The Atlanta Braves promised that they would continue to provide updates on changes to the coaching staff and now those updates are here. In addition to having a new pitching coach and first base coach, the Braves have now found their new third base coach and bullpen coach as well. The Braves have hired away Baltimore’s interim manager (who was the third base coach before that) Tony Mansolino to be their new third base coach and they’ve also brought in San Francisco’s pitching coach J.P. Martinez to be their new bullpen coach going forward.
Meanwhile, the real intriguing hire here is the addition of J.P. Martinez to the staff. As the press release within the embedded tweet mentions, the Giants bullpen put up some pretty impressive numbers during Martinez’s sole season as their pitching coach. The staff as a whole was borderline top 10 overall, as they posted the 11th-best ERA- as a collective (94) and the FIP- (also 94) was tied for fifth-best in all of baseball. Those numbers got even better when you looked at just what the relievers were doing, as San Francisco’s bullpen posted the third-best ERA- in all of baseball (85) and the joint-10th-best FIP- in all of baseball (94).
While we all know that reliever performance is very volatile on an individual level and can change from season-to-season, that’s still a pretty impressive season to hang your hat on and it’s one that the Braves clearly noticed when it came to making this decision. I’d say that the coaching staff is well in hand when it comes to pitching, as hopefully new pitching coach Jeremy Hefner can work together swimmingly with J.P. Martinez calling the shots in the bullpen.
Personally, I’d say that the coaching staff is looking very solid at the moment. While I’m sure there’s still plenty of healthy skepticism surrounding the promotion of Walt Weiss to manager, I’d also say that the coaching hires over the past couple of days surely suggest that the team is going in a different direction. There’s still more to come as well, as Walt Weiss’s promotion opened up the role of bench coach on the staff and who knows if they’ll add some assistant hitting coaches for Tim Hyers going forward (an earlier version of this post speculated about his position but as this Tweet from Mark Bowman states, he’s under contract so he’s not going anywhere). This is pretty fascinating and also a pretty good sign that things might very well be different with Weiss as the manager.
