Storylines I'm watching this spring

The last reliever in the bullpen, pre-Acuña platoon options, and more.

The Braves have only signed one major league free agent this offseason, but that’s not the only decision they’ve made.

They’ve decided not to acquire any external replacements for the 339.2 innings of starting pitching they’ve lost from Max Fried and Charlie Morton. After years of signing and trading for expensive relievers, they’ve decided not to continue the trend after losing A.J. Minter to free agency and Joe Jiménez to knee surgery.

These aren’t obvious decisions - and I'm not entirely sold on them. Anthopoulos said recently that the team will be “much more selective” about acquiring players given the long-term commitments he has made too much of the roster. That’s a fair approach if he simply means ‘selective relative to what we’d do if we didn’t have most of a starting lineup and rotation locked up for the long haul’. But that doesn’t really explain carrying a lower cash payroll than the team carried at Opening Day last year. Perhaps contrary to everything Anthopoulos has said about the team’s budgeting principles for years, this is a bid to reset the luxury tax.

At any rate, the Braves are a very good team, projected by ZiPS as the second-best squad in the National League (albeit in an extremely close three-way race with the Phillies and Mets). And while it would be nice for the team to Just Sign David Robertson Already or build some floor into the rotation with an innings-eater like José Quintana, some of the resulting uncertainty makes for some storylines worth watching in an otherwise dull month of spring baseball.

Who plays right field while Ronald Acuña Jr. rehabs?

Jarred Kelenic got 449 plate appearances last year and while he didn’t exactly justify the significant short-term financial outlay the Braves made to get him, he’s a perfectly cromulent option in right field till Acuña gets back. Kelenic is the sort of player it’s difficult to quit - he’s pretty fast, he has a strong arm, he hits the ball hard, and he seems like he should be a good defender (though he doesn’t really ever end up doing that). He whiffs a lot - a lot a lot - but it’s easy to dream on that going from ‘horrendous’ to ‘merely bad’ and the results finally coming.

Is there any better option? Usually, the previous year’s worst qualified hitter in baseball is not strong competition. But as I’ve mentioned here, I’m very interested in Bryan de la Cruz. If de la Cruz provides value, it’ll be with his bat - he’s Flanderized Jarred Kelenic defensively, with atrocious fielding metrics despite average sprint speed and elite arm strength. Unlike Kelenic, though, de la Cruz has had a prolonged stretch with elite batted-ball data: in 2022, he put up a .355 xwOBA in 355 plate appearances, which sits squarely in the Austin Riley neighborhood.

Why not both? Kelenic is a lefty, de la Cruz is a righty, and both have distinct platoon splits. My expectation is that the Braves will platoon Kelenic and de la Cruz till Acuña is back. But I’m excited to see both this spring.

Which relief pitching lottery ticket pans out?

The Braves haven’t signed a reliever with any degree of performance certainty, but they’ve acquired a bunch of interesting guys.

Like late bloomers? The Braves spent their first post-rebuild major league Rule 5 selection on Anderson Pilar, who apparently saw his velocity tick up in winter ball and modified his repertoire. Prefer some major league track record? Jake Diekman and Angel Perdomo were good in 2023 and Enyel de los Santos was great in 2022. If some reason you’re just an ERA guy (or like to root for locals), Buck Farmer pitched to a 3.04 ERA over 71 innings last year and attended Georgia Tech.

Pilar, de los Santos, Diekman, Perdomo, and Farmer are joined by the likes of Wander Suero, Enoli Paredes, and Dylan Covey. None of these guys are strong bets to be very good. But here’s the beauty of throwing large numbers at a problem: that means that at least one of them will probably be good.

Let’s do the math. Assume extremely conservatively that each of these eight pitchers has a 10 percent chance of being a good pitcher this year. If each pitcher’s success is an independent event - a fair assumption, I think, since they span a wide variety of arsenals and track records - there’s a 57 percent chance that at least one will perform well. And again, I think that undersells it.

The thing about relievers is that they’re pretty random year-to-year. Look at the 2024 reliever fWAR leaderboard and you see Mason Miller and Emmanuel Clase, but also Jeremiah Estrada and Cole Sands, both of whom were worth negative fWAR in 2023. Spring training will provide an early look on which of these relievers gets a chance to prove that he’s got an Estrada or Sands-type season in him.

Who wins the fifth (and sixth?) starter jobs?

When Spencer Strider returns, the Braves’ ideal rotation is Sale-Strider-Schwellenbach-López-someone. In fact, it might be someone-someone, since the Braves shifted to a de facto six-man rotation at times last year to give starters extra rest.

Anthopoulos has tabbed Grant Holmes as the early frontrunner for this job, describing him as the measuring stick against which the team considered starting pitching acquisitions this offseason. Holmes was a revelation last year, finally making good on his top-prospect pedigree as an effective reliever and a somehow even more effective starter. Closely following Holmes is Ian Anderson, who has plenty of pedigree himself. Anderson hasn’t been particularly effective since 2021, though, so expectations are muted, especially since he doesn’t claim to have made any significant changes to his repertoire or delivery.

Holmes and Anderson are both out of options, and while Holmes could shift to the bullpen, it’s not clear that Anderson’s stuff would play up in a relief role. It seems extremely likely, then, that both will be part of the Opening Day rotation and that at least one will be given the opportunity to stick there after Strider returns.

In my view, this is the biggest risk the Braves are taking this offseason. Anthopoulos will be rightly criticized if neither Holmes nor Anderson can at least pitch like a decent fifth starter and the Braves are forced to bring someone like AJ Smith-Shawver, Hurston Waldrep, or Drue Hackenberg up earlier than they’d otherwise like to. On the other hand, Holmes and Anderson are both controllable. If Holmes proves he can sustain his 2024 form over a full season and/or Anderson proves that he’s all the way back from injury, the Braves will have successfully avoided the indignity of paying $15 million annually for a Charlie Morton-type pitcher.

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