The Braves announced Monday that they’ve selected the contract of top pitching prospect Touki Toussaint from Triple-A Gwinnett. He’ll serve as the 26th man in today’s doubleheader and is slated to start the first game of that twin bill.
Toussaint, who turned 22 in late June, ranked as the game’s No. 76 prospect on the midseason update from Jim Callis and Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com, while Kiley McDaniel and Eric Longenhagen of Fangraphs currently peg him 56th overall.
Atlanta infamously acquired — or, more accurately, purchased — Toussaint from the D-backs barely a year after Arizona had selected him with the 16th overall pick in the 2014 draft. The Braves took on the remaining half season of Bronson Arroyo’s contract in order to extract the well-regarded Toussaint from the D-backs organization in a trade that saved Arizona roughly $10MM.
While it’s taken nearly three years (as was to be expected when purchasing a recent high school draftee), the Braves appear poised to reap the benefit from that Arizona misstep. Through 117 1/3 innings between Double-A and Triple-A in 2018, Toussaint has been excellent, working to a combined 2.68 ERA with 10.7 K/9 against 3.8 BB/9. He’s allowed only seven home runs in that time. Callis and Mayo praise both his fastball and curveball as plus offerings, adding that his changeup could be an average or better third pitch.
Toussaint will become the latest arm from the Braves’ vaunted collection of pitching prospects to surface at the MLB level over the past couple of seasons. While the results have been mixed to this point, the team has seen positive signs from that group — most notably from Sean Newcomb but also Mike Soroka (prior to his shoulder troubles) and Max Fried. Kolby Allard and Luiz Gohara, meanwhile, are still waiting for earnest looks in the rotation after brief exposure to big league opponents, while others such as Kyle Wright and Ian Anderson are still awaiting their first call to the big leagues.
It seems likely that Toussaint’s promotion will simply be a spot start, though the fact that he’s serving as the 26th man would mean that he’s eligible to return whenever the Braves next need a fifth starter. There’s no predicting yet exactly how Toussaint’s service clock will play out, as it remains to be seen when the Braves will bring him to the Majors on a permanent basis, but he’s currently controlled through at least the 2024 season. If he finishes the 2019 campaign with less than one full year of MLB service, that’d allow the Braves to control him through the 2025 season, although Atlanta likely hopes that Toussaint is capable of securing a long-term spot on the MLB roster in quicker fashion.
If nothing else, he has a great baseball name!
Best one since Boof Bonser
Warner Madrigal?
Tuffy Gosewisch.
Ohhhh, but there is so much more to Touki than his name!!
Just wait and see, and his debut was just a sign of things to come for this talented youngster..
He’s my favorite Braves prospect, and he’s been the one I’ve been most excited about only behind Acuña Jr. and Albies. He has ALL the tools to be the Braves ACE moving forward, and adding Touki alongside Folty, Newk, Soroka, and Gausman is going to give the Braves one of the most talented rotations in the NL come 2019 and moving forward.
Not to mention, even when some injuries occur, which is inevitable, the Braves will still have the likes of Max Fried, Kolby Allard, Kyle Wright, Bryse Wilson, and Ian Anderson all ready and raring to go as talented young starters in AAA..Plus, they will have Patrick Weigel coming back in 2019 after he’s sat out all this year recovering from TJ Surgery..
Alot of fans said, well the Braves might have 10 extremely talented and young SP’s, but pitchin prospects typically don’t pan out and the majority of them will either flame out or get injured..Well, a couple years later, here we are, and the vast majority of these promising pitching prospects are all soaring through the system with a high degree of success..
They still have to pass the test of being successful at the ML Level, and then sustaining that success..HOWEVER, the Braves have really set themselves up for some sustainable success, due to their excellent scouting system and drafting prowess…Plus, simply buying Touki from Arizona..I bet Arizona is kicking themselves over that one…I’d be absolutely ticked, if my team sold our extremely talented first rounder for basically 9mil…But, I’m glad the D-Backs did, because Touki is going to be a shining star in Atlanta for a long time to come..Especially since that “average” change-up, is actually a split change, and I is truly filthy!! It just dies at it enters the hitting zone, and at 86-87, with Touki’s excellent FB at 94-98 the two make for an unittable pairing…Then, you add in Touki’s ridiculously knee-buckling curve ball at 74-78, and it’s just not fair for opposing hitters..
WATCH OUT NL, here comes Touki!!
“pitchin prospects typically don’t pan out and the majority of them will either flame out or get injured”…
I’d like to know who says this, Sure most prospects don’t work out because the majority of them are not high draft picks or they are just there to fill out a minor league roster. But high draft picks do tend to work out–not all of them obviously–many do flame out, but i wouldn’t say most. .
