Braves Briefing: AJ Smith-Shawver is now a Top 100 Prospect

The Atlanta Braves kicked off their ten-game homestand with a wonderful come-from-behind victory against the Seattle Mariners. It was a pitcher's duel early, as Bryce Elder and Bryce Miller battled, but Atlanta prevaled in the end.

Here's what's going on around MLB.

Braves RHP AJ Smith-Shawver is a Top 100 Prospect

Mid-May is when the Prospect Apparatus updates their Top 100 prospect lists. Owing to trades (for Matt Olson, Sean Murphy, and others) as well as graduations (of Michael Harris II, Spencer Strider, and others), Atlanta entered this season without a Top 100 prospect from any of the common prospect evaluation services (Baseball America, MLB Pipeline, Fangraphs, ESPN).

Enter AJ Smith-Shawver.

The Braves righthander, who has been promoted from High-A to AAA over the span of the last six weeks, has been put into Fangraphs' Top 100 Prospects list. In the piece explaining their updates, here's what they had to say about the youngster:

Finally, the Atlanta Braves again have a Top 100 prospect as AJ Smith-Shawver moves into the 50 FV tier upon promotion to Triple-A. This isn’t like with (Phillies RHP Andrew) Painter last year where by the time he had made a few Double-A starts, he had already shown polished usage of two more pitches than he was in April. Smith-Shawver still has a lot of key developmental checkpoints left to hit. His line to the plate, including often during his last start at Mississippi, can waiver all over the place and impact his fastball command. However, his feel for his curveball has leveled up since his first couple of starts, and his feel for locating his slider (which is often better than his fastball command) consistently gives him a go-to weapon that can miss a bat in a big spot. He still hasn’t allowed an earned run this year and is now the youngest player at Triple-A. There’s big long-term projection here because of the athletic and mechanical elements discussed throughout Smith-Shawver’s scouting report. That stuff carries a lot of weight in forecasting above-average command and a good changeup down the line. He’s now stacked near Cubs righty Ben Brown on the Top 100 list. Both are huge-framed late-bloomer types with two good breaking balls.

AJSS started Friday night for Gwinnett, going five innings with four hits, two runs (his first two runs allowed of the 2023 season) with two walks and five strikeouts. He has a lot of work left to do, but there's an outside chance we could see the 20 year-old before the end of the season in Atlanta.

NL East Standings for Saturday, May 20th

Rough night across the division, as outside of Atlanta, only the Mets won their matchup (and even there, they needed to score two runs in the 10th inning to come back and walk it off). The youth movement worked again for New York, with the rookie trio of C Francisco Alvarez, 3B Brett Baty, and DH Mark Vientos combining for five hits and four RBIs in the contest, including 2 RBIS and 2 runs in the pivotal tenth inning.

Team	Record	GB	Today
Braves	28-16	--	vs Mariners
Marlins	23-22	5.5	@ Giants
Mets	23-23	6.0	vs Guardians
Phillies	20-24	8.0	vs Cubs
Nationals	18-27	10.5	vs Tigers

We Wrote It

Braves Today writer (and host of the Locked On Braves podcast Jake Mastroianni) pointed out how Atlanta's offense got back to their clutch hitting late in last night's takeaways:

The Atlanta Braves have been a team over the last several years that could score a bunch of runs late, but we haven't seen that as much this year. Coming into Friday they were just 12th in runs scored in the seventh inning or later. But in back-to-back games now we've seen the offense come to life late for a comeback win. Against the Rangers on Wednesday, they scored 2 in the eighth to tie the game and 1 in the ninth to take the lead. On Friday, they score 2 in the seventh to take the lead and then added 3 more in the eighth to put the game away.

Read the whole thing HERE

Highlights from Friday night's Atlanta Braves win over Seattle

How to Watch Atlanta Braves vs Seattle Mariners on Saturday, May 20th

First pitch is scheduled for 7:15 ET, and the game broadcast is a national broadcast on Fox. The radio call, with Ben Ingram, is available locally on 680 AM/93.7 FM The Fan or outside the Atlanta market on the Atlanta Braves Radio Network or MLB.com.

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