If you read my pre-deadline article, you know how I feel about how it turned out. Even though virtually every non-Skubal starter has been blown up in his first post-deadline start - Casey Mize, Freddy Peralta, and Foster Griffin have done nothing to induce envy - it remains problematic that the Braves’ second-best starter is Tyler Mahle or Bryce Elder and that their primary designated hitter isn’t especially good at hitting.

But I’m also amused to see people online angry about Alex Anthopoulos’ post-deadline media availability, available in full here. Paraphrased: “We had prospects we were willing to trade and others we were very reluctant to trade. There are various reasons that more deals didn’t come together. And anyway, we didn’t go into deadline dead set on adding anything in particular - we just wanted to make the team better.”

The first two sentences in my paraphrase are platitudes. Every team is more willing to trade some prospects than others, and every team works on deals that don’t come to fruition. In saying those things, Alex effectively said nothing. If you’re mad about that, maybe you’ve never - or shouldn’t ever - watch an executive (“We’re looking to balance near-term success with long-term sustainability”) or coach (“We just have to approach this one game at a time”) or player (“I’m just trying to put up a good at-bat every time I’m at the plate”) give an interview.

The third sentence is a lie. We know the Braves were looking for a playoff-caliber starting pitcher. We know that specifically, they went after Jacob deGrom and apparently would’ve gotten him except that he chose not to waive his no-trade clause, that they went after Logan Webb but the Giants wouldn’t move him. And to some extent, they were interested in José Soriano. It’s almost certainly true that Anthopoulos and his group set out with the aim of getting one of those guys.

So why lie? Anthopoulos could’ve said, “We were interested in a starting pitcher who refused to waive his no-trade clause to come and play for us. We were interested in another starting pitcher whose team decided to hold onto him. As for the remaining starters on the market, they were either prohibitively expensive relative to their team control or just not difference-makers. We’d rather roll the dice on Owen Murphy or JR Ritchie finding his footing in the next few months than giving up six years of either of them for Casey Mize.” From all reporting, that would’ve be truthful.

But what good would saying that have done Anthopoulos or the Braves? It’s embarrassing to publicly acknowledge that a player wasn’t interested in coming to your team. (See Dave Dombrowski admitting that Roki Sasaki refused to take a meeting with the Phillies.) It’s potentially even more embarrassing to downplay the quality of a player not on your team. (See Brodie van Wagenen claiming the Phillies overpaid Zack Wheeler.) Why make your team look less attractive as a destination. Or worse still, why provide free bulletin board material to the various also-ran starting pitchers who moved at the deadline?

Maybe there’s a broader philosophical disagreement here. I think Anthopoulos’ sole responsibility to the fans is to maximize the quality of the on-field product consistent with basic ethical considerations. I think his arm’s-length approach to the media is consistent with that. Anthopoulos has said as much before - front offices prefer to deal with front offices that don’t leak. But this is an entertainment business. There are other things that baseball teams do - trade star players they don’t think they can re-sign rather than lose them in free agency, for example - that are competitively optimal but are plain un-fun for many fans. If you’re a Braves fan who’d sacrifice 0.05 percent of championship win probability in return for making Anthopoulos’s press conferences 10 percent more interesting, I can’t fault you for that.1 It’s just not how I conceive of his job.

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I don’t usually write against the clock. But having procrastinated in writing about the trade deadline, my alternative was to say nothing. I’m checking Twitter every five minutes as I’m writing this to see if any of my ideas have been rendered impossible - or, more optimistically, have come to fruition - in the meantime. If you’re reading this, that either didn’t happen or I managed to come up with new ideas on the fly.

Let’s set the scene. The Braves have put some distance between themselves and their mid-June to mid-July woes - and between themselves and the Phillies. They’ve done so despite their rotation looking as dire as it’s looked at any time since 2020 (remember when Mike Soroka got hurt and Cole Hamels contributed 3.1 innings?), with arguably their best reliever on the injured list for over a month, and with lots of uncertainty at left field, shortstop, and backup catcher.

Last night, the team tried to fix the first of those issues by acquiring Lane Thomas.1 Because I try not to say what’s already been said - and because time is of the essence! - I’ll keep this quick. Thomas’ .349 xwOBA against left-handed pitching this year puts him second among Braves lineup regulars,2 and good news - it’s consistent with his career .344 xwOBA against southpaws. Thomas and an awakening Mike Yastrzemski form a nice platoon in left field. Tough news for Eli White, but he’s probably better suited as a luxury fifth outfielder/pinch runner than a first-choice inclusion in a playoff lineup against Tarik Skubal or Cristopher Sánchez. I wish Lucas Braun and Carter Holton well.

So what’s left to be acquired?

Playoff-caliber starting pitcher

At this point in writing this article, I left for dinner. When I got back, the Braves had traded Anthony Molina for Tyler Mahle. If Mahle is the lesser of two starters the team adds, he’s a good acquisition. Mahle’s underlying numbers compare favorably to those of teammate Robbie Ray, whom I think Braves fans would’ve been a little more excited to have acquired. Anthony Molina is a non-prospect arm the team picked up in its winter 40-man roster shuffle.

But they need to get another guy. And it would really help if that guy could credibly start a playoff game. Spencer Strider seems likely done for the year. Spencer Schwellenbach is targeting a September return, but who knows what he’ll look like when he’s back, and he’s one small setback from being unavailable in October. So if a playoff series started tomorrow, who would take the ball in Game 2? Martín Pérez? Bryce Elder? Tyler Mahle? With all due respect to those guys, yikes.

Even with Tarik Skubal and Kevin Gausman off the board (neither of whom was a logical fit in Atlanta for different reasons), there are some options out there. The Braves may be interested in Casey Mize. The Cardinals should move Dustin May. José Soriano and Reid Detmers are at least nominally available in trade discussions. Jacob deGrom might be, too. Bob Nightengale says the Giants don’t have any interest in moving Logan Webb, which means they probably do. These pitchers will cost varying amounts of prospect capital and money, but given the rejuvenated state of the Braves farm system, they’re probably all gettable. The team really has to acquire one - or someone similar I’ve overlooked.

Left-handed bat

When everyone’s healthy, Braves lineup against lefties looks set, and it looks good. It’s something like:

Acuña (RF) - Baldwin (DH/C) - Olson (1B) - Albies (2B) - Thomas (LF) - Murphy (C/DH) - Riley (3B) - Harris II (CF) - Dubón (SS)

Murphy has killed left-handed pitching throughout his career, so both catchers should be in the vs-LHP lineup when he and Baldwin are both available.

Against righties, Yastrzemski replaces Thomas. The real question is: Who ought to be the designated hitter on days when Baldwin is catching? Dom Smith has been the answer so far, but he basically got the role by default after the Jurickson Profar suspension. Smith has had a 79 wRC+ since the start of May. That’s unacceptable for a DH.

Good news: If defensive versatility isn’t important to you, it’s not hard to find a hitter who can mash right-handed pitching on this market. The Reds could move J.J. Bleday, who’s been excellent against righties this year. I think Joc Pederson makes a ton of sense beyond even the meme potential - he’s rebounded from a horrendous 2025 to post a .362 xwOBA against righties. I’ve coveted Jesús Sánchez for a while and wonder if the Blue Jays would flip him months after acquiring him. The Twins tried to trade Trevor Larnach for a rental reliever a few days ago, so his value can’t be that high. Not all of these guys are very exciting, but I’d rather have any of them than Smith down the stretch. And with no obvious alternatives in the high minors (sorry, Rowdy Tellez), improving on Smith will happen now or it won’t happen at all in 2026.

High-leverage reliever(s)

Alex Anthopoulos is as sure to acquire a reliever as he is to run down the clock on his radio appearances. He did it last year with Tyler Kinley while the Braves were virtually eliminated from playoff contention. This year, the need is even more than usual. Robert Suárez is out of action. Didier Fuentes is an excellent reliever, but the Braves are justifiably treating him with kid gloves. Combine those facts with the team’s emphasis on reliever rest, and in the last few months the likes of Elieser Hernández, Carlos Carrasco, Victor Mederos, and Danny Young have been repeatedly asked to pitch in leverage.

