Atlanta Braves Hot Stove Report: December 17, 2018

Welcome to the Hot Stove Report, your semi-regular capsule of all of the off-season news, rumors, transactions, and winter league action for the Atlanta Braves. Check in with us every Monday through the start of spring training as we sift though everything Braves.

Programming note: The Hot Stove report will be on hiatus until Monday, January 7 for the holidays. Look for transaction analysis pieces here on OFR should the Braves make any major roster moves and look out for the OFR Hall of Fame voting coming up this week!

Winter Meetings and the Rule 5 Draft

Braves GM Alex Anthopoulous made clear his preference not to do deals at the Winter Meetings known, and he was true to his word. The Braves finalized no transactions the first three days of the meetings, other than announcing that third baseman Rio Ruiz was claimed on waivers by the Baltimore Orioles.

Of course that doesn’t mean the Braves were idle as executives met with agents, other teams, and media. That said, the fact that Anthopoulos left the meetings Wednesday morning to attend a planned Liberty Media event in Denver bespeaks of a lack of eminent trades or significant signings.

The best news for the Braves this week was that they did not lose any of their minor leaguers in the Rule 5 draft. As expected, the Braves didn’t make a selection in the major league portion of the draft, but they bolstered their minor league depth with three selections in the AAA portion of the draft.

RHP Jason Creasy: A former 8th-round pick by the Pirates back in 2011, Creasy got as far as AAA before the Pirates released him just before the season started in 2017. Creasy dealt with a forearm strain for most of the 2016 season that limited his innings and his effectiveness. After pitching limited duty with the independent league St. Paul Saints in 2017, Creasy got healthy and threw in 44 games for the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs of the independent Atlantic League in 2018, pitching to a 1.96 ERA in 36.2 relief innings, striking out 50 batters in the process and only walking 6. The performance was enough to attract the attention of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who picked him up in August for the final two weeks of the minor league season.

Creasy’s hallmark has been control, and he owns a 2.5 BB/9 mark in his affiliated minor league career. If healthy, he should be able to provide innings out of a Braves minor league bullpen, most likely in Mississippi.

RHP Jose Rafael De Paula: De Paula has been most known for getting caught lying about his age when he was being scouted as an international amateur, saying he was 16 when he was actually 19, and for being traded by the Yankees to San Diego in the Chase Headley deal. De Paula will turn 28 before Opening Day and has pitched relatively well at the AA and AAA levels the last two seasons in the Reds organization. The Braves always need pitchers that can put up acceptable innings in the high minors, filling in gaps as they come up due to promotions and trades; right-handers Andres Santiago and Connor Johnstone filled roles like that the last couple of seasons. De Paula would seem to fill that same need.

IF Riley Unroe: Of the three players taken by the Braves in the Rule 5 this year, Unroe would have the most upside. Unroe is only 23 years old, and was a 2nd-round draft pick by Tampa Bay in 2013. This is actually the second consecutive season Unroe was selected in the Rule 5 draft, having been plucked from the Rays organization by the Angels last December and making it as far as the AAA level last year. Despite being a switch-hitter with good bat speed, Unroe has not been a successful hitter at higher levels due to extreme groundball tendencies. Even if he doesn’t figure it out at the plate however, Unroe gets solid marks in the field, showing good hands and range at all three infield skill positions, though his arm is best suited from second base. Given the relative lack of Braves middle infield depth in the minors, Unroe seems like the best shot of the three players to stick this season.

Big River Rolls On

The Braves bid farewell to Rio “Big River” Ruiz last week. Ruiz was put on waivers to clear him for a designation to Gwinnett, a move that would take him off the 40-man roster. The Baltimore Orioles claimed him however, so Ruiz moves on to an organization that quite frankly will provide a much bigger opportunity for him to get major league playing time. At one point considered the top third base prospect in the Braves system, Ruiz had found himself behind new free agent signee Josh Donaldson, last season starter Johan Camargo, utilityman Charlie Culberson, and top-5 Braves prospect Austin Riley on the Braves third base depth chart.

