A glimpse at the Alex Anthopoulos PowerPoint
A glimpse at the Alex Anthopoulos PowerPoint
The Braves are in their Good Old Days, and they've adopted a new team-building approach.
Three years ago, the Braves acquired Orlando Arcia in return for a pair of upper-minors relievers. Arcia was a former top prospect whose defense was enough to produce positive overall value, but whose weak bat (career 71 wRC+) meant that he would never be a quality everyday player.
Before he played an inning for the major league team, the Braves showed him a PowerPoint about his swing. The full contents of the PowerPoint weren’t publicized - they almost certainly won’t ever be - but the Braves’ offensive philosophy isn’t a secret. Don’t hack at everything, but swing hard at pitches in the zone. Chasing pitches is bad, but in-zone whiffs are just the cost of doing business, because it means that the in-zone swings that do result in contact are that much more likely to send the ball a long way.1 It’s no wonder the Braves were first in zone-swing percentage last year (the difference between them and the third-place team is the same as the difference between the third- and tenth-place teams) and that they were towards the bottom of the league in zone-contact percentage. And sure enough, Orlando Arcia has become an average-ish hitter, all while seeing his zone-swing increase, his zone-contact decrease, and his hard-hit rate skyrocket.
There’s plenty of reading out there about the Braves’ offensive philosophy, and I think with the exception of the people who crow that it doesn’t work in the playoffs (if this is you or a loved one, please read the footnote), everyone agrees that it’s smart and sustainable.
So let’s talk about something more controversial: the Braves’ allocation of resources this offseason. The team entered the offseason pledging to increase payroll, and indeed they have. At the time of writing, the Braves sit at a $273M tax payroll, just a hair under the third luxury tax tier (the one that starts affecting draft picks) and more than $30M over their 2023 figure. The team needed another starting pitcher and a left fielder. Alex Anthopoulos acquired both.
But it’s not difficult to understand why some smart people are confused about why the Braves did it by spending nearly all of the new money and a recent top prospect to acquire Chris Sale and Jarred Kelenic. Kelenic has put together about one month of really good big-league performance over three partial seasons. Sale hasn’t put together a full, healthy season since Johan Camargo looked like a franchise cornerstone. Without even accounting for luxury tax penalties, the Braves have invested significant 2024 capital in these players.
And make no mistake, there were more conventional ways to add a left fielder and a starter. The Braves could have gone after Teóscar Hernandez or Lourdes Gurriel Jr. to play left field. (Heck, how many people would have complained if they just kept around Rosario and signed Adam Duvall as his platoon partner?) And even if they balked at the prospect price for Dylan Cease and Tyler Glasnow and the annual financial commitment for Jordan Montgomery and Blake Snell, they could’ve bid competitively for Sonny Gray or Seth Lugo. A combination of, say, Gray and Gurriel doesn’t cost that much more in 2024 than Sale (whose contract Boston is mostly paying) and the dead money attached to Kelenic.
So why pick two way riskier options? I argue that it’s intentional. Over the last few years, Anthopoulos has built a juggernaut. And the Braves’ competitive position and the nature of the playoffs dictate a new strategy. Maybe Alex Anthopoulos’ secret takeaway this offseason was that it’s time to follow the same approach as his best hitters: swing smart, but swing big.
Where the Braves are
There are teams that entered the 2023-24 offseason desperate for sure things. Take the Cardinals, who entered the offseason with a rotation of Miles Mikolas, Matthew Liberatore, Zack Thompson, Steven Matz, and prayer. Is it any wonder that the Cards immediately signed two classic low-end innings eaters (Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson) and then paid big for a high-probability #2 starter (Gray)?
Look at the Braves’ roster and you see team control basically as far as the eye can see. The biggest name they lost in 2023 was . . . Eddie Rosario? Max Fried and maybe A.J. Minter are the only major expected departure next offseason. The Braves have team-controlled All-Star caliber players at catcher, first base, second base, third base, right field, center field, and one of the starting pitcher slots. That’s to say nothing of the quality players in Atlanta on a short-term basis, like Fried, Minter, and Morton.
It’s no wonder that ZiPS has the Braves projected for 97 wins, best in baseball by 4 games and best in the NL East by 12 games. (And if the last two postseasons have convinced you that the Phillies and Braves are much closer than that, do remember that the Braves won the division by 14 games in 2023 and finished 14 games up on Philadelphia in 2022.)
Projections are projections and there’s a reason they play the games, et cetera. But this Braves team has the kind of floor (FanGraphs says you could remove the team’s top 5 players and it would still be an above-.500 squad) and ceiling such that chasing marginal improvements in regular season win total is more a fun exercise than a real necessity.
