It’s official: Atlanta Braves ink top Korean HS shortstop

The Front Office is full of good news this afternoon… there’s a special guest in the house for tonight’s game who’s come a long way to get here.

A couple of weeks ago, we wondered if the Atlanta Braves international scouts had perhaps landed one of the best baseball players coming out of South Korea.  Well, wonder no longer.

The signing figure is probably $300,000… it’s the maximum that Atlanta is allowed to offer any young international free agent player under the terms of their penalty assessment – which lasts through June 2019.

The Braves have him in Atlanta already – posing for pictures with his family, and even meeting somebody else who speaks his language:

Kind of weird to have a member of the opposition posing with your newly-inked prize prospect, but the situation is certainly a bit unusual.

This wasn’t necessarily the kind of news that we might have expected to escape from the Braves’ offices today, but this – and the re-signing of Kurt Suzuki – is indeed good news to hear on this, the final home weekend of the 2017 season.

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Getting Bae is something of a coup for the Braves’ International Scouting department.  He was almost certainly going to be a first-round pick in the KBO draft, and according to the AJC, is “one of the few top young Korean players to skip playing in his country and sign with a major league team”.

On the field, they also wrote that Bae possesses “outstanding speed and ability to handle the bat and make contact”.

How good is he going to be? Obviously it’s early, but there’s already very lofty comps being thrown around:

Braves special assistant Chad McDonald is being given the most credit for finding and following Bae, and signals that this club will literally go to the ends of the earth to find new talent.

Next: Speaking of Kurt...

Congratulations to them and to their new shortstop… hopefully his stint in the Instructionals is a productive way to get immersed into stateside baseball.