scouting director, will handle scouting director duties for the Braves for at least for the next several months.
More Braves News
Elsewhere on the site, we took a look at the players that could underperform next year for the Braves. Ideally, everyone on the Braves' roster goes wild next season and they coast to another World Series title. However, almost no season goes like that and sometimes players have down years, so we took a stab at predicting who those guys could be.
Finally, we had number three on our all-time Braves managers list go up on the site. Frank Selee managed the franchise in the 1880's and 1890's and led them to quite a bit of success during this time. He also had a fantastic mustache.
MLB News
While it is pretty late in the offseason, we actually did have a trade elsewhere in the league yesterday. The Orioles and Athletics got together on a deal that sent Cole Irvin and Kyle Virbitsky to Baltimore while Oakland picked up shortstop prospect Darell Hernaiz. Baltimore adds some pitching depth while the Athletics continue to try to add some long-term upside.
Our friends over at MLB Pipeline announced their Top 100 prospects list for all of baseball yesterday. Gunnar Henderson got the top spot on the list and no, the Braves did not have any prospects on that list...at least not yet.