Okay, this functionally works as news and not a question, but…
Last night, Chandler Rome of The Athletic reported that current Braves assistant general manager Ben Sestanovich was in the running for the Houston Astros’ vacant front office head honcho position.
The Braves are no strangers to having their Alex Anthopoulos proteges depart to baseball ops departments with… tricky… ownership situations. Perry Minasian was the top of the card in Anaheim, for better or worse, until he wasn’t. Dana Brown went
to Houston, where he was sacked a couple of months ago, leading to the current opening.
It strikes me as odd that Astros owner Jim Crane would show Brown the door, only to then hire another guy from the Braves’ front office… but Crane does Crane things, so that perhaps fits.
Sestanovich is one of five guys with his “assistant GM” title at present, with a focus on player development. He was the Padres’ head of player development before the Braves offered him the promotion and brought him on ahead of the 2020 campaign. If he does end up moving on to Houston, it would be the second time that Crane handed his keys to a Braves staffer focused on non-MLB talent, as Dana Brown was the Braves’ vice president of scouting.
While the Braves are fairly coy about specifics on what their staffers do and achieve, my main Sestanovich nugget is that he was the guy that helped Kyle Wright break out by having him change his pitch mix to be an east-west, sinker/curve guy. (Having Wright do this was a popular plea in the comments around here for quite a while before it happened, but apparently Sestanovich was the guy who broke through in this regard.)
Anyway, what do you think? Is Sestanovich going to be Brown’s replacement in a time is a flat circle way?