I’m pretty sure that if you look at all the pitching prospects that made it to the top 100 prospect list at some point in their career, less than 25% had a career long enough to reach free agency.
It’s Touki time!
Im sure AZ fans will be watching his career closely after he was given away
He was sold just so the Dbacks could save 4 months of paying Arroyo. Terrible trade
I’m not even a Diamondbacks fan but there’s no way that Dave Stewart should have another job in a front office ever again
I’m a Rockies fan and I have zero problem with Dave Stewart getting a front office job with either Arizona, San Francisco, or the Dodgers. I would wish him on the Padres too, but he might be an improvement over their GM.
I guess you could say that both Matt kemp trades were bad. Maybe the Wil Myers trade wasn’t that good. But if they can just keep him in one position, I think this trade won’t be as bad as it once seemed. And we still have 7 years to see how Eric Hosmer goes.
So yes, you can debate those moves. But they have the number one ranked farm system right now. What is it, 8 or 9 players in the top 100? Say 4 or 5 pan out and add to the team which may already have solid building blocks? I think Preller gets way too bad of a rap than he deserves.
Definitely. That organization is in a position to succeed for a long time.
You don’t have 7 years to see how Hosmer goes – you have 7 years to suffer through Hosmer, full stop.
It was a bad deal when it was signed, and somehow it looks worse now.
Don’t forget the Pads gave up Jake Bauers in the Myers deal. As a Padre fan, I’d rather have Bauers than Hosmer.
Lol def not 8-9 in top 100 braves have been stayed by all mainstream media as having most top 100 players at 8 I believe padres have 6
Padres have 10. Unfortunately. I’m a Giants fan.
It depends on who you ask. MLB pipeline says 8, but follows up with that if all the top 100 were brought up, the Padres would still have a top 10 farm system. Their strengh is in the depth.
The best scenario is having one of the top minor league systems while the major league club is in contention for the playoffs. May not last too much longer for the Braves if they start making some significant trades to bolster the line up or pitching roster.
I love that trade as a Braves fan. It is a little crazy that same player could not be paid that much when being drafted but can be bought for that much a year later.
Prime example of how earning capacity is majorly suppressed in drafts.
Each team has 8, but SD has 6 in the top 50 where the Braves have 4. As a devout Braves fan, evenI have to concede they have the better farm system right now.
Yep. The Braves graduated the games top prospect, Acuna, while the Padres acquired a top prospect, Meija. Before all that it was close so you have to figure the Padres have taken the no.1 spot.
The goal is not to have the top farm system in baseball. Just like the Braves the Padres will hold onto the title for a while, graduate players and then another team will take the title.
Lucky for Touki, his first major league start is vs. a minor league lineup. Are you ready for this? Ortega, Prado, Realmuto, Dietrich, Riddle, Galloway, Rivera and Sierra. I’m not joking!
Hence the reason why it was so easy for Touki and Folty to breeze through only combining to allow 2 runs after pitching a combined 14 innings…
Marlins didn’t stand a chance with those two on the mound..And that was even with Touki not having his nest pitch working, NOR did Folty have his slider working at all..
Both looked like bona-fide aces, even though it was pretty clear neither pitcher had their best stuff today..Poor Marlins…lol
haha, what a story, Mark!
With a name like that, I predict he will succeed in MLB
Sarcasm, but seriously, amazing name. Good luck, kid.
Unfortunately Biff Pocaroba (Poke-Ah-robe-Ah) only had a mediocre career with the Braves. LOL
Plus fastball = Touki Torch
Ouch. That’s awful. I love it.
same
Ouch. That’s awful. I love it.
watching Touki live at the Braves prospect game at the end of spring training, his “stuff” is pretty awesome. If he continues to get better with his control, he has the upside of a #1 starter.
He has such a filthy curve. I can’t believe the Dbacks tried to get him to use it less
Braves did the same with Touki last year, but in doing so, they had Touki focus more on his split-change..
It has ended up working with excellent results as well, because Touki’s split-change is filthy now!! It absolutely dies at the plate, and it pairs extremely well with his FB..
His Split-Change sits at 84-87, with some excellent downward movement, and his FB sits primarily at 94-97, with excellent arm-side run..
Touki is a bona-fide stud in the making, no doubt about it!!
They did? I thought they encouraged him to use it more
Joe Simpson gonna let Touki slide without a bigoted comment on his name or ethnicity?
Soto is 30, we all know it.
