This week’s mailbag features questions on the Braves’ rotation, how they might handle the trade deadline, Ronald Acuña Jr and plenty more.
A big thank you to everyone who sent in questions for this week’s Atlanta Braves mailbag. I couldn’t get to all of them, but we will do another one soon. Let’s get to it!
Obviously, we have a long way to go until the trade deadline, but if Alex Anthopoulos decides to target a starter do you think he’d look to someone with more long-term control or a rental starter that can fill in for the rest of the year and give him time in the offseason to do something more substantial?
Given where the rotation stands beyond this season, my thinking was that they would be looking for a starter with team control even before Spencer Strider was injured. The only thing that changes now is that the urgency is a little greater, which might mean that specific rentals get more attractive now even when they didn’t before Strider got hurt. Still, we’ll have to see what happens once July rolls around. History is shown that they won’t do anything rash, but I think the search continues at the Trade Deadline and then into the offseason if necessary.
Do the Braves stick with internal pitching options or go to FA/Trade? AA has familiarity with Noah Syndergaard, who is still out there.
At this point, I think they stick with their internal options and see what they have. So far, we have seen Allan Winans and Darius Vines. They haven’t even gotten to Bryce Elder, who made 30 starts for the club last year. AJ Smith-Shawver will get a look at some point as well, and they still have Dylan Dodd as another option.
While I personally think Noah Syndergaard is toast at this point in his career, there are other free agent options out there. If Alex Anthopoulos thinks that one of those options gives the team a better chance, then yeah, I believe they’d make a deal. At this point though, I’m not sure any of those available options is better than what they already have. Current freely-available guys would also need to ramp up, so they’re not an instant fix. The team would also probably want to work with them to implement some degree of gameplanning or what have you, and that makes it easier to promote and pitch the guys they’ve already been working with, to some extent.
We don’t know how long Sean Murphy is going to be out and since Travis d’Arnaud can’t catch every day and Chadwick Tromp neither knows the hitters nor can he hit himself, are the Braves looking around for another catcher?
The answer to this is no. The Braves signed Sandy Leon to a minor league deal and placed him at Gwinnett for insurance, but I think they are pleased with their catcher situation. They won’t rush Murphy back from injury, but it is likely he returns sometime in May barring a setback. While Tromp’s bat might not scare anyone, he has been in the organization since 2022 and most importantly, knows most of the pitching staff. The Braves had multiple chances to move on and find someone else, but they seem to like Tromp just fine as an organizational third catcher. Atlanta’s catchers go through extensive game planning on their opponents before every game and then even brought Murphy on the last road trip to assist with that. So, I don’t think it is a case that Tromp doesn’t know the opponents either.
If this was more of a long-term injury for Murphy, then maybe they would keep an eye out for another veteran, but you must remember, Alex Anthopoulos has stated repeatedly that the most important thing they look for in their catchers is how they handle the pitching staff. Tromp checks the boxes there, or he wouldn’t still be in the organization. Any offense they get from their backstops they view as a plus and they have the lineup to cover them if necessary.
It’s also worth noting that Chris Sale has gone on record about how effectively he feels he works with Tromp, so I don’t think the organization is in a hurry to find other options.
Since it is a year post TJ surgery now, is July the earliest possible ETA of Ian Anderson in Atlanta assuming no setbacks?
I am not expecting Ian Anderson to become an option until sometime after the All-Star Game, and maybe even after the Trade Deadline. The talk was that he would be back on a mound sometime in June and he will need plenty of time to not only ramp up, but to get some game action in. The Braves have been very optimistic about getting Anderson back possibly for the stretch run, but in these cases I always feel that it is best not to count on them until they are completely back. With that said, I think the earliest that we might see Anderson back in Atlanta would be August or September.
Given that David Fletcher is out of options and about to hit five years of service, what might happen to him when Ozzie returns? (Assuming no other injuries that would matter for this question, etc.)
This is a good question and I have seen a lot of confusion on it. The early report is that Albies might need two weeks. That would give Fletcher the five years of service time that will guarantee his current contract even if he becomes a free agent. This will essentially leave the Braves with two options.
The first and easiest would be to keep Fletcher on the active roster and drop Luke Williams who was called up on Friday.
If the Braves don’t want to do that, they could designate Fletcher for assignment and outright him to Gwinnett. He will reject it, become a free agent and then look for other major league opportunities like the situation with Jackson Stephens. The only catch is, the Braves will owe him the remainder of the money left on his contract. So, if Fletcher signs with another team, Atlanta will still owe him his money. There would also be a chance that if he can’t find another major league opportunity, that he re-signs with Atlanta on a minor league deal.
While paying a player to play for another team isn’t an appealing thought, it is likely something that the Braves considered as a possibility when they acquired him. Atlanta hasn’t dealt with a lot of dead money since Alex Anthopoulos’ first season with the club, but it isn’t an unheard-of situation with major league clubs.
