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Rick Kranitz

Braves Hire Jeremy Hefner, Antoan Richardson

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The Braves announced that they have hired Jeremy Hefner as pitching coach and Antoan Richardson as first base coach. Henfer replaces Rick Kranitz while Richardson replaces Tom Goodwin. Mark Bowman of MLB.com reports that third base coach Fredi Gonzalez won’t be returning to Atlanta next year either.

Atlanta is plucking a couple of coaches from a division rival. Over a month ago, it was reported that the Mets would be making major coaching changes. That included moving on from Hefner, their longtime pitching coach. More recently, it was reported that Richardson would be moving on from the Mets as well. Both of them now retake their previous jobs but in Atlanta instead of Queens.

Hefner, now 39, had a brief major league career. He pitched for the Mets in 2012 and 2013, making 50 appearances, before multiple Tommy John surgeries intervened. Once his playing days were over, he was hired by the Twins as an advance scout. He worked his way up to an assistant pitching coach role. The Mets hired him as their pitching coach prior to the 2020 season.

It’s always tough to separate the contributions of one coach from several individual players, but the team performed decently under Hefner’s watch. From 2020 to 2025, the Mets had a collective 4.03 earned run average, good enough for 11th in the majors. He’ll now head to Atlanta to join a club looking for a bounceback after an extremely disappointing 2025 campaign.

Bringing one pitching coach aboard means another is on his way out. Kranitz, 67, has spent most of the past two decades as a pitching coach in the big leagues. He first got that job with the Marlins in 2006 and has since gone to the Orioles, Brewers and Phillies.

Atlanta hired him ahead of the 2019 season. They had just finished a 90-72 campaign in 2018 but parted ways with pitching coach Chuck Hernandez afterwards. The club has had a lot of success under Kranitz but has been struggling more recently. Atlanta won the National League East in Kranitz’s first five seasons, a run which included a World Series win in 2021. However, they slid to a Wild Card spot in 2024 and then this past season was a nightmare. Atlanta finished 2025 in fourth place in the East with a 76-86 record. Evidently, it was time for a change.

Richardson, 42, has had various coaching roles with the Giants and Mets over the years. He has settled in more recently as a first base coach, having had that job with the Giants from 2020 to 2023 and with the Mets for the past two years.

Goodwin, 57, has coached for various clubs over the years. He spent the past two seasons as first base coach in Atlanta but will be looking for a new gig for 2026. Gonzalez, 61, has also bounced around to various teams. A lot of those bounces have been in Atlanta. He was on the coaching staff from 2003 to 2006 and was the manager from 2011 to 2016. He returned to the club in June of this year, a rare midseason replacement, taking the job from Matt Tuiasosopo.

Photo courtesy of Gregory Fisher, Imagn Images

Braves Notes: Melancon, Morton, Leaks, Chemistry, And Culture

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The Braves pulled off a somewhat surprising pair of moves early this postseason by nabbing starters Drew Smyly and Charlie Morton on one-year deals. That the deals were surprising, however, was not surprising. The Braves keep their internal conversations about players internal, according to the Athletic’s David O’Brien, who writes, “Atlanta is as leak-free as any organization in sports regarding rumors of potential trades and free-agent signings, and if the player and his agent are equally private, which is how the Braves like it and something that agents are aware of, there could and often are discussions and deals completed before anything is leaked.”

Hence, the dearth of news about re-signing, say, Mark Melancon, O’Brien notes, doesn’t equate to a lack of movement or interest. Simply, if the Braves do bring Melancon back, the public isn’t likely to hear about it until the deal is done.

In the meantime, Braves’ fans can content themselves with the additions they’ve already made this winter. After all, while neither the Smyly nor Morton contracts were big deals financially, they are big deals in terms of potential impact. The Morton acquisition bumped Fangraphs’ valuation of Atlanta’s rotation from the 16th-ranked rotation in the game to 11th, writes Jay Jaffe. Morton brings 1.5 more projected WAR than the Braves’ in-house alternative, per Steamer.