When did Joe Simpson make a bigoted comment on anyone’s name or ethnicity ?
Lookie Lookie Lookie, here comes Touki! (ATL folks will know)
Thanks slowcurve for putting that jingle in my head….Touki was very impressive today!
Feels like it’s been in my head for 33 years. I live in NC now but listen to 680 online and still hear it. He looked great! The most impressive thing was getting out of the jam with men on 2nd and 3rd with 1 out. He cruised after that.
I’m in nc myself…i do the mlb audio package, which is 680…
Cooke’s Pest Control….man, I’ve been gone from ATL for almost 10 years and I still can’t get that jingle out of my head. Kudos to the creators.
Really more of a Bob Tewksbury fan myself.
Dave Stewart logic strikes again.
It’s amazing how dumb he was as a GM. And the explanations he would provide the press were downright laughable.
Here is your DS comments on this trade when it happened.
fangraphs.com/blogs/dave-stewarts-misguided-commen…
“Over the weekend, the Diamondbacks made a pretty controversial trade, selling Touki Toussaint to the Braves in exchange for $10 million in salary relief. I wrote up my thoughts on the deal on Monday, noting that while it’s certainly possible that the Diamondbacks have more information about Toussaint than other teams, it still seems like they simply misread the market value of a prospect in making this deal.
If you didn’t think that’s what happened a few days ago, you can be sure of it now, because in Ken Rosenthal’s latest column, Stewart says some things that, for a baseball executive to say publicly in 2015, are absolutely remarkable. And should scare the crap out of Diamondback fans.
Per Rosenthal’s column, here’s the entire text of what Stewart said in regards to trading Toussaint.
“The truth is we did not know what Touki’s value would be if we shopped him. There is a lot of speculation on that. People are assuming it would have been better, but we don’t know.”
“There was an opportunity to make a deal that gave us more flexibility today as well as next year. We took that opportunity. It’s tough to say we could have gotten more. He was drafted at No. 16, given ($2.7) million. In my opinion, that’s his value.
“To this point, he has pitched OK, he has pitched well. But guys are mentioning that he throws 96 mph. He hasn’t thrown 96 mph since he’s been here. We haven’t seen 96 once. There is some inflation of what people think Touki is.
“We think he’ll be a major-league pitcher. We don’t see it happening in the next three or four years. Maybe five or six years down the road, he’ll show up and be a major-league pitcher. But that is a long ways down the road.”
There is so much to unpack there. Let’s recap the critical points.
1. The D’Backs did not test the market to find out if other teams would have offered more.
No, teams don’t take the time to let every person in the league know before they trade a player, and this isn’t the first time a deal has been made where a player wasn’t shopped extensively. Sometimes, GMs just target a certain player that they happen to really like, and they don’t necessarily care whether another team could make an offer that would be perceived to be better; they want that certain guy, and they figure out how to get him.
But that isn’t the case here, because the D’Backs were selling Toussaint for cash, so there was no room for evaluation differences on the return. This isn’t a case where Atlanta just happened to have the guy who caught Arizona’s eye; they were offering the exact same asset any other team could have offered, and the D’Backs didn’t even bother to find out if another team would have outbid the Braves cash offer. If the market’s valuation of similar prospects held up with Toussaint, they should have been able to use him to dump Aaron Hill instead of Bronson Arroyo. Maybe no one in baseball would have taken the ~$18 million remaining on Hill’s deal just to get Toussaint, but they’ll never know, because the D’Backs front office didn’t even try to find out.
2. Dave Stewart apparently believes that the slot-value of a draft pick is equivalent to that player’s market value.
This is the one I couldn’t believe I was actually reading, because it’s so obviously wrong in ways that should be clear to absolutely anyone working in baseball, much less an executive in charge of making significant decisions. To claim that Toussaint’s market value is $2.7 million because that’s what he signed for in a closed-market system with constrained spending is so ridiculous that I can only hope Stewart was just making an off-hand comment to a reporter and didn’t think about about the ramifications of what he was saying.
Because if he actually believes that a player’s trade value is equivalent to their signing bonus, then he’s simply unqualified for his job. It should be glaringly obvious that the slot values assigned to draft picks are a tiny fraction of what the player’s open-market value actually is. The implosion of MLB’s recommended pools for international free agents — which are essentially soft-caps, given that the penalties for exceeding the limits are not as severe as they are for exceeding your pool in the draft — should have made that clear, and it’s not like the D’Backs are unaware of the inflation of international prospect bonuses; they signed Yoan Lopez for $8 million and paid an $8 million tax on that signing just a few months ago.
