One of the busiest offseasons in Braves history has featured an overhaul of the front office, particularly the scouting and baseball operations departments, and a severe roster makeover highlighted by nine trades, most bringing back prospects in exchange for major league players.
The type of moves that probably were overdue, Braves chairman and chief executive officer Terry McGuirk said Monday.
One immediate result: the Braves are a longshot (at best) to win the 2015 title in the National League East division they once owned, and a severe underdog for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century.
Another result: the future looks brighter, both from within the Braves’ organization and in the view of industry insiders, many of whom had criticized Atlanta’s declining farm system and some its high-profile roster moves in recent years.
After longtime former major league general manager John Hart moved from a senior advisory role to become president of baseball operations and de facto general manager, replacing fired GM Frank Wren, the Braves made one after another bold moves, undeterred by many concerned fans and others who opine the team could be awful for a year or two.
“There’s a special bond, I think, among the front office now about what the direction is, that we’re building for the long term,” said McGuirk, who watched newcomer Shelby Miller throw on the first day of the team’s voluntary pitching camp. “The goal is not to be good, it’s to be good for a long time. And we have such great faith in John Hart’s view and vision. We’re all in — on the whole program.”
McGuirk, a liason to the Denver-based Liberty Media ownership group, said everyone in the front office and upper management was on board with the strategy, which is aimed for the team’s move to a new ballpark in 2017 and beyond.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I would say that there’s more unifying factors in the group-think of our baseball organization maybe since we started the run in the early ’90s. This is no indictment necessarily of Frank, but it was a situation where he was sort of growing the organization organically, at the major league level, because that’s where the success was that he had been enjoying. But plainly, the minor-league organization was going in the opposite direction.”
In the past decade, if the Braves were involved in a prospects-for-major league player trade, they were usually the team giving up the prospects. And they had mixed success in recent drafts and missed badly on some of their highest-profile free-agent signings (B.J. Upton, Derek Lowe) and lucrative contract extensions (Dan Uggla).
“We just kept winning – fortunately or unfortunately, but it didn’t allow us to make the adjustments,” McGuirk said. “We won (the NL East in 2013), and we were on first place on July 18 in ’14. It was just hard to make the adjustments. And I’d say soon after July 18, we all realized it was time to make the adjustments, so we began to ready ourselves.”
The Braves won 17 of their first 24 games in 2014 and were still in sole possession of first place with a 53-43 record on July 18. They went 26-40 the rest of the way, totaling 205 runs and 41 homers in 66 games and finishing in a second-place tie with the New York Mets, 17 games behind the Washington Nationals and two ahead of the Miami Marlins.
They fired Wren and assistant GM Bruce Manno on Sept. 22 after being eliminated from the wild-card race. Braves president John Schuerholz talked his friend Hart into taking over full-time after one month as interim GM, and Hart surrounded himself with respected baseball men including holdover assistant GM John Coppolella and special assistants from other organizations including top international scout Gordon Blakeley from the Yankees.
The frenzy of offseason moves has included 43 free-agent signings — nine signed to major league contracts and many others to minor-league deals with spring training invitations. And the offseason has featured nine trades, including deals that brought in 11 of the top 20 on Baseball America’s updated Braves prospect rankings.
“The analogy has been, a major league team is the tip of the iceberg, and what’s below the water is the whole support system,” McGuirk said. “Where we are now — the major league team is going to thrive on the basis of what’s going on below the water. And it’s really improved.”
Four of the six Braves prospects that ESPN analyst Keith Law had in his top 100 in baseball were acquired in offseason trades, including Mike Foltynewicz, 100 mph-throwing right-hander who came with three other prospects from Houston in exchange for Evan Gattis. Baseball America and ESPN rank him as the Braves’ No. 2 prospect.
Baseball America tabs left-hander Max Fried as the Braves’ No. 3 prospect. Fried, who’ll miss the 2015 season recovering from elbow-ligament replacement surgery, came from the San Diego Padres with two other prospects in a trade for Justin Upton.
“The Braves Way is from the bottom up. It just builds a great esprit de corps in the organization; everybody has the same approach to the game, and that’s sort of what it feels like now. And when you go six months (or so) down the line and some of these Tommy John recoveries are completed, the force gets even stronger.”
What the Braves Way does not include is a boost in payroll and filling a lot of gaps with free-agent signings. The Braves are currently just below $100 million in payroll for 2015, which should rank just below the middle among 30 teams. The figure is just about where they were last year before Wren was given permission during spring training to sign Ervin Santana to a $14.1 million contract after pitchers Kris Medlen and Brandon Beachy had season-ending elbow injuries.
The Braves say their payroll will rise in future years, particularly after the move to the new ballpark. But don’t expect it to jump sharply and put the Braves back in the top five among major league spenders, where they were in the 1990s thanks to billionaire owner Ted Turner.
“I remember years ago when we made the shift, in turning to youth and enthusiasm,” McGuirk said. “And it only took about 15 minutes for the fan base to get with it – they totally embraced it. But it was hard to make that (full) transition, because we still had a lot of veterans from the winning years. And now, we’re in a position where we can be all-in on youth and enthusiasm. And I think you’ll see that from here on out, starting with all the John Hart moves.
“We’re not going to have many people that don’t pull the oars all in the same direction, and hustle and play the game right. … You know, the correlation between payroll and winning decreases every year, and you’ve seen it for a lot of different reasons. The salaries are getting somewhat out of hand. The correlation between a strong minor league system and winning increases ever year. And plainly, we’re going with the trend, and we’re going all in with that trend.”