I’m not even going to list the options here. It is not hard to find relievers. The Braves should probably get a righty (to slot behind Iglesias and Suárez on days when Fuentes is unavailable or if they want him reserved for a bulk role) and a lefty (to slot behind Lee and perhaps alongside the very intriguing Dylan Dodd).

I want to hold myself accountable for my takes, and writing this article now (rather than 19 hours from now, when the chips have fallen) encourages me to do that. So here goes. I think the Braves need to acquire a playoff-caliber starter between now and the deadline for the deadline to have been a success. Having Dom Smith pencilled into the lineup moving forward is annoying but workable. Not acquiring a reliever would be baffling, but the Braves could probably make do without one. But they’ve been talking about getting a pitcher who could start in October for nearly two years now. Time to go and get one. The clock is ticking.

By any measure, Reynaldo López is having a bad season. In a sense, him being available at all a season after undergoing shoulder surgery is a positive. But if you’re not inclined to hand out participation trophies, it’s hard to find much to like about his performance. He managed to get himself bounced out of a rotation that wasn’t very deep to begin with by the end of April. His time in the bullpen was nondescript and while he’s been better in his second rotation stint, he hasn’t exactly been good.

This has led to lots of discussion about whether López is cooked. After all, there’s the whole “he underwent shoulder surgery last year” thing, and shoulder trouble is scary news for any pitcher, especially a pitcher in his thirties. What happened to 2024 Reynaldo López? Is that version of him irrecoverable?

You don’t have to be an expert in aging curves to know that a 32-year-old pitcher is further from his athletic prime than he was two years before, even when said pitcher hasn’t had shoulder surgery between then and now. So it’s a safe bet to say Reynaldo López is to some extent physically diminished compared to his 2024 self. But looking at his pitch data, the drop-off in his stuff is gentler than the drop-off in performance might suggest. Because the Braves moved López to the bullpen over apparent mechanical issues and because he was presumably moved back because he had made strides on that front, I’ll compare López’s numbers post-return to the rotation to his 2024 campaign.

(Note that PitchingBot does its scores on a 20-80 scale, whereas Stuff+ does theirs on a scale where 100 is average.)

López has definitely lost a tick on his fastball in the last two years, but he’s actually improved the shape of it enough that it’s barely a hair worse by both Stuff+ and PitchingBot’s measures. Stuff+ thinks López has lost a lot of slider quality since 2024 - that enchants for basically his entire drop in overall grade since then - but PitchingBot hated that pitch in 2024 and actually thinks it’s gotten a bit better since then. I don’t think there’s a big stuff quality problem here.

So what’s going on? For one, a decline in command. PitchingBot and Stuff+ might disagree over the quality of López’s arsenal in 2026 vis-á-vis 2025, but they both agree his command is a bit worse (103 to 99 by Stuff+, 58 to 52 by PitchingBot). López enjoyed a public reputation for being a stuff-heavy guy in 2024 - when you get converted to a starter after touching triple digits in relief, that might happen - but much of his 2024 success can be credited to his ability to locate pitches, which has gone from quite good to average. I’m curious whether this is the result of López having to throw harder to get the same level of stuff as he had pre-injury, the mechanical problems that got him demoted to the bullpen, or some mysterious third thing.

Also, we could bring back 2024 Reynaldo López in perfectly preserved physical condition and he almost certainly wouldn’t put the same season up again. Not only did he overperform his peripherals (1.99 ERA, 2.92 FIP, 3.44 xFIP), those peripherals themselves were probably the result of some overperformance. López’s true talent level was somewhere north of those numbers, and it’s no higher then than it was now.

A few years ago, I poured a bit of lukewarm water on the Reynaldo López discourse. Now, with discourse trending in the other direction, it feels appropriate to do the opposite. I’m not sure López will ever be a particularly effective starting pitcher again, but to the extent that the bones were ever there for that, I think they’re still there now.

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If the Braves rotation were a load-bearing object, it would be well beyond its tolerances at this point. Not having acquired a starting pitcher in the offseason, the group entered the spring with little room for error. Less than a week into camp, second starter Spencer Schwellenbach and likely contributor Hurston Waldrep were lost for months to come. And although it seems like Spencer Strider has avoided a third elbow surgery for now, he’s out of the picture for awhile, too.

When an object carries more weight than it can bear, it breaks. And when it breaks, we no longer expect it to do its job. The Braves rotation doesn’t have that luxury. And to its credit, the rotation has been by most measures a league-average unit despite the attrition.

Even that level of cromulence got harder to sustain with Strider’s injury. The Braves are replacing Strider with JR Ritchie, who joins Martín Pérez, Grant Holmes, Bryce Elder, and the excellent Chris Sale in the new-look rotation. That sounds like “Chris Sale and a bunch of fourth and fifth starters,” and indeed it basically is.

So here’s the question: which pitchers not currently on the roster are going to make starts for the Braves the rest of the year?

Likely options

The injured 2025 starters

Hurston Waldrep has been returned from his rehab assignment and starts for Gwinnett tonight. Neither AJ Smith-Shawver nor Spencer Schwellenbach has been cleared for a rehab assignment yet, but it seems plausible that both will be back in the majors some time before the season ends. All three will certainly get starts for the Braves if they’re healthy. Waldrep was awesome in 9 starts for the Braves last year, with a 2.88 ERA/3.21 FIP/3.66 xFIP and the highest zone rate of his career.1 Smith-Shawver had some major red flags in his profile before he got hurt in 2025 (just compare his 3.86 ERA to his 6.28 xERA) but he had a reasonably good grasp on a rotation spot last year and I think he gets a crack at it again in 2026. And Schwellenbach, if he’s his pre-injury self, is the second-best pitcher on this team.

Some trade acquisition

The Braves have made plenty of deadline moves in the Anthopoulos era, but come to think of it, the move has almost never been to acquire a starting pitcher. As far as I can tell, the only starter the Braves have acquired at the deadline under his watch is Tommy Milone in 2020. We don’t have to say anything else about Tommy Milone.

I think that this time, the Braves will trade for someone to fill innings for them down the stretch. For example, although they hate player options, maybe they’d like to take a chance on Luis Severino, who’s posted consistently over the last three seasons and, by every stuff model, is arguably showcasing his best stuff in years. Robbie Ray will be available and while he’s been bad this year, he was reasonably good as recently as last year and can almost certainly be had in return for some salary relief. Dustin May has been a revelation for the Cardinals and is on an inexpensive one-year deal. Maybe some of these guys won’t end up getting traded, but I’d guess at least one of them will, and there are plenty of others like them.

Plausible, if not probable

One of the Gwinnett prospects

Other than Waldrep, the Gwinnett rotation has two interesting arms: Owen Murphy and Garrett Baumann. Murphy, a 2022 first-round pick, is in his first year in Gwinnett; Baumann, a 2023 fourth-round pick, just made his first start in Gwinnett.

Neither of these guys is really beating down the door, although Baumann had a great debut at the level and ever since getting brained in his first start as a Striper, Murphy has done everything but suppress home runs. But as we’ve learned with Smith-Shawver in 2023, Schwellenbach in 2024, and Didier Fuentes in 2025, the Braves will not let prospect arms burn innings in the minors if they think they can be helpful to the major league team, even if those prospects have not gotten their feet wet in the minors to a conventional degree. Whatever the team’s internal benchmarks are for these two, they’ll be wearing Atlanta uniforms as soon as they meet them.

One of the relievers

Two Braves relievers have also started games this year: Reynaldo López and Didier Fuentes. The Braves emphasized when moving both pitchers to relief that it was a short-term move and that the organization viewed both as starters in the long haul. They’ve had very different experiences in the bullpen and are thus in this category for different reasons.

López was ostensibly sent to the bullpen to work on mechanical issues - the stated reason (rather than his shoulder surgery) that his velocity had dipped from its pre-2025 level and seemed yo wildly fluctuate from outing to outing. Things haven’t really gotten better. After averaging 94.0 mph on his fastball as a starter, he’s averaged 94.5 mph in relief, and in only one relief outing this year has he matched his 2024 average fastball velocity as a starter. And none of López’s offspeed pitches have graded out well either. But López at least has experience as a starting pitcher, so perhaps it’s worth stretching him up to try and soak up some innings - especially since the team doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with him in the bullpen.