But even if things like Yoan Moncada costing the Red Sox $63 million didn’t convince Stewart that there’s a huge difference between open-market prospect values and the slot-values that draft picks are constrained by, he simply needed to look at the Dodgers purchase of a draft pick from the Orioles back in April. By taking Ryan Webb (and then immediately releasing him), Los Angeles paid $2.7 million for the 74th pick in the draft, which had a slot value of just $827,000. And they’ll have to pay the signing bonus to get Josh Sborz in their organization, so he’ll cost them $3.5 million when all is said and done.
Even if the D’Backs are down on Toussaint — and they are, obviously — there is no rational way to argue that he’s worth less than the 74th pick in the most recent draft, and that pick was traded for a cash savings equivalent to what Stewart is claiming Toussaint’s value is. This isn’t a matter of interpretation or an area where reasonable people can disagree; Stewart’s comment is just out-and-out wrong. If he actually believes it, and is going to continue to value the team’s prospects at the same level of their signing bonus, he should be fired before he gets around to swapping Dansby Swanson for a middle reliever this winter.
3. The D’Backs think Toussaint is being overrated.
This is the part where I’m somewhat inclined to defer to the organization. That isn’t to say that they are definitely right about Toussaint, but there is a history of draft scouting reports having too large of a role in prospect analysis even after a player has begun to demonstrate a different set of skills. And I have no reason to doubt Stewart that Toussaint’s stuff isn’t as lively as has been reported; the very mediocre numbers he’s putting up in A-ball suggest that he’s not exactly throwing unhittable pitches down there.
But if you think everyone is overrating your prospect, your goal shouldn’t be to help them understand why they’re wrong; you should be taking advantage of that information asymmetry before they realize their mistake. The D’Backs weren’t under any obligation to tell other teams that Toussaint’s stuff might be ticking down a bit as a professional, which is totally normal, by the way. If other teams hadn’t yet noticed that he was throwing more 94 than 96, and they still wanted to trade for him like he was the same arm he was coming out of the draft, then the D’Backs should have let those teams pay the price for his perceived value based on older scouting reports.
But, this gets back to the first point; other teams weren’t given a chance to do that. Instead, the Braves essentially won the lottery by being the first (and maybe only) team to realize that the D’Backs just didn’t really want Toussaint anymore, and they got Arizona to take an offer that was consistent with their internal valuation of him rather than what an external market valuation might have been.
As I said on Monday, the most likely outcome of this trade — by far — is that Toussaint never develops into anything and the D’Backs end up winning the deal in retrospect. The bust-rate on prospects like Toussaint is in the 80% to 90% range, and so this deal probably won’t come back to haunt the the team long-term. The actual cost to the organization of this trade is likely not going to do anything to the team’s future, given Toussaint’s high-risk status, but if I was a Diamondbacks fan, the process that led to this trade would scare the crap out of me.
You don’t have to think much of Touki Toussaint — I think he’s the kind of prospect that is most often overrated, and I might have been inclined to trade him if I was in Stewart’s position too — to see this trade as a huge red flag about how the D’Backs value assets. Understanding market value, or at least trying to ascertain the market value of your own players before you trade them, should be a requirement of running a front office in 2015.
This trade raised real questions over whether the D’Backs understood Toussaint’s value to the other 29 teams. Based on Stewart’s comments to Rosenthal, it’s not clear whether the Diamondbacks front office actually knows how to value players at all.”
I remember that article when it was first published. Looks like at this point Touki has a legitimate chance of being a very effective big league pitcher.
It’s crazy that the D’backs would pay him 2.5+ mil the year before and then ship him away to save ten the next season. They saved a net of 7.5 million and gave up their 1st round pick. Even if he would’ve busted that’s just ridiculous to do in year 2.
DS should be blacklisted. He could’ve seriously set Arizona back years and years
Who do you guys think will be better, Allard or Touki??
No question Touki has a MUCH higher ceiling. Allard gets by with smoke and mirrors. While Allard has been VERY effective in the minors he doesn’t really have the stuff that translates into swing and misses.
Don’t get me wrong, I still expect Allard to be a decent major league pitcher, but more of a number four or number five. Touki has a very realistic chance of being significantly better than that.
Trade with Yanks——————Markakis,Suzuki,McCarthy,Allard,I.Anderson,Demeritte and Carle FOR G.Sanchez(Yanks have soured on him),D.Acevedo,L.Medina and Florial. Lineup 2019===Acuna,Albies,Freeman,Sanchez,Harper,Riley,Camargo,Swanson!