Acquired along with right-handers Mike Foltynewicz and Andrew Thurman from Houston in exchange for catcher Evan Gattis near the start of the Braves rebuild, the first scouting reports had him as a bat-first third baseman with patience and power. His first season with Mississippi however was a huge disappointment as he hit only .233/.333/.324 with 5 home runs. Personally challenged by then-President of Baseball Operations John Hart to lose weight, a much leaner Ruiz reported to camp for the 2016 season. While his work at the plate never progressed beyond simply average at AAA, the work on his body helped his range at third base, and he was an above average defender there for the rest of his Braves organization tenure and allowed him to expand his versatility by also putting work at the other three corner positions on his résumé.

Ruiz’s best AAA season was his first one in 2016 as he hit .271/.355/.400 for Gwinnett as a 22 year old and got his first major league cup of coffee. In 2017 he received his best shot at sticking in the majors when Adonis Garcia and Freddie Freeman were injured, but Ruiz hit a paltry .175/.264/.288 in 91 plate appearances during that time (though he hit his first major league home run against Max Scherzer). Ruiz returned to AAA Gwinnett, and eventually Johan Camargo won the third base job. In recent years, Ruiz has been an afterthought when considering possible bench players. At the trading deadline in 2018, with the Braves sorely needing offensive depth, the Braves traded for Adam Duvall and Lucas Duda rather than promote Ruiz.

Realmuto Hostage Crisis Reaches It’s 52nd Week

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the Miami Marlins kicking off a rebuild with the trades that sent second baseman Dee Gordon and outfielders Giancarlo Stanton and Marcel Ozuna off to other teams for prospects. Since then, catcher J.T. Realmuto has been waiting his turn, but the Marlins have been a much tougher trade partner than in their earlier trades. This is likely because Realmuto represents the team’s last remaining controllable All-Star caliber veteran; Realmuto is their last shot at securing the prospects they feel will jumpstart their rebuild process.

Realmuto has made it clear that he has not inclined to sign an extension with the team in order to be a bridge to the younger team that will presumably be competitive in four or six years from now. As such, there’s no incentive for the Marlins not to try to trade Realmuto now to the highest bidder.

However Realmuto remains a Marlin, with the team’s price tag rumored to typically be at least two of any team’s highest-ranked prospects, plus more. While Realmuto is unquestionably one of the top catchers in the game, in some way that’s more of an indication of the overall dearth of quality two-way catchers in the game right now. Only 9 catchers with more than 400 plate appearances in 2018 had a wRC+ over 100, with many teams now following the Braves example of the last several years of having a near 50/50 split of solid catchers rather than have one catcher taking the vast bulk of playing time.

Realmuto’s market this off-season has been stymied by the number of other quality options available. Yasmani Grandal, perhaps the only other catcher in the baseball that could make the argument of being a better all-round catcher than Realmuto, is still on the free agent market. Four of the teams reportedly most interested in Realmuto — the Braves, Nationals, Mets, and Astros — have all made other arrangements for 2019. The two teams most commonly rumored to still be in discussions with Miami are the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Tampa Bay Rays.

This didn’t keep Marlins beat writer Craig Mish this week from tweeting that despite Atlanta’s retention of incumbent catcher Tyler Flowers and the signing of old friend Brian McCann to be the catching tandem in 2019, the Braves remain in contact with the Marlins regarding Realmuto, a report that Braves beat writer Mark Bowman flatly dismissed this week. Rather than recount all of the back-and-fourth, I’ll turn your attention to Alan Carpenter’s excellent rundown of the drama over at Tomahawk Take.

My take is similar to Carpenter’s conclusion, that there’s room for both writers to be correct, in so much that they are reporting what their sources are telling them. It does seem likely that the Braves made an offer, and offer which may still be on the table, but that it was not an offer the Braves intend to improve upon. If that offer is, as rumored, Austin Riley plus other prospects, it would both represent a fair offer, but also one in which the Marlins may feel is not enough.

