GM John Coppolella: Braves boast baseball's top farm system
NASHVILLE — John Hart's inheritance in Atlanta was a top-heavy one.
The Braves president of baseball operations first arrived as a senior adviser in 2013 and found a quality team coming off a division title, but an empty cupboard of a farm system. Most rankings slotted the pipeline among baseball's bottom third, at best, entering the 2014 season. The first farm-focused meeting between Hart and now-general manager John Coppolella was, according to the former, demoralizing.
"I almost turned around and left. Really. It was a tough, tough gig," Hart said. "And I went up to Coppy and I said, 'Coppy, within the next three to five years, I want us to be the No. 1 farm system. I'm used to having that cache for an executive, for a GM, for us when we talk to other clubs — the greatest cache of young players.' And I said, 'Three to five years.'"
Hart's goal was not ambitious enough.
Over the course of 12 months, the Braves have transformed one of the worst farm systems into one of baseball's very best. It has cost the franchise the majority of its young corps — Jason Heyward, Andrelton Simmons, Justin Upton, Alex Wood and Craig Kimbrel — and an ugly 67-win season, but it's a 180-degree organizational turnaround that not even Atlanta's front office envisioned. And as the Braves have continued to add top-tier prospects this offseason, notably No. 1 prospect Sean Newcomb and No. 14 Chris Ellis, and other top systems start trading away young talent, there's a credible case for Atlanta at the No. 1 spot.
"I've done prospects stuff for close to the 20 years I've been in the game. I thought (our farm system) was really close with Boston at the start of the offseason," Coppolella said when asked if his franchise boasts the top farm system. "Boston traded away four of their prospects. We added two more with Newcomb and Ellis. I might be biased, obviously, but I feel we do."
To Coppolella's point, ESPN insider Keith Law ranked the Braves as the No. 2 pipeline behind the Red Sox back in July ... before Boston unloaded four highly regarded prospects to acquire Craig Kimbrel and Atlanta acquired its near-consensus top prospect, Newcomb, in the Simmons trade.
It's become a full-scale renovation project. In terms of FOX Sports South's prospect composite rankings updated last month, 16 of the franchise's top 20 prospects were not in the farm system at the end of the 2014 season.
The high-end young talent leans toward pitching — Newcomb, Lucas Sims, Kolby Allard, Touki Toussaint, Max Fried and Mike Soroka, not to mention top arms like Matt Wisler, Mike Foltynewicz and Manny Banuelos already cutting their teeth at the major-league level — but there are a few position players mixed in, including teenage shortstop Ozhaino Albies and promising bat Austin Riley.
(It should be pointed out that top-10 prospects Sims and Albies were left over from the Frank Wren era, although Coppolella had a hand in their acquisitions while serving as assistant general manager at the time.)
There's more talent coming, too. The team owns the No. 3 overall draft pick next summer and it has some of the deepest pockets to work with during the international signing period. Farm systems do not win championships, nor fill new stadiums, but if the franchise has bet right on even a fraction of its up-and-coming talent, the future looks bright.
"If you build a skyscraper, you build it from the bottom up," Coppelella said. "We aren't building to be good for one year and then to have it all fall apart. We took, in the first four picks in the draft last year, high-school kids. We've done a lot of work with foreign signings. We want to be good for a long time.
"We don't want the bottom to fall out the way it did in the second half of 2014, where we went to look for young players and there were none to be found."
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