It's an Alleninomenon, and other thoughts
Dude, can you play the shortstop with the f---ing defense?
After starting the season winless through their first seven games, and with vibes that were arguably worse (Jurickson Profar suspended for 80 games? Reynaldo López out for three months? The losses were all to the team that eliminated the Braves last postseason and the team that has served as their measuring stick over the last eight seasons?), the Braves have sort of climbed back out of the hole. They enter play on Tuesday a game over .500, a mark they reached much earlier than the 2021 Braves. They’re the second-fastest team to reach .500 in MLB history after starting 0-7, which I suppose is another way of saying “they’re likely among the best of all teams that were bad enough to lose seven straight to start a season.”
The Braves have won a lot since those dark days of early April, but they’re not quite firing on all cylinders. After all, they’ve run out two backup outfielders in the corners for almost the entire season and they’ve needed far more innings than they would have hoped from AJ Smith-Shawver and Bryce Elder. And the players who we all expected to be in the starting lineup and rotation have run hot and cold. some of their successful series - the 5-2 record they compiled against the Rockies and Reds, for example - have been marked by uncharacteristically poor batted-ball inputs.
But there is help on the way, with Spencer Strider scheduled to start tonight against the Nationals and Ronald Acuña Jr. potentially rejoining the lineup late this week. In the meantime, here are the storylines that have caught my eye.
The Nick Allen experience
When the Braves have traded with the Artists Formerly Known as the Oakland Athletics, they’ve tended to go big. Matt Olson and Sean Murphy are franchise-cornerstone talents traded in their primes for hauls (although in the case of Murphy, the haul didn’t actually end up going to the As). Trading Jared Johnson for Nick Allen was small potatoes. Fingerling potatoes, really. Johnson was a relief-only prospect who finished the fifth season of his professional career in High-A Rome; Allen was a scrappy utility guy who had accumulated -0.1 fWAR over 700-plus plate appearances and would be in the mix with the likes of Luke Williams and Christian Cairo for a utility job.
When Allen hit to a 140 wRC+ in the spring and became a popular name among Braves fans who had experienced quite enough Orlando Arcia, I remained a nonbeliever for a few reasons. First, Allen had a horrendous offensive track record in the majors, such that a bad year for Arcia (which 2024 indeed was) compared favorably to the best Allen had ever done. Allen barreled 7 baseballs in his entire major league career and went years at a time without hitting a ball with an exit velocity over 105 mph. And second, I wasn’t a big believer in the potential for Allen’s defense to offset his bat. He was great in a two-month sample in 2022 (+8 OAA, +6 DRS) but got more mixed reviews in 2023 and 2024 (0 OAA, +7 DRS in significantly more innings). I figured that the Braves would give the Arcia experiment another try and hope for something more like his 2023 (or 2022, or 2021) batted-ball inputs.
So far, I’ve been right about Allen’s bat being extremely weak. The .260 batting average looks respectable, but the .293 slugging percentage is comical; only eight hitters in baseball have a lower slugging percentage in as many plate appearances or more. Every single one has been worth negative fWAR.
But here’s the part where I’m wrong. Nick Allen’s defense has been so good that he’s on a 4-fWAR pace (that’s positive four) despite it all! No defender at any position has accumulated more Outs Above Average. Only four players - including teammate Matt Olson - have more Defensive Runs Saved.
I’m not going to be dramatic and say the Braves have their guy at shortstop. But I will say that the Statcast record for OAA is 35 (2018 Nick Ahmed) and in the unlikely event that Allen keeps up his current rate of accumulating defensive value, he’ll be challenging for that title.
Drake Baldwin does (almost) everything
I was high on Drake Baldwin going into this year. His 2024 campaign in Gwinnett was the storyline of the season in the Braves minors in my view; he put up the best batted-ball data a prospect has basically ever put up in Triple-A in the Statcast era. That said, the International League is an inflated offensive environment and I figured that Baldwin would face some early growing pains against major league pitchers.
So far, not really. Sure, he had an on-paper slump to start the year, but it was purely the result of bad batted-ball luck. Baldwin’s Statcast profile is a sea of red; he hits the ball very hard, he takes big swings, he doesn’t whiff, he elevates, and he’s increasingly shown a knack for pulling the ball in the air. He chases more than average, but by Baseball Prospectus’ SEAGER swing-decision metric, he’s a 77th percentile performer. He’s due for some regression, but not that much; Baldwin’s .388 xwOBA, if it held over a full season, would put him in the same conversation as Corey Seager, Kyle Tucker, and Matt Olson.
While Alex Anthopoulos recently said on the radio that the Braves haven’t given any consideration to playing Baldwin in left field, I can’t help but think about it anyway. The picture clears up significantly after 2025 - I imagine the Braves might be inclined to let Ozuna walk after 2025, despite the fact that he’s been their best hitter for the last two years, and play both Baldwin and Sean Murphy every day. But Murphy is an excellent catcher (and a good hitter in his own right), Ozuna can’t be taken out of the lineup, and at least until Jurickson Profar returns in whatever form, left field is an Alex Verdugo/Eli White platoon. There’s room for improvement there.
The problem? Drake Baldwin would be the slowest left fielder in the Statcast era. The silver lining? The two slowest left fielders in the Statcast era right now: 2025 Alex Verdugo and 2025 Jurickson Profar. The Braves don’t care about corner defense at all, and I wonder if at some point, Baldwin gets to moonlight in left field the way William Contreras did for a game in 2022.
My recurring Craig Kimbrel nightmare
At some point in the next few weeks, I think Craig Kimbrel will be promoted to Atlanta. Kimbrel has been adequate in Gwinnett (3.27 FIP/4.61 xFIP) and while his velocity isn’t particularly good, it’s come back up to the roughly 94 mph range he sat in last season. Kimbrel is currently enjoying what we might call the Backup Quarterback Halo Effect; many fans appear convinced that Kimbrel is better than whoever their least favorite Braves reliever is (for the most rational, this is Rafael Montero; for others, this is Aaron Bummer).
My concern with Kimbrel isn’t that I think he’s terrible - or even that I disagree that he’d be an upgrade over Montero. That’s probably right; Montero has been a tough watch so its’s a low bar. My concern is that like Montero - who’s been deployed as a high-leverage reliever while Aaron Bummer has pitched mop-up despite their statistical profiles suggesting that their roles will be reversed - Brian Snitker will deploy Kimbrel as though he was the pitcher he was two years ago. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen that happen, or even the second. Hector Neris got a late-inning one-run lead on Opening Day and was punted off the roster within a week. In 2021, Nate Jones pitched in closer-level high leverage before being DFAed. Bring Kimbrel up and play “Welcome to the Jungle.” Just don’t ask him to put out a forest fire on his first day back (or even his second.)