Fuentes, meanwhile, has excelled in relief. Only Robert Suárez and Tyler Kinley have entered games at a higher average leverage index, and Fuentes has rewarded the Braves when tested. But assuming it’s consistent with whatever innings total they have set for him, it seems like a matter of time till he gets another start this year.

A playoff-caliber trade acquisition

While, as I mentioned, I think the Braves will add a starting pitcher of some kind, I’m less sure that pitcher will be the kind of player you’d enthusiastically start in a playoff game. There just aren’t that many of those pitchers out there, and the teams that possess them are either competing or won’t sell them but for a king’s ransom.

This is as good a time as any to talk about Tarik Skubal. It seems likely that Skubal - back in record time from elbow surgery - will be on the move this deadline. “The Braves should go all-in for Skubal” is a take already making the rounds in the drive-time radio sphere, not the least because the farm system, at least on the position player side, has been as exciting to follow as it’s been in years.

Tarik Skubal would definitely make the Braves better, and if I thought the world was going to end at the conclusion of the season and thus everything beyond 2026 was irrelevant, I’d want to acquire him, too.

But I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I think “going all-in” is a fool’s errand in a sport that has the kind of postseason variance baseball has. People make fun of the Brewers for preaching about the value of having more bites at the apple or the Mariners for talking aspirationally about winning 54 percent of their games, but the people who made those comments aren’t dumb and they aren’t seeking mediocrity. The best shot at winning a title is keeping the title window open as long as possible. Even two to three months of Skubal will cost a significant portion of a farm system just starting to claw its way out of the cellar.

If a pitcher with multiple years of control - say, Logan Webb or Joe Ryan - ends up on the market, it’s easier to imagine the Braves being interested in acquiring a player like that. But again, the supply of Webbs and Ryans is limited and the demand will be fierce. Can the Braves put together an attractive package for one of those players if they’re willing to put all of their prospects in play? Probably. It just doesn’t seem anywhere near certain.

Unlikely, but fun to ponder

One of the non-Gwinnett prospects

Remember that Didier Fuentes made one start in Gwinnett before getting called up to the majors and that Spencer Schwellenbach came to Atlanta straight from the team formerly known as Double-A Mississippi. Could someone take a similarly steep ascent this year? Luke Sinnard just hit the injured list with an unknown (hopefully not arm-related) injury, but he’s been so dominant in High-A Rome that it feels like he should move up to Double-A Columbus in short order, where he’ll be a call away from the bigs. Drue Hackenberg had a terrible 2025 season but has looked much better through three starts in Columbus - and most importantly, has gotten the walks down to a career-low rate. I wouldn’t be shocked to see either of these guys - Hackenberg in particular, since he’s in his Rule 5 platform year anyway - get a start down the stretch.

A draft pick

Just putting this in here for fun. The Braves are the rare team with a top 10 draft pick and a massive pool and serious near-term contention aspirations. And it’s not unprecedented for a pitcher to make his major league debut in his draft year. Chris Sale and Garrett Crochet helped the White Sox out of the bullpen in 2010 and 2020, respectively, and in 2025, the Angels inexplicably brought up second-round reliever Ryan Johnson virtually immediately.

A draft pick starting major league games in his draft year is closer to unprecedented. As far as I can tell, we might have to go back to Greg Swindell in 1986.

But this is the team that had Dylan Lee make his starting pitching debut in the World Series, so let me paint a picture. With the ninth pick, the Braves pick Coastal Carolina’s Cameron Flukey. Unlike many college arms, Flukey could use some additional innings anyway - thanks to a rib injury, he only made seven starts this year. It seems possible to me that if Flukey impresses off the bat, he gets onto the major league roster by the end of the year.

Last week, team owners and the MLBPA swapped their initial proposals to replace the expiring collective bargaining agreement, meaning that parity - i.e., leaguewide competitive balance - is back on the discursive menu.

The parity debate seems to have two camps. On one hand, there’s the Parity Problem camp, which sounds like this:

On the other hand, there’s the No Parity Problem camp, which sounds like this:

Unsurprisingly, the owners’ proposal - which includes complete redistribution of local television revenues and a hard-cap, hard-floor system - attempts to solve the Parity Problem. And just as unsurprisingly, the players’ proposal - which calls for a soft floor and heightened luxury tax thresholds - rejects the premise that such a problem exists.

What frustrates me about the parity discourse is that it feels like these camps are talking past one another. Full disclosure before we go further: I’m not a neutral observer in the debate. I think that there’s indeed a parity problem in Major League Baseball. But it’s not quite as many in the Parity Problem camp make it seem.

What the parity problem isn’t

The No Parity Problem campers are right about this: the World Series champion is not predetermined, and it’s fatalistic to treat the Dodgers - or any team, for that matter - as anything close to an odds-on favorite. At the start of this season, FanGraphs had the Dodgers with a 24.2% chance of winning the World Series and a 36.6% chance of winning the NL. Those are huge numbers. For reference, FanGraphs gave the Braves a 22% chance of winning the World Series at the start of play on October 20, 2021 - and that Braves team was up a game in the NLCS!

And yet even if you combine the Dodgers’ World Series odds today with the Yankees’, Mets’, and Blue Jays’ - y’know, the teams that signed all the free agents - it is more likely than not that someone other than the Goliaths wins the World Series.

There are a few reasons for this. Baseball is a highly random sport, and even a seven-game series doesn’t come close to taming the randomness. For the better team to advance as often in a baseball postseason series as it does in a basketball playoff series - around 80% of the time - MLB would need a best-of-75 series! The very mechanics of a baseball game favor volatility, and as such, favor the underdog. Also, there are diminishing marginal returns past a certain level of payroll, and it’s not just the hyper-spendy teams that have passed that point. One can build a long-term championship contender by drafting and developing well, retaining those players through long-term extensions, and occasionally supplementing the core by trading for players other teams won’t pay to retain and making mid-tier additions in free agency. If that sounds a lot like the Braves, it’s because I intentionally phrased it that way. But it also sounds a lot like the Astros, on whom the modern Braves are modeled.1 That’s a realistic aspiration for many franchises. Finally, it is true that MLB’s player control system does a lot for small-market teams. Junior Caminero doesn’t even become arbitration-eligible until after next season. The Brewers have the entirety of Jacob Misiorowski’s twenties to themselves. Even teams like Tampa Bay and Milwaukee can and do leverage this control to negotiate team-friendly extensions that guarantee that homegrown stars like these stick around for the entirety of their primes.

So the parity problem isn’t that the Dodgers are overwhelming title favorites, or that good players don’t end up in small markets, or that they jump ship as soon as they get there. Frankly, the top end of the free agent market is a complete crapshoot and no team - the Goliaths included - can sustain long-term success without identifying and developing amateur talent effectively. If these are the critiques you’re levying, I think you’re going about it wrong.

What the parity problem is

It’s longitudinal.

I was a Packers fan long before I was a Braves fan, so my default mental model for what parity looks like is the NFL. Some in the No Parity Problem camp say, “You’re really talking about the NFL, where teams like the Patriots and Chiefs have gone on decade-long runs of dominance, as a model of parity?”

The difference is that the Patriots and Chiefs’ dynasties aren’t really the result of structural advantages. You could point to good ownership, but what did ownership really do? Hire the right front offices and then not meddle as they put together championship-caliber teams? That’s a pretty low bar! And we know those teams don’t enjoy grand structural advantages because, well, look at what the Chiefs did for the 40 years before they drafted Mahomes and look at the Patriots’ entire history leading up to the Belichick-Brady era. And, for that matter, look at the Patriots’ run after Tom Brady left but before Drake Maye arrived.

