Braves Minor League Recap: Caminiti Strong Again for Columbus

It was an off day for Owen Murphy, and in allowing only one run he had to feel fortunate after he left this outing. Murphy had a lot of trouble landing his fastball up in the strike zone, and across his arsenal he left way too many pitches in hittable locations. Murphy gave up a lot of loud contact, but Louisville didn't get him squarely too often and he survived on fly outs for five innings. The one exception came in the second inning when Murphy through a middle-middle fastball that got tattooed for a 447 foot home run. This was quite a departure from where Murphy typically is on the mound and I'm inclined to chalk that up to a bad day for now. Over the past couple of months Murphy has been solid with his fastball location and has held his velocity deeper into games, so it could have just been an off day. He could also finally be reaching the ceiling of his stamina for the year, given that he's well past his career-high and has made ten more appearances this season than in his prior two combined. Murphy's velocity early in the game recovered a little bit from his prior starts but he couldn't maintain that the second time through the order, and when combined with a drop in spin rate and command I'd suspect that fatigue wall to be coming up on him. Regardless of where the rest of the year takes him this has been a resounding success. He's been healthy for most of the year and improved drastically, and anything beyond this point is icing on the cake. The biggest focus is keeping Murphy healthy, and I don't see any reason to believe the Braves would take a risk if does start to wear down.

Gwinnett's lineup has surged back to relevancy with the transactions over the past couple of weeks, and an eight-run opening to this series is nothing to sneeze at. Lizandro Espinoza put the exclamation on the game with a three-run home run to push his OPS over 1.000, though it wasn't the most impressive of shots. He curled in a wall-scraper in the left field corner and otherwise had a bit of a rough day out there, but there is little to complain about what Espinoza has done so far. He's definitely aggressive at the plate and is going to have to cool it a bit, but he's shown the ability to adjust at the lower levels and I think he's shown he can already handle being a depth piece as a utility player. David McCabe hasn't played too many games since coming back but he has been a monster at the plate. He had two hits and four more hard hit balls in this game. The whiffs are there in a bad way and he just doesn't seem to have enough overall value as a player to be valuable to keep at the major league level, but he has a good enough power/approach combination to keep some value as depth in the minor leagues. I'm also liking some of what we're seeing from Patrick Clohisy. He's not doing much damage on secondary pitches but has been a lot better the past week with his playte discipline and that showed with two more walks in this game. He's shown a history in his career of being streaky with his power, but as long as he can make the adjustments to get on base and play defense as well as he does he'll have a long professional future ahead of himself even if he's never a starter-caliber option.

If you're not excited about what Cam Caminiti is doing you might be dead inside, because this has been an outstanding sequence of games from him. He has immediately kept pace with the Double-A level without even blinking, and has found a way to integrate his entire arsenal better and better with each start. The command issues were still apparent in this game and that will remain a running theme for him, but it's so much better than it was at the start of the season. That was something that was expected coming in from Caminiti but the process is working and the hope is that eventually his athleticism will take over and allow him to find more consistency. It's absolutely a point of emphasis and he will need to bring his walks down before he'll get a shot at the Triple-A level, but the pitch quality itself is already good enough to make the jump. It's rare to find a 20-year-old with confidence in three different pitches and even if there is plenty of room for development there has already been a massive improvement. Caminiti is taking all of the steps necessary to be make it yet another quick ascension for a young Braves pitcher.