Philly Front Office

Nick, Danny, and any other of the dozens of Braves fans out there, let’s give you a chance to wallow in the opening week’s misery for a second. I may sincerely despise your team, but I don’t wish a bad opening baseball experience on anyone. Opening Day is one of the few times in the sports year that everyone who considers themselves a baseball fan can feel happy simply that their sport has returned.¹ The weather is immediately nicer, work seems less important, and you have the possibilities of a fun season even if your team loses and doesn’t have much of a chance. Braves fans have been completely robbed of this.

Teams lose games, teams underachieve, and players get hurt through the course of a season, but all of that isn’t supposed to happen IMMEDIATELY. So far, without even a week of baseball in the books, the Braves are 0-6, their star free agent signing was suspended 80 games (and for the playoffs), and one of their front-line starters is out for a few months (and possibly the season) with a shoulder injury. It’s worse than that too. Much worse.

On The Field

The hitting stats are ugly. Batting average, last. On base, last. Slugging, last. They aren’t even particularly close to the mean either. Now, granted, the team had to start out west against the Padres and the Dodgers, but the offense has generated only 7 extra base hits in 6 games. They haven’t even seen the best of opposing pitchers yet either considering the Dodgers are taking their starters out after 5 innings and Michael King and Dylan Cease weren’t sharp in their outings. Nick Pivetta carved them up.

No one on the team is hitting and ignoring Marcell Ozuna and Matt Olson walking, the lineup is doing basically nothing. Now Jurickson Profar is out. He was expected to pick up the slack until Ronald Acuna was ready from his ACL recovery. Now that job goes to Alex Verdugo and Bryan de la Cruz, two of the worst players in the league last season. The team has very little depth. Plus, ACL injuries usually sap the ability of players in the first season back from injury. This happened to Acuna once already, we will see if it happens again. The Braves do have considerable talent in Austin Riley, Michael Harris, Ozzie Albies, Ozuna and Olson, but the rest of the lineup is in trouble.

The pitching has been fine, but it is about to be seriously strained. Ideally, the Braves’ rotation is Chris Sale, Spencer Strider, Reynaldo Lopez, Spencer Schwellenbach, and Braves Magic. Braves Magic is either a rookie or journeyman who comes out of nowhere and shoves. Last year it was Schwellenbach and Lopez, it was Strider before them; it’s always someone. Well, not this year. Since Lopez is already gone, this means they need two Magic spots, unfortunately they don’t even have one. AJ Smith-Shawver and Bryce Elder have already shown they are more like spot starters than anything. Strider isn’t back yet but looked good in his limited spring appearances. He could come right out and dominate, but as we have seen with him before, the zip might not be there after the first couple innings. We’ll see if his arm can hold up to the Braves needs this season after missing almost all of last year. Then there is Chris Sale, last year’s deserving Cy Young winner. His regularly glass body held up to the rigors of a full season for the first time since 2018…until it didn’t. He missed his final and most pivotal starts of the season with a back issue. He is now 36 years old and pitched 177 innings last year, his most (by a lot) since 2017. His arm and its high torque delivery is on thin ice. The one non-question mark is second year magician Schwellenbach. He’s just plain good. The 24 year old sophomore is the safe bet to be the Braves best pitcher this season.

The bullpen has been rough. Hector Neris who came out in the 7th in the opener left with an infinite ERA and has already been DFA’d. It’s Aaron Bummer, Raisel Iglesias, and pray you don’t have to use Grant Holmes as a starter.

In The Front Office

The Braves have one of the best GMs in sports not named Howie Roseman. Alex Anthopoulos routinely makes shrewd moves, evaluates great talent, and regularly convinces players to take team friendly extensions. He has saved the Braves countless dollars while putting out elite rosters year after year. His one problem is that he has a Board of Directors to report to rather than a standard owner. Dave Dombrowski needs to only say “come onnnn” to John Middleton to get him to open his wallet, Anthopoulos doesn’t have that luxury. The Braves are owned by Liberty Media, a publicly traded company. This means that the Braves are a business first, next, and last. They can’t run deficits in the name of winning and lose money for shareholders, meaning they can’t spend extra money to address a need. The record of the team simply does not matter over profit. We don’t know this budget, but Anthopoulos has to treat it like the bible. The Luxury Tax threshold is $241m. The Braves are currently at $220 after being at $278m last season. That’s a significant drop. The only free agent they went after was Profar while letting Max Fried walk. I don’t think they are going anywhere near that tax number. Essentially, reinforcements are not coming.

What the hell Braves? Atlanta has regularly saved money thanks to absurd contracts signed by their young players. The following are their homegrown, all-star level talent and their tax numbers:

• Ozzie Albies – $5m
• Michael Harris – $9m
• Ronald Acuna – $12.5m
• Spencer Strider – $12.5m
• Austin Riley – $21.2m

Those are the biggest bargains in baseball!!! These guys are all cost controlled for years too. Not to mention team friendly deals for Olson, Ozuna, and Sean Murphy. Instead of using this savings to invest more in the team, Liberty Media will be making a profit this season. I’m sure Ozzie Albies LOVES that he is making money for shareholders while making basically the league average and watching the Mets and Phillies blow up the bank.

This is worse when you consider who they didn’t sign this winter and how it could have helped them. The team clearly had a problem with the 5th starter and knew of their own injury concerns. Instead of even attempting to retain Max Fried, they let him get overpaid by the Yankees. They never even tried. Then there’s the outfield that they knew had an Acuna sized hole and a left field problem. Yes, they signed Profar, but their other moves were to keep Jarred Kelenic and sign Bryan de la Cruz. There wasn’t anyone out there as a high-end bench bat, someone like Max Kepler, they could have used? Again, they didn’t try and relied simply on more Braves Magic. It may have finally caught up with them.

What’s Next?

The Braves aren’t done despite staring 0-7 in the face tonight against the Dodgers. The team simply has too much high-end talent to just roll over, especially with Strider and Acuna waiting in the wings. But the budget and the pitching staff loom as significant barriers to legitimate contention. Hitting is the current problem, but the pitching is what could really bite them this season. The Braves need the luck and health that they had two years ago but abandoned them last season. It might not be coming back.

1. Anyone who has ever been to WrestleMania knows this feeling. It’s going to a sold out sporting event where everyone is happy just being there and that’s more important than who wins. ↩︎