Braves News: Liberty Media wants top 5 payroll, Masataka Yoshida, and more
By Eric Cole
The Atlanta Braves were shut out of the MVP finalists last night, although they did have three guys get some down ballot love. As a result, it was a somewhat quiet news day for the Braves outside of some interesting developments regarding the owners of the Braves, Liberty Media.
First, Liberty Media announced that they were going to be creating a new tracker stock for all of their Braves holdings. This feels more like Liberty shifting some assets around to include with the Braves and replacing their old tracking stock, but we will dig into that later. Liberty Media president and CEO Greg Maffei also made some interesting comments about the Braves’ payroll which he is expecting to be a top 5 payroll in the league in the next few years. It will be curious as to what that means for the Braves’ 2023 payroll…only time will tell.
More Braves News
Elsewhere on the site, we took a look at one of the newer entrants into the realm of free agents (well, kinda) in Masataka Yoshida as potential option for the Braves. The timing of Yoshida’s posting will play a big part in all of this and the Braves would have a ton of competition for him, but he may be an option worth considering nonetheless.
The Rule 5 Draft is also coming up and while the Braves did protect three players from it last week, that left a number of Braves minor leaguers unprotected. Here is our look at those unprotected players and who the Braves could feasibly lose.
Finally, we continued our season review series continued with Michael Harris whose arrival in Atlanta during the 2022 season coincided with the team’s turnaround after a rough start. His stellar play was a big reason why (and won him the NL Rookie of the Year Award, too).
MLB News
Around the league, we had another interesting trade as the Diamondbacks traded for Mariners outfielder Kyle Lewis. Lewis can’t seem to stay healthy and the Diamondbacks have too many outfielders now, but Lewis has a ton of raw talent and this probably means that more trades are coming for the Diamondbacks.
As mentioned at the top, the Most Valuable Player awards were announced last night. As was, I think, largely expected, Paul Goldschmidt took home the NL Award while Aaron Judge won the AL crown. Both winners won by pretty comfortable margins despites some strong seasons from guys like Manny Machado and Shohei Ohtani.