Hello and welcome to episode 817 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from baseball

perspective presented by the play index at baseballreference.com. I am Ben Lemberga,

538, joined as always by Sam Miller of baseball perspective on the phone today. And we are doing

the second team up in our 30 team preview podcast series. Yesterday we did the fillies and today we

are doing the team that Pacota projects to be the second worst in the major leagues, the Atlanta

Braves. And later in the show, Jeff Potternastro will talk to Garrett Spane, who covers the Braves

very highly rated farm system for talking chop, the espination Braves bug. But in our first segment,

we are talking to Mark Bradley, longtime columnist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution and author

of an excellent essay on the Braves in this year's BP annual. Hey Mark. Hey Ben, how you say I'm?

So we have to rewind a little bit, I think before we talk about 2016 because I'm still a little bit

blurry on how the Braves got to where they are today. Because just a few years ago, it seemed like

they were as well set up for the future as any team in baseball. They had one of the highest rated

farm systems. They had teams that were winning titles and winning 95, 96 games. They had young stars

locked up to recently signed extensions. They seem to have it all. And then with blinding speed,

they collapsed and they fired their general manager and they embarked on a rebuild or at least

a reset as they have called it. So how did this happen? You talk a bit about Frank Ren and how

the Braves quickly fired every Ren insight everywhere in the organization and in the Mariner League

system. And you talk about how he wasn't well liked in the organization. But from afar, it's hard

to see why. So how did this downfall come about? You know, I vividly remember you and I having,

I think it was an email conversation back in. I think it would have been either February or March

of 2014, which is not that long ago. And we were talking about how how pressient the Braves were

to have locked up all these young guys for the long term. Julio Taran, Andrew St. Simmons, Greg

...