The second part of this week’s Braves mailbag discusses the impact of coaching changes, Marcell Ozuna in the outfield and more.
Again, a huge thank you to everyone that took time to send in questions for this week’s Atlanta Braves mailbag. If you missed the first part, you can find it here. Let’s get to it!
I know the long term plan for the rotation was one of the bigger concerns for the Braves going into the season. Now with everything that we have seen from new veterans and top prospects, How do you guys feel about the long term rotation plans now?
This is a great question. No matter how this season ends, one of the big storylines for the offseason is what happens in the Braves’ rotation. As it stands, we know that Chris Sale and Reynaldo López will be a part of it. Spencer Strider will presumably return at some point in 2025 but I’m not going to speculate when that might be right now.
I know the numbers for the fifth spot in the rotation haven’t been great, but I don’t feel the angst as much as some of the fanbase. Those numbers have been skewed at times by some rough performances.
I really like what I have seen from Spencer Schwellenbach in that he pounds the strike zone. If there has been any knock on him, it is that he has struggled a bit to put hitters away, but the bumps he has dealt with are those that nearly any that any rookie pitcher would deal with. The second inning of Wednesday’s start was an opportunity where things could have gone sideways in a hurry but he showed poise and got out of the jam with just two runs scoring.
I was really disappointed when AJ Smith-Shawver got hurt, as I believe he was going to get an extended look. Hopefully, he can get back before the end of the season. I’m excited to get another look at Hurston Waldrep on Sunday. I don’t feel like he is really ready for the majors yet, but he’s intriguing all the same.
If I had to guess about the rotation next year, I’d say that at least one of those young arms will begin the season in the majors. I also expect Alex Anthopoulos to sign or trade for another legitimate starter. I talked about the possibility of Max Fried returning in the first part of the mailbag, and I’m not counting on it. Everyone has assumed that Charlie Morton will retire next season, but if he wants to come back, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Braves brought him back. Granted, such a reunion would probably be for less than the $20 million that he is making this season.
As hard as it is going to be to stomach if Fried heads elsewhere, I personally still feel optimistic about the rotation.
Who is the best option to replace Ronald Acuña Jr at the leadoff spot this season?
I think the answer is that there isn’t one. Acuña is the perfect leadoff hitter for today’s game and the Braves really don’t have another guy. From a very traditional, “fast guy hit first” perspective, a combination of Michael Harris II against right-handers and Ozzie Albies against left-handers made sense, and the Braves tried that for a little bit, but it appears that Brian Snitker is going to give Harris an extended run in that spot every day for now.
In a perfect world, your leadoff hitter is one of your best hitters, whose skillset skews more towards getting on-base than hitting for power. If you look at starters on the active roster and their xwOBAs against right-handers, it’s Marcell Ozuna, a giant gap, Matt Olson, another giant gap, and then a clump that has, in order, Travis d’Arnaud, Harris, Austin Riley, and Albies. If you do the same for left-handers, you have Adam Duvall, d’Arnaud, and Ozuna all destroying southpaws, and then Olson as the only other slightly above-average guy against them. If you look at projections, the top three bats are Ozuna, Olson, and Riley, and those are also the three guys with the best projected OBPs for the rest of the season. In short, there’s no obvious solution here, especially if you expect Ozuna and Olson to hit somewhere else.
Hi Kris, My question is about the Ronald Acuña Jr’s recovery and the Marcell Ozuna option. Do you think that Acuña is going to need extended time at DH in at least the early part of 2025? If the answer is yes, do you think this impacts whether the Braves will exercise the Ozuna option? My understanding is that Ozuna is now taking infield as a first baseman and not working in the outfield at all. So is letting Ozuna play some left field while Acuña DH’s off the table? Thanks for your thoughts on the subject.
First, I think it is an absolute certainty, at this point, that the Braves pick up the option on Marcell Ozuna’s contract. Really the question is, how could they not? It is amazing that I type that sentence now knowing full well two seasons ago we were trying everything we could to figure out how to get him off the roster. Credit him for putting in the work and turning his career back around. It is scary to think where the team might be right now if not for his offensive production.
That said, I think the ship has sailed on Ozuna playing left field. People won’t remember it now, but Ozuna played the first two games of the 2023 season in left field. He hasn’t been out there since. Some speculated after Acuña’s injury that the Braves might put Ozuna in left, but Brian Snitker was quick to say that they were going with Jarred Kelenic and Adam Duvall. They haven’t wavered from that plan even as Kelenic has struggled to begin the year, and Adam Duvall, despite a lack of a platoon split for his career, having one of the most egregious small-sample splits possible.
Basically, the Braves are saying that defense matters — especially with the difficulty that they have had scoring runs. In addition, they may not want to mess with Ozuna when he’s tearing the cover off the ball. Doing anything that might affect his production at the plate would be suboptimal at this point. For his career, Ozuna has a 142 wRC+ as a DH and a 114 wRC+ as a left fielder, which is really bizarre because there’s a well-documented “DH penalty” where hitters hit worse when playing DH. But Ozuna is so weird that of course the DH penalty is a “DH benefit” for him.
I will add this caveat: it probably wouldn’t be smart to completely rule out anything. I’m sure if he was asked, Ozuna would grab a glove and head back out to left if the Braves needed him to. I don’t think that is something that they currently want to do, though.