But for Morton, the decision to sign on the dotted line had as much to do with the personalities involved as it did the strength of the rotation. Familiarity with catching coach Sal Fasano, pitching coach Rick Kranitz, and catcher Travis d’Arnaud helped Morton commit to the switch from Tampa to Atlanta, according to a piece by O’Brien from just before Thanksgiving.

The already-established clubhouse culture in Atlanta also made the Braves an intriguing destination. Chemistry may not be the metric du jour for statisticians, but it was a consideration for Morton. Per O’Brien, Morton said, “Most good teams, they can outplay their talent level just by being close and having good attitudes and having fun. From everything that I know and what I’ve seen, the Braves have both. It looks like they’re really loose, fun-loving, but they’re also really talented. So I’m looking forward to being part of a group where you’re looking forward to getting to the park every day and you just want to hang out, being excited to play together.”

NL Notes: Bumgarner, WGN, Cubs, Phillies

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Madison Bumgarner has made his last pitch of the 2019 season – and perhaps his career as a San Francisco Giant. The free-agent-to-be would have been in line to start Sunday’s season finale, but manager Bruce Bochy says they’ll watch the game together from the bench, per Kerry Crowley of the Mercury News. Sunday will be the last game of Bochy’s prodigious career as well, and it will be appropriate to take in the game alongside Bumgarner, with whom he won three world championships. If Bumgarner does move on this offseason, he will finish his career in San Francisco with a 119-92 record and 3.13 ERA/3.32 FIP across 1,846 innings – 8th on the Giants all-time bWAR leaderboard. Still just 30-years-old, Bumgarner wraps up 2019 with a 3.90 ERA/3.91 FIP while eclipsing 200 innings for the seventh time in his career. As the penultimate day of the 2019 season gets under way, let’s check in on a couple other teams from the senior circuit…

  • The Cubs say goodbye to WGN this week, the beloved television network known as the home of Cubs content for the last 72 years. The long-awaited Marquee Sports Network launches next year, but the revenue streams won’t provide real kickback for a couple of years, per Paul Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune. The long-promised “wheelbarrow full of money” won’t be arriving at Theo Epstein’s baseball operations department from day one, but neither does Epstein see the new television deal affecting baseball decisions. Said Epstein, “We want to win the World Series. But it’s not because of the TV network. That’s the goal. It’s unrelated. There’s a wall between baseball decisions and anything related to the TV network.”
  • Trust is a process, and first-year Phillies pitching coach Chris Young understands that process takes a little longer with suboptimal results, per The Athletic’s Matt Gelb and Meghan Montemurro (subscription required). Young’s job was made all the more difficult when players bristled at the dismissal of his predecessor Rick Kranitz. Young’s analytics-driven philosophy was in lockstep with manager Gabe Kapler, but Philly pitchers are taking longer to buy-in, in part from its perception as an inflexible top-down approach. It was a frustrating season on the whole for Philadelphia’s pitching staff as the team regressed to 2017 levels after taking a big step forward in 2018.

Braves Hire Rick Kranitz As Pitching Coach

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DECEMBER 6: The Atlanta organization has announced the hiring.

DECEMBER 4: The Braves appear to be closing in on an agreement that will make Rick Kranitz their new pitching coach, per David O’Brien of The Athletic (via Twitter). It’s not clear if and when an announcement will be made, but the report says it’s now “expected” that Kranitz will come aboard.

It came as a surprise when the veteran coach came free after just one season with the Phillies. The driving force was not any particular displeasure with his performance on the part of the Philadelphia organization. Rather, faced with interest from other organizations in assistant pitching coach Chris Young, the Phils decided to promote him to Kranitz’s position.

On the Braves’ side, the organization decided after the 2018 campaign to part ways with Chuck Hernandez. That left the team in need of a new leader in the pitching department, coinciding with Kranitz’s availability.

The Atlanta staff had some notable successes last year, but also some disappointments. Frankly, much the same could be said of the Phillies, so it’s tough assess this move from an outside perspective. Clearly, though, Kranitz enjoys plenty of respect within the industry. He previously served as pitching coach for the Marlins, Orioles, and Brewers.

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