The Venezuela team in the WBC had a nice win against the prohibitive favorite Dominican Republic team 5-1. Ronald Acuna went 0-4 with a strikeout, but his Venezuelan team managed a comfortable win regardless.
Meanwhile, extensions have been flying around recently, with Keibert Ruiz and Corbin Carroll the latest recipients. While this is obviously not an idea that can be attributed originally to Alex Anthopoulos, it does feel like the Braves’ approach and the results it have yielded have caused an uptick in these extensions league-wide. This will likely mean that some players end up getting paid based on prospect status and/or early career production that doesn’t pan out long-term, but the same can be said for paying players later in their career in free agency and those contracts are much larger, so why not give more guys life-changing money with the potential reward of cost-control.