Is it annoying to watch your rival put together a long run of dominance? Sure. But in the NFL, any fanbase could be the next to experience that. If you told me that 20 years from now, there’s an NFL team that, coming off back-to-back titles, will sign the top available free agent on the market and give its franchise player a market-resetting extension, I couldn’t eliminate any of the 32 teams.2 On the other hand, barring changes in ownership, I could eliminate more than half of MLB teams given the same facts. A baby born a Reds fan today is virtually guaranteed to have a fundamentally different viewing experience than a baby born a Yankees fan. Or, for that matter, a baby born a Braves fan! You might not think of the Braves as one of the rich teams, but they’re perennially between 5th and 10th in payroll, routinely cross into the luxury tax, and have locked up basically their entire position player core.

This doesn’t just mean that the small-market teams win fewer games than the large-market teams, front offices being equal. It means that it’s optimal for the small-market teams to behave differently. The Brewers didn’t trade Freddy Peralta last offseason because they couldn’t afford to pay him in 2026. They did so because they couldn’t afford to let him walk as a free agent afterwards, as he inevitably would have, rather than getting prospect return for him. Teams like the Brewers and Rays will almost inevitably trade every star player they don’t lock up to a long, pre-arbitration extension because that’s what keeps the gears turning. And is it any wonder that the likes of the Dodgers are willing to commit to extremely high-risk profiles in free agency - pricey relievers, starting pitchers with checkered injury histories - that small-market teams aren’t? Neither Tanner Scott nor Edwin Diaz has been “worth” his expensive free agent deal, and yet their (huge) salaries are drops in the bucket for Los Angeles.

Some concluding thoughts

I shouldn’t be misinterpreted as saying that small-market teams can’t or shouldn’t spend more (I think virtually all of them can and should), or that teams like the Dodgers and Yankees are solely good because they run large payrolls (they have smart front offices, too), or that Major League Baseball’s financial future hinges on changing its economic model (I’ve seen no evidence that the concentration of talent in large markets has been bad for anyone’s bottom line), or that an imposition of a cap-floor system would result in a dramatic reordering of the league (it probably wouldn’t, though I think teams like the Brewers, Rays, and Guardians would become even more fearsome). At the same time, I think it’s delusional to suggest that all that separates the Dodgers and Brewers is that one ownership group has a fanatical will to win that the other doesn’t. They’re all businessmen. They’re more or less all doing what’s economically rational under their respective circumstances. So I think it’s time to change those circumstances a little bit.

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It’s hard to criticize the returns the Braves have gotten out of their farm system over the course of this contention window, but if they’re susceptible to critique somewhere, it’s the bullpen. Where are the homegrown relievers? A.J. Minter was unbelievable, but having made his major league debut in 2017, the last of the interregnum years, I can’t really count him. Tyler Matzek and Dylan Lee kind of count - both were minor league free agent signings - but neither spent significant time in the Braves system before establishing themselves in the major league bullpen. One of my first posts on this site was about the Braves overspending on relievers. But you get how a perennially contending team getting little internal help would end up doing that.

Dylan Dodd is on his second career. In his first, he was a pitchability starter who rose through the minors in 2022, made the back end of FanGraphs’ top 100 prospects to start 2023 on the strength of his preternatural command, showed up in the majors, and got beat around by major league hitters. His 8.43 xERA and 9.1 percent strikeout rate were bad in an extravagant way, not a mundane one. Dodd then spent 2024 putting up unremarkable numbers in Gwinnett. And it could’ve kept on like that, and Dodd could’ve ended up in the Quad-A Starters bucket that has collected the likes of Darius Vines, Jared Shuster, and Allan Winans over the last few years.

But then Dodd did something none of those guys did. While the Braves were enduring the “pain as performance art” spectacle of 2025, Dodd reinvented himself from a four-pitch starter into a cutter-slider reliever.

It’s gone remarkably well. Of the 296 relievers who have thrown at least 30 innings over the last two seasons, Dodd (who has pitched 39 innings) ranks 50th with a 3.43 xFIP. Dodd has kept the pinpoint command that gave him helium as a starter, good for a 104 Command+ score and, although command and control are slightly different, a minuscule 3.9 percent walk rate.

The Dodd renaissance would be especially convenient if he was doing this by menacing left-handed hitters. Aaron Bummer is gone and Martin Pérez isn’t a reliever so much as he’s doing a part-time internship in the bullpen, so the Braves could use a Robin to Dylan Lee’s Batman against tough lefties. As you could probably tell by my use of the conditional tense, Dodd is not doing that. In his short major league relief career, he’s mowed down righties, with a 3.01 xFIP comparing him favorably to Aroldis Chapman, Louis Varland and Andrés Muńoz. Lefties have bashed him, though, to the tune of a 4.69 xFIP (and an even worse 7.30 ERA/6.38 FIP).

But the Braves surely won’t be choosy about bullpen help right now. To Walt Weiss’s credit, he’s been unafraid to deploy his best relievers in tie or deficit situations. (It’s odd to hear a Braves manager use the term “chase a win” in a non-pejorative way.) To the front office’s credit, they’ve given him some unconventional tools, shifting Didier Fuentes into a relief role, Pérez all over the staff, and occasionally making Grant Holmes available out of the bullpen. And to those players’ credit, they’ve adapted. But using Pérez and Holmes, and to a lesser extent Fuentes, has consequences that can reverberate across the next week of games. Tyler Kinley might be gassed. And Raisel Iglesias, Robert Suárez, and Dylan Lee can’t - or at least shouldn’t - pitch in every close game.

Good news: Nothing is easier to buy at the deadline than relief pitching. The Braves acquire relievers when they’re good. As they showed by trading for Kinley last season, they acquire relievers when they’re bad, too. Bad news: Nobody is selling right now - at least not at a normal price. For at least the next two months, the Braves will have to piece things together with what they’ve got. If they do so successfully, it’ll likely be thanks in large part to Dylan Dodd.

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Today is the first off day of the 2026 season for the Braves. Last year, they were gasping for air by the time they had a day off. Not only were they winless, Reynaldo López was done for the year, Jurickson Profar was suspended, and the rest of the offense looked flummoxed.

This time, the Braves fly back home considerably happier. They’re 8-5, having won three series and split the fourth. The team’s health, while plenty dire, has trended positively since Opening Day - Sean Murphy will make his first rehab start on Friday, Ha-seong Kim shouldn’t be far behind, Spencer Strider is throwing bullpens, and Hurston Waldrep is ahead of schedule. And the Braves are scoring runs this time around!

Only two people at the front of the plane - or wherever the coaching staff sits - were on board when the plane took off from San Diego last April. One is Eddie Pérez, who, I think, will probably be a coach in the Braves organization as long as he wants. The other is Walt Weiss. If you told me then that Weiss would be the manager a year later, I would’ve been despondent. I probably don’t have to tell you why, since there’s a decent chance you would’ve been despondent, too.

Well, it happened. I came into this season with an open mind about Weiss, aware that subordinates often disagree with their bosses, that the Braves had surrounded Weiss with reputedly smart people , and that, at bottom, the manager just doesn’t matter that much. With the off day finally here, let’s talk about how it’s gone so far. First, I’ll address some overarching stuff that we might attribute to Weiss and then, since the season is still so young, I’ll go through every game he’s managed so far and spotlight some decisions I found interesting.

Big-picture management

Being a manager isn’t just about making in-game calls - it’s about steering the ship over the course of a season. That includes vibes management (probably the most important part of the job), offensive approach, and baserunning strategy.

Let’s start with the good news. The defense has been phenomenal. The Braves lead baseball with 8 Outs Above Average. There’s not much more to say here, but special credit to Mauricio Dubon and Jorge Mateo for both accumulating positive OAA at shortstop so far. Watch your back, Ha-seong Kim.

Now, the rest. The Braves’ offense is basically doing what it did in 2025. From 2019 to 2024, the Braves’ offensive recipe was simple: swing very hard at as many strikes as possible. This meant the team consistently ran a high zone-swing rate, a low zone-contact rate (bigger swings means more whiffs), and a high xwOBAcon. Early in 2025, the team messed around with the idea of emphasizing lower chase rates to worsened results. In 2026, the Braves are seventh in Z-swing% (and just a hair from third), bottom 10 in Z-con%, and seventh in xwOBAcon. This is pretty close to where they ended up last year. The good news is that they’re fourth in xwOBA, in large part because they’re running one of the lowest strikeout rates in the league. I don’t know if that’ll hold, but if you’re not going to maximize quality of contact, you’d better make contact more often. And the Braves have no sacrifice bunts so far. Good!

