Let's figure out the Braves' shortstop shortlist

For a player who performed poorly in 2024, Orlando Arcia will be weirdly difficult to replace.

The Orlando Arcia saga has been far more eventful than anyone had the right to expect when the Braves traded for him early in 2021. The Milwaukee Brewers, just having acquired Willy Adames (more on him later), dumped Arcia for Patrick Weigel and Chad Sobotka. The Braves acquired Arcia not to be their starting shortstop (that was Dansby Swanson) or their starting second baseman (that was Ozzie Albies) or even the first bat off their bench (that was somehow Pablo Sandoval). Arcia was the utility infielder, the former top prospect who’d be Guillermo Heredia’s partner in crime in the dugout and would spend most of the Braves’ championship season in Gwinnett.

The rest is recent history. With Dansby Swanson hitting free agency at the end of the 2022 season - amidst the strongest crop of free agent shortstops in years - it was widely assumed that the Braves would acquire a shortstop. Instead, they rolled with Arcia. After a 2023 campaign that saw Arcia make a surprise All-Star Game appearance and put up a healthy 2.4 fWAR over 139 games, Arcia cratered in 2024, finishing with a mere 0.8 fWAR and an eye-gouging 72 wRC+ while somehow overperforming his batted-ball metrics in the process.

2023 Orlando Arcia is exactly the kind of player that every contending team with a finite payroll wants: a league-average starter making bench player money. 2024 Orlando Arcia has a place on a roster, but you’d really rather not give him 500 at-bats, because in a lineup with any other weak spots - that is, not a generational machine like the 2023 unit - you’ll feel the pain of doing so on a nightly basis.

So the Braves likely find themselves in the shortstop market this offseason. Before the offseason speculation reaches full blast, let’s talk about what avenues exist to upgrade the position. Because unlike the Braves’ usual needs over the last few years - corner outfielders, mid-rotation starters, relievers - good help at the shortstop position is extremely hard to find.

Who’s out there?

Let’s just start with a list of every player FanGraphs lists as a shortstop who has accumulated at least 500 PA over the last two seasons.

(By the way, play around with these charts! Order them from high to low and whatnot. Apparently Datawrapper allows me to embed charts into Substack, which is a real upgrade over me taking clumsy screenshots of Google Sheets tables and pasting them as .png files.)

This list includes some players who are probably better described as utility players (Tommy Edman, Ernie Clement, Jose Caballero), but we can err on the side of over-inclusion for now.

Who’s gettable?

A bunch of these players are simply not obtainable. Teams with really good shortstops tend to want to keep them. That’s true even of the most poorly managed teams; even the Rockies had the good sense to ink Ezequiel Tovar to a pre-arbitration extension. Witt, Lindor, Henderson, Betts, Seager, Swanson, Turner, Bogaerts, Correa, and Tovar are all signed to large long-term extensions. And most of those players are under contract with big-market teams that don’t project to dump salary any time soon. Maybe the Twins freak out about their payroll and try to ship off Carlos Correa, but even that seems extremely unlikely. De La Cruz, Pena, Volpe, Neto, Cruz, and Winn haven’t yet gotten extended, but all are cheap, surefire starters (or better) for teams that should have no interest in selling players like that.

So let’s look at the list - this time with the players who probably aren’t available in red font.

Who’s an improvement over Orlando Arcia?

Let’s next eliminate players who are probably worse than Orlando Arcia. Arcia is cheap and, for all of his flaws, a solid shortstop defender (+5 OAA in each of the last two seasons). Lost in the conversation about Arcia’s 2024 season is the fact that you can, in fact, do worse than him. So I’m highlighting the players who have accumulated fWAR at a lower rate than Arcia over the last two years.

Who’s left?

We’re left with thirteen players the Braves could target who could plausibly be upgrades over Arcia.

And we can do some further culling at this point.

Bad approach: Perdomo, Caballero, Clement - and, historically, Rojas - are slappy, no-power hitters who don’t really fit the Braves’ player acquisition mold. (I don’t think the firing of Kevin Seitzer is going to meaningfully change this mold, if at all; Seitzer predated the Anthopoulos-driven offensive approach.)

Bad defense: Smith was iffy as a shortstop defender this year, and Abrams was outright bad.

Bad team match: I think it would be quite difficult to get the Phillies to give up Sosa, both because he’s a valuable utility player and because the Braves and Phillies haven’t made a trade since 2002. (Wow.)

That takes us to five players: Willy Adames, Ha-seong Kim, J.P. Crawford, Bo Bichette, and Tommy Edman.

Who’s the best bet?

Adames and Kim are the two shortstops who will headline the free agency class. Both are set to get paid, and both are pretty decent bets to give you top-10 production at the position next year. Adames is the Braves-ier hitter in terms of approach, but metrics vary on his defense. Kim is indisputably a great defender - and a pretty good hitter. But he’ll miss the early stages of the season recovering from shoulder surgery and he’s just hired Scott Boras.

Crawford and Bichette are trade targets who have the potential to capture some Adames/Kim upside. Crawford seemed to break out in 2023 when he posted a 4.9 fWAR campaign but fell back to earth in 2024, including a miserable 89 wRC+. But Crawford underperformed his batted-ball numbers significantly, and as I’ve highlighted here before, even batted-ball numbers get depressed in T-Mobile Park. He’s owed a mere $11 million annually over the next two years and he has a no-trade clause. I’m guessing it’ll take a lot of persuading to get Seattle to deal Crawford. Bichette would be a straight-up one year rental. Just a year ago, it would’ve been difficult to imagine Toronto dealing the young star. But Bichette had a nightmarish 2024, plagued both by injuries and ineffectiveness, and given his apparent lack of interest in staying in Toronto long-term, the Blue Jays might be particularly inclined to move him. Bichette is a poor defender at shortstop - a middle infield with him and Ozzie Albies could create some real disaster-classes - but if he returns to his career norms offensively, you’re talking about an elite performer at the position.

Finally, Edman is just a good, cheap shortstop defender (who has the additional ability of playing a plus center field) with an uninspiring but not apocalyptic bat.

Did I miss anyone? Am I misestimating anyone’s availability? I hope this serves as a jumping-off point for some shortstop discussion.