As far as Acuña’s recovery, maybe they explore the Ozuna in left option, but I’d be surprised. Maybe they don’t rush Acuña back until they feel he is ready to play every day. He was clearly on the field in 2022 before he should have been. As much as they will need him back, I think they take an even more measured approach with his return next time around.
How much do you think that all of the offseason coaching changes have impacted the Braves performance thus far? Also – do you think any mid season coaching changes might occur as a result of the recent results?
This is a popular thing that has popped up on social media during the Braves’ skid. I’m sure some of those guys miss Ron Washington and Eric Young Sr., but I don’t think the changes have had any effect. None of the three coaches that left had anything to do with the offense. As we pointed out plenty of times over the past few seasons, the Braves were extremely fortunate to keep the coaching staff together as long as they did with the success they had.
I’m sure Atlanta would have loved to have kept Washington and Young, but this is what happens. Coaches leave for opportunities and teams must adjust. The argument that the coaching staff changing has led to worse play seems to simply be mixing together “coaches left, team plays worse” without any sort of verifiable theory of change, or anything similar. Anyone can make those sorts of claim at any time about anything, but it doesn’t really hold water without more than just a claim. For all we know, it’s not the coaching changes, but the new, lower-quality uniforms that are rubbing the Braves the wrong way.
I think there is close to a zero percent chance that the Braves make any coaching changes in-season. The things I would stress to anyone that suggests a coaching move is in order is that this group is working just as hard as they did last year. Probably too hard, if we are being honest…
Will Brian Snitker remain the manger until he is ready to retire regardless of how the team performs?
…which brings us to this question. I don’t think anyone has full, one hundred percent job security, but Snitker has more than most. The players love him. He has a good relationship with the Front Office. No manager, team employee, or even player will ever have unanimous support from their fanbase — just look at the complaints people had about Acuña last year, or the fact that there are still people who think Alex Anthopoulos and his crew have done a bad job for some reason. What is definitely more certain is that even if the Braves swapped out Brian Snitker for someone else, there’d be a similar litany of complaints against whomever stepped into the role.
I think there is a better chance that Snitker retires or moves into a Front Office role than him ever being fired. He certainly won’t be fired in a season where he lost his best pitcher and his best position player to season-ending injuries, unless there’s some kind of flashpoint between him and the Front Office that hasn’t revealed itself to date.
Any significant news regarding Ian Anderson? The last we heard was that June is a target.
You probably saw it already, but Justin Toscano reported that Ian Anderson recently threw a live batting practice session. The team hasn’t announced any updates on Anderson, but the natural progression would be a rehab assignment starting imminently. How much time he needs and whether he makes additional starts at Gwinnett before returning to the majors is yet to be determined. Anderson’s career went off the rails well before Tommy John Surgery, though, so there’s little reason to figure he’s just going to be pre-shoulder injury Ian Anderson from 2020-early 2021 when he finishes rehabbing his elbow.
Sean Murphy hasn’t hit well since last July. Do you think the new league now has an updated, more effective book on him?
I’m going to push back on this a bit because Sean Murphy had a 108 wRC+ in July and a 135 wRC+ in August last season. Yes, that dropped to a 36 wRC+ in September but this idea that he went off a cliff after June of last year is false. Nor were those stats just luck, check this out:
Even in his worst month, September, he had an above-average xwOBA and was mostly just done in by underhitting it by literally .100 points.
He’s played 12 games so far this season due to the oblique injury, so that is too tiny of a sample to make any real judgements. He started slow last season, too, before catching fire when Travis d’Arnaud went down with a concussion. Just looking at him, he seems to be suffering from the same things that the rest of the lineup are dealing with, except he’s months behind them based on how much time he missed. He currently has a 70 percent grounder rate and has a terrible combination of a low z-swing rate and a high o-swing rate; maybe if those things keep up he can be considered fully cooked, but there’s no reason to assume that that’s the case after 45 PAs. While we don’t have bat speed data from last year, he’s still swinging way harder than league average this year, so it’s probably not some kind of overwhelming physical issue, either.
If the coaches and manager don’t know why the team is in a hitting slump, how can they correct it?
You probably read Ivan’s article on the team’s struggles last week. It has been frustrating for fans and even more frustrating for the players and coaches. A perfect microcosm of this season occurred in the first game in Baltimore when Sean Murphy flied out on a ball that is a three-run homer in any other ballpark. The Orioles of course answered back with a three-run shot of their own an inning later that was a homer in just 20 of 30 ballparks, and was hit less hard than the one Murphy hit. It was a case of the Braves hitting a ball too high, such that it was profoundly affected by the extra drag on the ball this season, but as the above-linked article notes, that’s actually not been a problem for the Braves this year overall, as they’ve been screwed on lower, hard-hit line drives way more than on lofted balls that getting dragged into outs.
But, it isn’t all bad luck. At times there have been really poor at-bats up and down the lineup. That isn’t a situation where a guy doesn’t care but is just simply trying to do too much. Getting behind 0-2 and then chasing a head-high fastball is a great example.
So, while the players and the coaches can’t control how many barrels end up in their opponents gloves or why Major League baseballs this season seem to resemble wet socks, they can certainly work on having better plate appearances. Some of them can also work to get back to the approaches that worked really well last year — in particular, Harris, Orlando Arcia, and Kelenic have spent large parts of this season without any useful plan or approach, or seemingly any recognition that pitchers know how to get them out and are going to execute that plan against them.