The baserunning has been . . . fine. It’s looked ugly under new first base coach Antoan Richardson, but Statcast has the Braves as having accumulated 0 runs above average on the basepaths so far - which sounds unimpressive till you hear they were 4 runs below average last season.

And the vibes seem good so far. Weiss hasn’t had very many trying moments yet - it’s April 9th! - but he said and did all the right things during and after the Braves’ brawl with the Angels on Tuesday. He’s found a DH day for Acuña and a day off for a struggling Austin Riley He hasn’t yet complained about a player pimping a home run or not “playing the game the right way.” He seems to be well-liked. That’s the standard, and he’s met it so far.

If there’s one big-picture issue Weiss needs to fix, it’s this: The hitters must do better with their ABS challenges. If you think the Braves seem uniquely bad at this, you’re pretty much right; per Statcast, Braves hitters have the third-lowest success rate in the league. More than that, they’ve been terrible at picking their spots, with Ronald Acuña Jr. as a particular culprit. Hint: if you’re out of challenges by midway through the first inning, you’re probably using the challenges wrong. What can Weiss do about this? He might have to institute a blanket “no challenges with the bases empty unless it’s a full count” rule. I love the ABS system - I plan to write more on that soon - but it sure is annoying that my favorite team doesn’t seem to know how to use it.

In-game management

With the overarching stuff aside, let’s look at the decisions Weiss has made in each game the Braves have played so far. I’ll do my best not to let hindsight cloud my analysis.

March 27: Braves 6, Royals 0

The Weiss era started with an easy win - one that didn’t require the manager to do a whole lot. Chris Sale went six innings and left with a 4-0 lead. Some small credit to Weiss for not pushing Sale into the seventh at 88 pitches, I guess. From there, Weiss let two of his high-leverage relievers, Dylan Lee and Robert Suárez, take an inning apiece. And with a 6-0 lead in the ninth, he gave Iglesias the night off and had Tyler Kinley finish it off. On a day other than Opening Day, maybe I’d quibble with using Suárez, but this is all perfectly respectable.

March 28: Braves 6, Royals 2

Weiss was a lot busier in this one. With his velocity flagging, should Reynaldo López have faced Salvador Perez a third time? I don’t think so. But at least the plan was for López to face Perez alone before letting Dylan Lee face the left-handed Carter Jensen. Still not ideal, but more defensible than, “His pitch count was good and he hadn’t allowed a run yet.”

From there, Weiss stepped up. Perhaps using Joel Payamps with a one-run deficit was a little much to ask a pitcher who’s at the bottom of the pecking order. But when Payamps let two of the three hitters he faced reach, Weiss sensibly went to ground ball specialist Aaron Bummer. As is unfortunately wont to occur, Bummer had some terrible BABIP luck. Good process, bad result!

The Braves went into the ninth inning down two runs, and again, Weiss was active. Drake Baldwin walked, then Matt Olson singled, and Weiss pinch ran Jorge Mateo for Olson. Two batters later, Mike Yastrzemski singled and Weiss pinch ran Eli White for him. These aren’t mind-blowing decisions, and I’m not going to pretend that only a great tactician would make them, but Weiss certainly held up his end of the bargain in this one.

March 29: Braves 1, Royals 4

Perhaps tired from all the moves he made the previous night, Weiss was quiet in this one. Grant Holmes went five innings and Didier Fuentes pitched the rest of the game. If the Braves had really eaten into Kansas City’s lead late, what would Weiss have done? Who knows. But that’s not what happened. No real complaints here. I don’t love the mop-up relief role for Fuentes, but that’s almost certainly not Weiss’s choice to make.

March 30: Braves 4, Athletics 0

Another unremarkable game for Weiss. It’s sort of interesting - interesting in a good way, in my books - that he elected to pull Bryce Elder after 83 pitches when Elder had been scoreless through six innings and the Braves were up 3-0. Bummer and Suárez took the next two innings and Raisel Iglesias got his first appearance of the year in a non-save situation.

March 31: Braves 2, Athletics 5

This game was sort of like the final game of the Royals series. José Suarez started and struggled. Joel Payamps got an inning of work and Martín Pérez threw some bulk relief to finish it off.

April 1: Braves 5, Athletics 1

Weiss was gifted with six innings of one-run ball from an apparently very sick Chris Sale. By the time Sale left the game, the Braves had a 5-1 lead, and Weiss threw Suárez, Lee, and Iglesias to end it. A wrinkle: Weiss threw Suárez against the teeth of the Athletics’ lineup in the seventh and let Lee take the eighth. This isn’t groundbreaking - Joe Jiménez primarily got the 8th inning in 2024 but occasionally took seventh inning appearances or closed, for example - but it’s nice to see, anyway.

April 2: Braves 17, Diamondbacks 2

Yawn. Good job convincing the offense to score 17 runs, though. Also, good job getting Acuña and Riley off their feet late in this one.

April 3: Braves 2, Diamondbacks 0

After getting six innings from Grant Holmes, Weiss followed his standard late-and-leading formula in this one - Lee, Suárez, and Iglesias. Something I’ve noticed at this point: Weiss doesn’t seem to measure his starting pitchers’ outings by pitch counts - or, at least, the target numbers are pretty low early in the season. Holmes got pulled at 85 pitches.

April 4: Braves 1, Diamondbacks 2

The offense wasted another nice Bryce Elder outing, but there’s no use blaming Weiss for that. Elder pitched seven innings without an earned run - a rare error from the excellent defense was the difference in this one. Tyler Kinley got the eighth, which is fine usage for him.

April 5: Braves 5, Diamondbacks 6

Simply put, Walt Weiss should not have let Martín Pérez face Corbin Carroll to start the sixth inning. Pérez is about the ninth starter on the Braves’ depth chart when the rotation is healthy. He had not pitched well to that point in the game. Carroll is excellent. The game was tied. There’s no justification for it at all.

To Weiss’s credit, he immediately pulled Pérez when Carroll singled and put in Tyler Kinley. There’s an argument for putting in a higher-leverage arm at that point and letting Kinley have a clean inning, but maybe that’s nitpicking, and at any rate, I’m not sure it would’ve made a huge difference. Carroll promptly stole second and, a groundout later, was on third. He scored on a single and although there would be some back-and-forth the rest of the way, that run would be the difference.

From there on out, Weiss followed the late-and-close playbook, going to Lee, Suárez, and Iglesias in the bottom of the ninth in a tied game. The Diamondbacks walked it off against Payamps, and at that point, the Braves were basically out of arms anyway.

April 6: Braves 2, Angels 6

Two good Chris Sale starts had made Weiss’s job boring in a good way. This time, a terrible Chris Sale start made his job boring in a bad way. Should Sale have gone out there for a fifth inning? Maybe not, especially given his visible frustration throughout the start. But I don’t hate the idea of letting Sale end his day on a high note. It just didn’t work out that way. From there, Weiss used Payamps, Bummer, and Bido. No complaints there.

April 7: Braves 7, Angels 2

We’ve finally reached Weiss’s most active game of the year. I was curious how far he’d let Reynaldo López go with a 4-2 lead given that López’s stuff ticked up significantly in the fifth inning, and given that López was already facing the top half of the order for a third time. Weiss didn’t get a chance to show us what he’d do. Instead, he got busy tackling Jorge Soler.

When the dust cleared, Weiss had a tough job ahead of him: manage the remaining four innings and change with a two-run lead and try to snap a three-game skid. He started with Tyler Kinley facing Jeimer Candelario with a runner on third. Before I had time to say, “You’ll likely have to use all the high-leverage relievers today anyway, so you might as well use one of your best ones now with a runner on third,” Kinley had struck out Candelario. From there, Lee and Suárez took the Braves to the eighth.