Austin Riley came in at #3 in the OFR prospect ranking, and was listed higher in other recent well-respected national publications including a #1 ranking at Baseball America and #2 at FanGraphs. While my inclination would be not to trade Riley’s six years of team control for 2 years of Realmuto, this is not an unreasonable offer for the Braves to make.

News, Rumors, and Innuendo

• Three NL East rivals made moves during the Winter Meetings. The Phillies made perhaps the biggest free agent splash last week, inking veteran outfielder Andrew McCutchen to a 3 year/$50 million contract. The Mets signed their former closer Jeurys Familia to a 3 year/$30 million deal to set up new closer Edwin Diaz. And in an interesting move, the Nationals traded long-time starter Tanner Roark to the Cincinnati Reds for reliever Tanner Rainey, a move that is both the first evert Tanner-for-Tanner trade in major league history and saves an estimated $10 million in salary for the Nats, but leaves a whole in their rotation that they had just filled with free agent starter Patrick Corbin.
• On Sunday, the Mets added catcher Wilson Ramos, a solid defensive catcher who can hit but with a checkered injury history. This is the third new catcher to the division, joining the Braves’ Brian McCann and the Nationals’ Yan Gomes.
• Anthopoulos’s retreat to Denver on Wednesday for a planned meeting with Braves owners Liberty Media led to some speculation as to why the GM would abandon the Winter Meetings to go talk to the Braves owners. The most popular hope was that Anthopoulos was making a request for LM to open the pocketbook more this offseason in order to sign a big-ticket free agent, most likely Bryce Harper.
• Anthopoulos’s stated targets remained the same after the Winter Meetings: an outfielder, a starting pitcher, and help for the relief corps. McCutchen was a popular suggestion by many, but size of his deal with the Phillies still caught some by surprise.
• Cleveland completed an odd and complicated trade that sent DH Edwin Encarnacion and the $21.667 million owned to him in 2019 on to Seattle. One of the ramifications to this trade is that it has apparently given Cleveland the financial room it wanted that prompted them to place starting pitchers Corey Kluber and Trevor Bauer on the trade block.
• MLB Network’s Jon Morosi tweeted this week that the Braves remain interested in bringing back Anibal Sanchez, but that Sanchez has also received interest from the Reds and Nationals.
• Per The Athletic’s David O’Brien, the Braves have at least internally discussed perusing free agent outfielder A.J. Pollock. Pollock was given a qualifying offer by the Diamondbacks at the start of free agency, so if the Braves signed him they would have to surrender their second-round pick, though it seems that Pollock’s contract demands — rumored at 5 years/$60 million — is far more of a deterrent.
• “Sometimes prospects don’t live up to expectations” remains a poor argument for or against any particular trade.

Mailbag Q&A

With a slow Winter Meeting, there was smaller mailbag this week.

Q: Do you think trading deadline should be the last day of the Winter Meetings, as has been suggested with no trades until March 15? – J. Lamb

A: After a second consecutive relatively quiet Winter Meetings, many in the media were clearly frustrated by the lack of news. There was some rumblings from the media (not from anyone actually in baseball) that there should be a hard stop at the conclusion of the Meetings to force teams to be more proactive in the trade market.

My feeling is that I would rather have teams make good decisions, and that I personally am not invested in the Winter Meetings as an entertainment, so I don’t see a real reason to impose this kind of artificial limit on off-season trades.

Q: Is Mitch Haniger this year’s Josh Donaldson/Christian Yelich? – N. Lyle

A: If you mean if he’s going to be the guy that everyone is going to get sick of talking about until he’s finally moved, I think that honor already goes to Realmuto. That said, there could be a parallel between Haniger and Yelich in that Haniger is an obvious big-time trade piece on a rebuilding club, but whose club is at least publicly saying isn’t available. Of course despite the Marlins’ protests that Yelich wasn’t available, he was and ended up getting moved in late January.

It’s possible Haniger may be another late off-season move.

 

Your Moment of Zen

Braves rookie Rio Ruiz goes yard for his first career home run pic.twitter.com/KQUNiljQDJ

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) May 20, 2017