Braves News: Murphy, John, Schwellenbach starts in familiar story.

wen Murphy is getting Tommy John surgery and that is an interesting case study for the Braves’ recent organizational draft strategy of investing more in pitchers than hitters. Of course, part of this is due to their long-term contracts with many position players that decreases their need for new position-players, but it has been a seemingly clear strategy. Many of their draft picks (Schwellenbach, Ritchie, Murphy, Phillips, Maier, Burkhalter, probably some more) have and/or are now expected to missed significant time due to injury. Such is the nature of pitchers.

If the organization can expect to still produce enough quality position-players (or use pitching prospects to trade for them) and then extend them, thereby extending their usefulness to the team, then investing in quantity of pitching prospects makes sense, as they can be used to both trade away and it is more likely that some of them will survive the high attrition rate and make it to the majors. On the other hand, however, the argument could be made that since position-players are more stable and valuable assets, the team would be better served attempting to develop a quantity of them and then trading them for major league ready pitching as needed. Both approaches have some merits and there are confounding factors such as organizational development ability for each type of player, prospect quality available to the organization in the draft and IFA, among other things. It is interesting to see how this strategy has worked out for Atlanta and continues to work out as the prospects develop.

Braves News