That’s when things got uncomfortably interesting. It started with Weiss doing something I like: giving Aaron Bummer the ball in a competitive game with a lead. For reference, Bummer had one appearance last year in the seventh inning or later with a lead of three runs or less. Unfortunately, Bummer didn’t validate Weiss’s faith in him. He hit a batter, walked a batter, and allowed a barreled flyout. So Weiss turned to Iglesias to get a five-out save.

Maybe you’ve noticed a recurring theme here: Iglesias getting a multi-inning save isn’t crazy, but it’s interesting that it’s happening so early in the season. Iglesias has been the Braves’ primary closer since 2023. In 2023, he attempted zero multi-inning saves. In 2024, he attempted three, all late in the season in a tight playoff race. In 2025, he attempted one.

Walt Weiss asked him to do it on April 7th! And Iglesias did exactly what he was supposed to do: he struck out two hitters with the tying run at the plate, and, with the benefit of some insurance runs, closed the game out in the ninth. It was a validation of Weiss’s effort to aggressively pursue a win. They count as much in April as they do in September.

April 8: Braves 8, Angels 2

Atlanta headed home with one of those “So easy even a fan with a Substack could manage this one” games. Grant Holmes overcame a total loss of command in the second inning to pitch deep into the sixth inning. With two runners on, Weiss brought in Payamps, who struck out Mike Trout to keep the lead comfortable. José Suarez ate two innings against his old team to wrap it up.

I hope you enjoyed this, because I’ll probably never do this again. Not until the Braves get another manager, anyway. You’ll go crazy dissecting every in-game decision made over a 162-game season. But my takeaway here is that Walt Weiss is doing a fine job so far. He’s managing his bullpen with urgency, he’s finding days off for position players, and everyone seems to be pretty happy. I certainly am.

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“If you want full disclosure, I think it’s a good thing you got Damon off your payroll. I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities.”

Moneyball (2011)

Jurickson Profar’s second PED suspension is twice as long as his first. But it hurts less, at least to me and probably to the Braves’ front office.

When news of Profar’s suspension dropped last year, it didn’t just signal that Profar would miss half the season. It also signaled that the Braves had whiffed on him. The case for giving Profar a 3 year, $42 million deal didn’t hinge on him perfectly replicating his breakout 2024 campaign. But it did hinge on that season being more than smoke, mirrors, and needles. In that moment, Profar’s contract went underwater.

Profar getting suspended for 2025 means the Braves get to skip a year of that underwater contract.1 And here’s the thing. I think that if you told Alex Anthopoulos at the start of this offseason that he could snap his fingers and make a chunk of Profar’s contract disappear, he would’ve happily done so. Anthopoulos wouldn’t have committed $42 million to a player whose breakout season was almost certainly fueled by something more sinister than clean living. Profar posted solid offensive numbers on his return from suspension. But those numbers now have an asterisk, too, and at any rate, his batted-ball data took a significant step back from 2024. The Braves’ plan for Profar seemed to be that he’d play left field against lefties and DH against righties. But he was going to be a major defensive liability in the field - he posted -6 OAA in just half a season of innings last year, though he did make the catch of the year - and every time the Braves started Profar at DH was a day they couldn’t get Drake Baldwin off-day at-bats or get an everyday position player off his feet.

Now, it’s not all roses. At least the Braves learned of Profar’s suspension before the start of the season this time, but the free agent outfield market - even for luxury fourth outfielders - is barren. And until Ha-seong Kim and Sean Murphy return, the lineup looks pretty vulnerable.

But like Peter Brand in Moneyball, I think there’s an opportunity here. We have two roles to fill: a left field spot every time the Braves face lefties and a DH spot against righties on days when it’s not occupied by one of the catchers or another everyday starter. And I think the Braves can fill them in a way that not only replaces Profar’s production but also frees up some extra money for the trade deadline.

What we’re replacing

What would the Braves have gotten out of Profar this year? I think we can safely assume that, consistent with his career trends, he would’ve been a bad defender. The offense is tougher given that it’s hard to trust anything Profar has done since the start of the 2024 season. Steamer, which I assume can’t account for PEDs, expected Profar to put up a 111 wRC+ against righties and 116 wRC+ against lefties. Prior to 2024, Profar had a .319 xwOBA against righties and a .305 xwOBA against lefties, with those numbers spiking to .352 and .351 over the last two seasons. We can be generous to Profar, disregard the aging curve and the drugs, and pencil him in for his career numbers: .327 xwOBA against righties, .316 xwOBA against lefties.2

Can we do better than that?

The in-house options

Writing about the Profar situation earlier in the week, Lindsey Crosby highlighted Dominic Smith as the likely internal candidate to take Profar’s part-time DH role against righties and Eli White as the likely internal candidate to take his default starting LF role against lefties. Let’s talk about those guys.

Part-time DH against RHP

Dominic Smith is about as boring as they come. If you’re an optimist, you can point to the 119 wRC+ he posted in 198 PAs against RHP last year. But he has a career 100 wRC+ and equally uninspiring .325 xwOBA against righties, and his 2025 xwOBA was actually a little worse than that. There’s also no defensive utility here. He’s a good defensive first baseman, but he’s played exactly 1 inning at any other position since 2021. If a player with that profile is batting eighth, as Smith probably should, you have the roster of the United States national baseball team, a really stupid manager, or a bad player for the role. If you’re looking for reassurance, Smith’s career numbers against righties are pretty similar to Profar’s. But a player with Profar’s career numbers shouldn’t get a lot of DH at-bats anyway.

If you’re looking for a wild card, David McCabe doesn’t have any defensive utility either but posted an xwOBA in the mid-.350s against lefties and righties in his time in Gwinnett last season. In his age-26 campaign, it’s probably now or never for McCabe.

Starting LF against LHP

On the other hand, the Braves might have something with Eli White. Since coming to Atlanta, White has hit LHP to an average-y 103 wRC+ but a much more impressive .346 xwOBA. In 2025, William Contreras, Junior Caminero, and Corey Seager put up worse batted-ball numbers against southpaws than White.3 We’re not talking about a large sample here - less than 100 plate appearances - but when you add that White is the eighth-fastest player in baseball and a good corner outfield defender, I think White has a strong case for getting the first crack at the left field against lefties.

The external options

These are more limited than they were, say, a week ago, when Randal Grichuk was still a free agent. They’re further constrained by the fact that neither of the roles we’re looking to full is a full-time role, and someone who’ll be good at one is probably not good at the other. So, we’re probably looking for two players. And ideally, neither costs much in terms of money or trade capital.

Part-time DH against RHP

Like Smith and McCabe, Rowdy Tellez can’t play any position but first base. ZiPS thinks he’s a replacement-level player at this point in his career. And although he’s playing for Team Mexico in the World Baseball Classic, he remains unsigned. Tellez has average-ish career outputs against righties (102 wRC+) but a career .338 xwOBA against those players. I think Tellez could fill some DH at-bats admirably and be a Pablo Sandoval-style pinch hitting weapon when someone else is taking that spot.

Trevor Larnach has had a rough go of it lately, but he’s put up a .339 xwOBA against righties in the last two years, he can play fine corner outfield defense, and the Twins would probably be willing to discuss him given their glut of prospect outfielders and their obvious lack of near-term aspirations.

Alejandro Osuna put up a .346 xwOBA against right-handed pitching in his debut with the Rangers last year. Osuna can play all three outfield spots and the Rangers don’t have an outfield spot for him to play, what with Brandon Nimmo, Wyatt Langford, and Evan Carter all penciled into spots. I don’t imagine he’d cost terribly much and like Larnach, his control gives him some upside.

Andrew McCutchen ain’t what he used to be, but he’s still a useful player. Despite being a right-handed batter, his offensive inputs are actually worse against lefties than against righties in the last two years (.319 versus .339 xwOBA). McCutchen is one of the few players I’m listing who would probably expect to get both of the jobs we’re trying to fill, and he might have a credible case for it.

Starting LF against LHP

If only the Braves had found out about Profar a few weeks ago. Michael Conforto recently took a minor-league deal with the Cubs and has a .382 xwOBA against lefties (to go with a .332 xwOBA against righties) over the last few years. Conforto doesn’t figure into Chicago’s starting lineup, so he might still be gettable!