What it means the Braves can do
The best players are obviously virtually sure things to perform at an elite level. But if you’re not looking to pay a free agent top-of-market money (or spend the equivalent in prospect capital), you’ve got to balance upside and certainty: the higher the payoff, the more risk you have to be willing to take on.
Kelenic and Sale represent very different risks, but they represent the same idea: the Braves taking a chance on players who fit desirable profiles, rather than committing equivalent capital to surer, less exciting alternatives.
Let’s start with Kelenic. I understand there’s been a ton of Internet discourse about him of late, and I’ve contributed to the conversation a few times, so I won’t labor too long here. But here’s the skinny of it: Kelenic is a toolshed who did everything right in 2023 except making consistent contact. And even with major whiff issues (31.7% K rate in 2023), he posted an above-average batting line. Moreover, Kelenic’s skillset is compatible with the offensive philosophy we set out above: he takes big in-zone swings, and his zone-swing rate rate, while above-average leaguewide, is a bit below the Braves’ preferred rate. So along with tweaking Kelenic’s swing, Seitzer’s approach message can be simple: keep swinging harder, just pull the trigger when you see the pitch in the zone a little more often. Then, good things like this can happen:
The rest of Kelenic’s skills aren’t as superlative as his power, but they’re a real upgrade from what the Braves have had in left field since Acuña briefly moonlighted there. He’s pretty fast, he can handle center field in a pinch and he has high-end arm strength.
As I’ve said before, the smart way to think of the Kelenic deal is as being akin to a highly frontloaded free agent deal. Kelenic and his dead-money compadres cost the Braves somewhere around $21 million in 2024. Next year, it’ll be closer to $5 million, and from there on out, it’s whatever Kelenic draws in arbitration. Think of it as a series of no-buyout team options. If Kelenic totally bombs, it’ll probably hurt the Braves as much as it hurt the team to sign Cole Hamels in 2020 - annoying but ultimately pretty forgettable. On the other hand, if Kelenic reaches even his 70th or 80th percentile outcome, he’s a young, inexpensive long-term piece.
In other words, think of the Jarred Kelenic as a deal where the upside is long-term. More than most teams willing to take on over $20 million of dead money, the Braves can afford to shoulder the risk of Kelenic not working out - or to bear the growing pains that might come from having a temporarily unproductive hitter working on a new swing.
So let’s talk about Chris Sale. As with Kelenic, I’ve made my primary contribution to the Sale discourse already. The short version is that Chris Sale is not a tweak away from being really good, nor does he desperately need a visit to the fountain of youth. 2023 Chris Sale was a very good pitcher, largely victimized by bad batted-ball luck and one of the worst defenses in recent baseball history. By xwOBA, he was virtually indistinguishable from Tyler Glasnow, Eury Pérez and Logan Webb (and meaningfully better than Aaron Nola, Blake Snell, and Shohei Ohtani). It turns out that no matter how many times you get injured, it’s still a really good recipe for success to strike out a ton of hitters, walk very few hitters, and not allow many barrels.
With Sale, the upside is short-term instead of long-term. Sale will turn 35 before the month is over; while the Braves have extended him to keep him around through at least 2025, his days of 6- and 7- win seasons are probably behind him. But in any given playoff series, he’s almost certainly the Braves’ third-best bet to win, and there’s maybe one other team in baseball with a better third option. Of course, the risk here is injury: even though so many of his injuries have been odd and fluky, age takes a toll on every pitcher and it’s difficult to feel confident that he won’t, say, have a scapular stress reaction again. But the worst case with Sale is that the Braves are left with the same top three pitchers they had last year: Strider, Fried, and Morton. And if Sale is healthy in October, then I’d bet on him performing comparably to the aces who got paid this offseason (Yamamoto, Nola, Snell).
Neither Jarred Kelenic nor Chris Sale is anything close to a sure thing - after all, there’s a reason they cost less (both in terms of prospects and money) than the Matt Olson and Sean Murphy deals in the previous two offseasons. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which six months from now, we think, “wow, those deals didn’t work.”
But as Kevin Seitzer tells his hitters, the risk of a whiff is just the cost of doing business. The Braves’ front office has identified good pitches - players who are either currently very good or who have a clear path to improvement that the organization can execute. They’ve taken big swings - meaningful financial commitments and guaranteed playing time on a contending roster.
And we all get to watch what happens next.
Despite the truisms of television commentators and old-school ‘the game was better when men were men’ types, ‘hit lots of home runs’ is a really good postseason strategy. Teams that out-homer their opponents have a sterling record, and of course they do - if you think it’s hard to hit a homer off Zack Wheeler, think about how hard it is to get three or four baserunners before he records three outs.