This week’s competition for the top minor league performer in the Braves farm system was particularly fierce. Mike Soroka threw a complete game shutout in the first half of a doubleheader and if his second start both fell within the week and was a strong one, he could have easily won the award. Honestly, I wouldn’t fault anyone for wanting to give him the nod and he is an early favorite for next week as he will have two starts this week in all likelihood and he has a tendency to dominate. Its a bit harder to give the award to a guy who has had a pretty light workload, but we have to give Freddy Tarnok a shoutout as well as it looks like he will end the month of April with a 0.00 ERA with 14 strikeouts in 11 innings of work.

Riley Delgado just keeps doing work down for Rome as well as he had eight hits and six RBIs this week. There is some understandable skepticism regarding his performance at Rome given his age relative to his competition, but we are keeping a close eye on him and he would have been a decent choice this week as well. We also had Touki Toussaint throw a seven inning gem on Saturday with seven Ks, although his other outing this week did feature a pretty high walk rate, so if we are nitpicking that does factor in. Bryse Wilson is going to be a perennial contender for this award it seems as he has given up one earned run all season and threw 6 2⁄ 3 scoreless innings in his start from this past week.

The completely arbitrary and unscientific choice for Braves Minor League Player of the Week this week is Cristian Pache of the Florida Fire Frogs. There are few players that had more helium amongst prospect evaluators than Pache and he is rewarding their optimism down in central Florida. Cristian had 11 hits this week with two extra-base hits including his first professional home run and five RBIs. He is currently slashing .301/.309/.419 for the Fire Frogs and while we would be happy if he would draw some more walks or hit for a bit more power, that he is performing this well in the notoriously pitcher-friendly Florida State League is a great indicator of his potential.

So anyways, congratulations to Cristian Pache for being our Minor League Player of the week. Also, big congrats to goliathefy from our comments section last week. They were the first one to comment and both predicted the winner would be Pache as well as predicted that he would hit his first home run this week (although you were a bit on the optimistic side in terms of extra-base hits). Well done....also a big “lol” to those that predicted Acuna as the winner. The Braves trolled you in the best possible way.

Make sure to put your guesses for next week’s winner in the comments section. We will shout you out if you are right....and its possible that we will make fun of you a little bit if you are hilariously wrong. Keep dreaming big for Alex Jackson, jdawghsizzle, keep dreaming big. Bonus points if you make a guess about a player’s line and get close. I’m not sure what those bonus points get you, but here we are.