Tommy Pham has a .349 xwOBA against lefties in the last two years, but he’s a notorious clubhouse malcontent (there’s a reason a pretty good hitter keeps switching jobs!) so I’d guess that isn’t happening.

Brenton Doyle is a phenomenal defender whose 2024 breakout campaign was sandwiched by two rough seasons. His .351 xwOBA against lefties makes him something of a supercharged Eli White. Unfortunately, the Rockies are now under what appears to be competent management and would probably like to see if they can recover Doyle’s 2024 form instead of leaving another team to do it.

Projected lineups

If the Braves give the part-time DH job to, say, McCutchen and let White take the short-side platoon LF job, here’s what their lineups might look like if and when everyone is healthy. I’ve also noted each player’s xwOBA against the given handedness in the last two years. Note that the league’s average xwOBA over that period is .316.

This is a really good lineup against righties; everyone but Albies and Kim has been an above-average hitter in that period. against lefties, everyone but Kim and Harris is better than average, but there’s a palpable need for some extra oomph in the middle of the lineup; Olson and Baldwin, in particular, are excellent versus righties but not quite middle-of-the-order bats versus lefties. Even if White performs up to these recent numbers and Murphy rebounds to his fearsome form against right-handed pitching, the Braves might be looking for a part-time DH against righties on the days Murphy is catching.

There isn’t a $15 million player left in free agency. But Jurickson Profar wasn’t going to be worth $15 million anyway. I’m not sure the Braves are better off without him, but given that he’s probably been using PEDs for the better part of two years, it’s hard to fathom what a Jurickson Profar who could pass his drug tests would look like, anyway. Instead of fitting a square peg into a round hole, as the Braves would’ve done with Profar, why not two semicircles?

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When your Instacart shopper tells you the store’s out of soy milk and asks if almond milk will do, you have to decide what you really want. Is it some kind of milk substitute or is it soy milk or bust?

The Braves face a similar dilemma in the starting pitching market. For the second straight offseason, the team’s public messaging has been that it wants to acquire a playoff starter. We’re not quite to Opening Day, but for the second straight offseason, it looks like the team won’t be successful in doing so. Unlike some people, I don’t think it’s for lack of trying. I have no doubt the Braves have made serious offers for free agents and trade candidates. But the team hates opt-outs, doesn’t want to give nine-figure contracts to pitchers in their thirties, and doesn’t have a deep enough farm system, especially on the position-player side, to throw together the kinds of broad packages that landed MacKenzie Gore and Shane Baz this offseason.

Each of those facts is easy enough to accept in isolation. Together, they’ve caused fans justifiable angst. The angst hasn’t been improved by Spencer Schwellenbach, the team’s second-best starter, and Hurston Waldrep, one of the top candidates for a backend rotation spot, heading to the operating room before fully unpacking their bags in North Port. Nor has the AJC’s report that the Braves weren’t seriously interested in Chris Bassitt, who recently signed with the Orioles, or Lucas Giolito, who’s probably the best starter left on the market, helped things.

Here’s how I understand a common line of critique to go. Sure, the Braves wanted a frontline starter. But guess what? All the frontline starters are gone. Framber Valdez and Dylan Cease signed, Freddy Peralta was traded, and Joe Ryan probably isn’t going anywhere this late in the offseason. So why not sign someone like Bassitt or Giolito or Nick Martinez or Zack Littell or [insert fourth or fifth starter type]? Isn’t something better than nothing.

I think the answer is that the Braves don’t see “playoff starter” and “backend starter” as similar commodities at all. I think they’re genuinely interested in acquiring the former - I don’t buy the “they haven’t gotten one so they’re not trying to get one” line of reasoning. But I don’t think they care to spend real money on the latter. And on that, I’m with them.

A single click on a FanGraphs player page and you have access to what six projection systems think about every major leaguer - and what a subset of those projection systems think about every minor leaguer. (For example: Steamer thinks Cam Caminiti would put up a 5.26 ERA/5.36 FIP/5.29 xFIP if he cracked the Opening Day rotation. Maybe he needs a little more seasoning.) The systems aren’t perfect, but as central estimates of player performance go, they’re much better than comparing back-of-the-baseball-card numbers or the eye test.

Something you learn when you look at Bryce Elder’s FanGraphs page is that all of these systems, even the most bearish, think he’s a much better pitcher than his 5.59 ERA over the last two years. They see him as a lot closer to his 4.55 FIP/4.02 xFIP over that period. ZiPS is especially kind to Elder, projecting him for 1.7 fWAR over 152 innings of work - perfectly cromulent for a fourth starter, let alone a fifth or sixth starter. Look a little further and you learn that these systems think the Braves can get similar work on a rate basis from the likes of the aforementioned Pérez, José Suarez, Joey Wentz, JR Ritchie, Lucas Braun, and Didier Fuentes.

None of these players are guaranteed more than $2 million this season. Some are optionable and most are controllable for a while. I like to think of the performance level of these players as a yardstick. Call it the Elder Line.

Above the Elder Line, you’re getting pitchers who, at least if things break right, could be credible playoff starters. At and below the Elder Line, you’re getting innings-eaters. And innings-eaters in free agency can be expensive! A couple of offseasons ago, the Cardinals allocated nearly $30 million to Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson combined. Jordan Lyles has made over $50 million in his career for a career 5.22 ERA/4.78 FIP/4.57 xFIP.

I think the Braves have concluded that paying for starters below the Elder Line is for suckers. Anthopoulos has said this in different words in the last two offseasons. In the 2024-25 offseason, he repeatedly referred to Ian Anderson and Grant Holmes as the bar that a starter addition would have to surpass. (I guess it was the Anderson/Holmes Line then.) This offseason, he’s consistently said the Braves want a playoff starter, which is a different way of saying the same thing. Agree or disagree with them, the Braves just don’t seem to think rotation depth is worth what it goes for on the open market.

This isn’t all to say that the Braves’ conclusion is the right one. As Dan Szymborski pointed out earlier today, while the Braves’ rotation continues to project as an above-average unit, it’s going to be perhaps the most injury-sensitive in baseball. And it doesn’t help that virtually every member of it but Bryce Elder has dealt with some kind of serious health concern over the last two years. If the Braves have three of the Elder Line guys in the rotation by early May, it’ll probably look very foolish to have passed on the likes of Bassitt and it might even look dumb to have passed on the likes of Giolito. But I reject the premise that the Braves don’t have a plan. The plan is to try and find a playoff starter and, failing that, to rely on internal depth. Will it work? I don’t know, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me nervous. Just because there’s a method to the madness doesn’t mean the method’s a good one.

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I haven’t written in a while. It’s not because the Braves haven’t been busy since my last post; they hired a new coaching staff around Walt Weiss, dropped a lot of money on relievers, a left fielder, and a shortstop, and promptly had that shortstop get injured. That’s plenty of action for an offseason. But I don’t have much to say about any of those topics that smarter people than I haven’t already said. Basically, it’s good that the Braves have worked to fill their left field and shortstop holes, it’s slightly befuddling that they continue to allocate the money they do to relievers, it’s sad that Kim got hurt, although thank goodness for Mauricio Dubón, and it remains important to add a quality starting pitcher, although the Braves’ options have narrowed of late.

What brings me back is a leaguewide trend. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re in the midst of the Offseason of the Opt-Out. Bo Bichette, Michael King, and Tatsuya Imai signed three-year contracts with opt-outs after each season. Kyle Tucker signed a four-year contract with opt-outs after the second and third years. Most amusingly, Cody Bellinger got a rich, front-loaded, long-term deal with the Yankees and multiple opt-outs. (Don’t let anyone tell you Scott Boras isn’t good at his job.) But despite adding plenty of salary this offseason, the Braves didn’t give any of their new signings an opt-out. Nor did they do so last season, or the year before that. In fact, the Braves have never given a player an opt-out in the Alex Anthopoulos era.