In the discussions of starting pitcher injuries over the past week, the fact that pitchers today throw everything hard has been identified by a lot of people as a factor. Are starting pitchers in MLB going to become like running backs in the NFL, with a useful lifetime of 3-4 years? Or are some of them going to start looking for ways to mix in off-speed pitches and still be effective? Or is MLB going to try to legislate a solution?
It is an interesting comparison to NFL running backs, but I think it is a good possibility. Some pitchers are already mixing in tons of off-speed pitches, but even those are thrown at greater velocity. It is an interesting time in that we can start looking to see if any organizations are going to try and make adjustments. It is going to be hard to get players to buy in, though, because right now, high velocity and high spin is what is getting pitchers paid.
The second part of this question is the one that scares me the most. The answer is yes, Major League Baseball is going to try to legislate a solution. One idea I have seen is cutting the limit on rostered pitchers to 11 or 12. I don’t think this helps the situation because again, pitchers aren’t going to stop throwing hard because that is what leads to success and ultimately gets them paid. This option will likely lead to more injuries and more roster moves. Another problem with this is the position player side of the 26-man roster. Teams must carry 13 position players now and that 13th guy basically never plays. Under a scenario where teams are limited to 11 or 12 pitchers, are they going to carry 14 or 15 position players? The league might want to cut roster size to 24 or 25 under that scenario, but the union will fight that every step of the way.
Another option I have seen is tied to the DH — the proposal where teams lose the DH if their starter fails to go five innings. This doesn’t fix the problem either and is ridiculous in my opinion. It creates a situation with even fewer comebacks, which makes the game more boring and gives you less reason to follow a game along as it develops. So yeah, I’m scared that the league might try to legislate this. I was all for the pitch clock. I don’t know why the league decided to adjust it again prior to the 2024 season without accumulating several seasons of data. That kind of shortsightedness is the reason I don’t want them trying to devise a remedy.
How do the Braves deal with Reynaldo Lopez? Since it seems unlikely, they are comfortable with him hitting 180 plus the post season. What are the possible approaches to managing his innings? What would be a maximum they are likely to be looking at?
Seems unlikely they are comfortable with him hitting 180 innings? I’d say that is a safe bet, since Lopez hasn’t pitched more than 66 innings in a season since 2019. Honestly, 100-120 innings could be a stretch, at least in my mind.
The Braves, though, don’t always follow the standards and norms. Case in point, I don’t think for a minute that the plan entering the 2023 season was to allow Bryce Elder to throw 170 innings. They evaluate their pitchers after every start and every side session to see how they are feeling and determine if they need extra days of rest, and that goes beyond the pitcher health management they already implement team-wide that regiments which arms are available when. They also do a good job of juggling their rotation around off days. For example, Lopez’s last start in Houston came with six days of rest. Limiting him to five or six innings no matter how well he is pitching is going to be the norm.
I think this is why they aren’t going to settle on just one pitcher taking that fifth spot. You are going to see a lot of guys dropped in throughout the season so that they can help get guys extra rest and hold down their innings.
What do we make of Ronald Acuña Jr’s approach at the plate? Counting stats aside, there are too many at-bats which he’s not competitive. Lots of weak contact early in counts, lots of chasing out of the zone. Is this attributable to missing a bunch of spring training?
I will stop short of saying that he is taking non-competitive at-bats because I doubt very seriously opposing pitchers feel that way. But there are some things that jump out when you look at his first 80 plate appearances. I think the biggest thing that jumps off the board is the fact that he has just one barrel on the season. As you mentioned, though, his average exit velocity and max EV are down, as is his hard-hit rate. Right now, he has a 54.2% ground ball rate, but that was high early on last season before improving. Acuña is also striking out at a 25percent clip, which is more than double his strikeout rate from a season ago, but more in line with his career average.
I do think missing as much Spring Training as he did is likely playing a part, and Acuña said as much last week. He says he is completely healthy, and I think it is just about getting more plate appearances under his belt while making some mechanical adjustments. The crazy thing is, he’s still carrying a 127 wRC+ through those first 80 plate appearances, though there’s some contact quality overperformance there.
Fundamentally, the problem is all about fastballs. He’s just not catching up to them, and it’s having downstream effects where he’s also probably guessing fastball too much because he really wants to get one he can drive. Teams aren’t stupid, either: they’ve acknowledged this and have been throwing him more fastballs, which is making his numbers worse. Even the homer he hit on Wednesday came on a non-fastball. Whenever he’s back to timing fastballs, everything should rebound, but for whatever reason, it’s been about three weeks and we still haven’t seen him time a fastball all that well.
He has 23 hard-hit balls so far this season, and only eight of them have come on pitches above 92 mph. Only four have come on pitches above 95 mph, and three of those came in his first two games of the year.
Is there any timetable on the return of podcasts? I am lost on Mondays and Thursdays now.
Let’s wrap with a little site news. We announced it on social media but really haven’t addressed it on the site. SB Nation made the decision to pull the plug on all their remaining podcasts including ours. That is obviously disappointing for us, but the podcast will live on somewhere. Brad is currently looking at the options and we should have an announcement to make soon. We appreciate everyone listening over the last few years.