There was a time when the Braves’ apparent refusal to give out opt-outs wouldn’t have been so unusual. In the 2019-2020 offseason, for example, none of the top ten free agents by AAV got an opt-out. In 2021, it was only Trevor Bauer, and maybe that was a desperate attempt to avoid losing a bet involving a paintball gun? But increasingly, the opt-out seems like the cost of doing business to get a quality player on a short- or medium-term contract. This offseason, it’s Bichette, King, Imai, and Tucker. Last offseason, it was Bregman and Alonso. And a player might insist on an opt-out even with long-term, top-of-the-scale guaranteed compensation in hand, as Bellinger demonstrated this week and Corbin Burnes last offseason.

If I were a general manager and was working with finite resources, I think I’d go to great lengths to avoid opt-outs. Free agent signings aren’t a cost-efficient way to fill holes to start with. Look at a list of the top free agent signings from each offseason with the benefit of a few years’ distance and you’ll see way more clunkers than steals. In that 2019-20 offseason, for example, three of the five highest AAVs went to Stephen Strasburg, Anthony Rendon, and Josh Donaldson. The middle tier of the market was no better, with Will Smith, Didi Gregorius, and Madison Bumgarner signing deals that would be in total completely irredeemable but for Smith’s 2021 postseason. But there’s occasional upside outcomes, like the Phillies’ signing of Zack Wheeler that offseason. For the same reason that club options are an unambiguous benefit for the team, opt-outs are an unambiguous detriment; they allow a player to undercut (or maybe altogether eliminate) whatever surplus value the team might have otherwise obtained. When you a sign a player and give him an opt-out, your best-case scenario is that he plays well enough to exercise the opt-out. If Wheeler had an opt-out midway through his deal, he certainly would’ve taken it - or at least leveraged it for a richer extension. It’s easy to understand the Braves’ reluctance to hand out contracts that put render the odds of doing better than breaking even so low.

How have the Braves made do without offering opt-outs, given that they’re also seemingly averse to doing nine-figure free agent deals? In free agency, they’ve largely shied away from the players who’d demand one or the other. This offseason is illustrative. They got high-AAV one-year deals done with Ha-seong Kim and Raisel Iglesias, whose age and/or 2025 performance put them in positions to get no more and they gave multi-year deals to two players in their mid-thirties, Mike Yastrzemski and Robert Suárez, who couldn’t have credibly asked for more than the two- and three-year commitments they got.

For now, this is working fine. But might a day come when, in order for the Braves to get the caliber of player they desire in free agency (or even via extension) without making a commitment beyond their comfort level, they’re going to have to give out opt-outs? They’ve shown a few hints of a willingness to do that in recent years by trading for one player (Jake Odorizzi) and acquiring another off waivers (Kim) who had player options for the next season. In these instances, the Braves weren't offering a player option or opt-out themselves, but they’re taking on contracts assuming the risk that the player they’re acquiring will stick around longer than they might like.

The Braves shouldn’t have a hardline stance against giving out player options. Like giving up a draft pick to sign a player who has declined a qualifying offer, the opt-out makes a free agent contract less desirable, but not necessarily a bad idea. The Giants have made good use of short-term, opt out-laden deals in recent years, getting good stints out of Blake Snell and Carlos Rodon and an eventual long-term commitment from Matt Chapman. Granted, Michael Conforto was a whiff, but you know what they say about eggs and omelets. That said, the Braves have come this far without offering a player the unilateral right to decide how long he stays with the team. The mandatory 1 percent donation to the Atlanta Braves Foundation might be a thing of the past (Kim, for one, didn’t chip in), but I’m betting Alex Anthopoulos holds the line on this front a little while longer.

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I didn’t care about baseball at all until my senior year of college. My parents raised me a football fan. Sure, our family would occasionally go to Braves games, but the Braves winning was our tertiary priority, behind praying for a delay-free game and begging the visiting third-base coach to throw a ball to my brother, dressed like a visiting team fan, between innings. (Simple math: fewer fans meant less competition.) It was hard for me to understand how someone could be invested in the 113th game of a 162-game season when every Packers game seemed to matter so much.

A switch flipped in 2019, partly because watching a less stressful sport became more appealing to me and partly because I made a close friend who was a Braves fan. We’d text through each evening’s game and he’d share his baseball worldview, which became a template for my own.

It’s been six years since then and nearly two years since I started ArmchairAlex, and suffice it to say my baseball worldview has developed in that time. While it colors everything I write, I haven’t yet tried to explain it.

So here goes.

Principle #1: Judge players on their inputs.

Baseball is structured around the pitcher-hitter matchup. At that level of focus, baseball is almost an individual sport. When the ball is in the pitcher’s hand, the pitcher has total control. The moment the ball leaves his hand, the hitter takes control.

But before the pitcher begins his windup and after the ball reaches the plate, everyone else earns their money. Have the managers put the right pitcher on the mound and the right hitter at the plate? Are the bases empty or loaded? If there are baserunners, are they good at baserunning? Is the defense properly positioned? If the hitter takes the pitch, how well does the catcher frame it? If the hitter swings, how well does the defense react? Does the pitcher or hitter just get plain lucky? It’s the combination of all of these factors, as well as the pitcher’s and hitter’s performance, that decides each plate appearance.

For most of baseball history, even astute fans (and astute teams!) struggled to separate the pitcher’s performance and the hitter’s performance from that of the other eight players on the field. Commentators dispensed qualitatively supported narratives - “This hitter has simply gotten lucky!” “This pitcher really bears down with runners in scoring position!” - that might be tainted by rooting interests or confirmation bias. And the publicly available numbers - win-loss records, RBI, batting average, OPS - were inextricable from the external factors that we were trying to set aside.

That’s changed in recent decades, and especially in the last decade: the Statcast era. We can measure pitchers by FIP and xERA; we can measure hitters by xwOBA and barrel rates. And even better, we have access to second-order inputs: the determinants of these new measures, like bat speed and spin rates. As you can tell if you’ve read any of my work, I care about the new numbers to the complete exclusion of the old numbers. This is for two reasons.

First, I oppose criticizing or praising players for events out of their control. I think it’s dumb when a receiver drops a wide-open pass and the cornerback celebrates as though he forced that incompletion. Likewise, I think it’s dumb that OPS treats a hard-hit line drive caught by a Gold Glove outfielder as equivalent to a three-pitch strikeout, that RBI treats doubling with a fast runner on first as more valuable than doubling with a slow runner on first, and that ERA treats bad defense as irrelevant if it doesn’t result in an error. Measures like xwOBA consider what the pitcher or hitter actually did. A hard-hit line drive isn’t more impressive or indicative of future success depending on quality of the defender tracking it down.

This isn’t just a moral “don’t judge people for things outside of their control” angle; it’s also about understanding whether a player ought to change his approach or the team ought to replace a player. My most polarizing article so far has been my response to the claim that A.J. Minter was mentally unsuited to the ninth inning because of his terrible surface numbers in save situations. Many of the comments I got on Reddit were variations of, “But the surface numbers are terrible!” If the driver of those surface numbers is bad luck - and not, say, diminished stuff or location - why clamor for a change?

Second, these new numbers better approximate how teams evaluate players in 2025. Last week, we saw Dylan Cease sign a $210 million contract despite posting an ERA over 4.50 in two of the last three seasons. Do you think the Toronto Blue Jays - or any of the teams that drove up the bidding to that point - were judging Cease on his ERA? Or were they looking at his significantly better underlying numbers and the strong pitch model grades on his arsenal? Do you think Devin Williams will be valued by the market like someone who just turned in a below-league-average season? At a much smaller scale, do you think the Braves gave Joel Payamps guaranteed money because of his horrible surface numbers in 2025, or because those pitch models showed that his arsenal was just as strong as it had been in previous years?

Obviously, the new numbers aren’t perfect. Some players chronically overperform or underperform their inputs, and the inputs have limitations. xwOBA, for example, doesn’t account for spray angle, which means that hitters might be over-credited for hard-hit pull-side groundouts and lineouts. So take the new numbers with a grain of salt - if a player undeperformed his xwOBA in 2025, but also in 2024, 2023, and 2022, it might be fair to bank on him underperforming his xwOBA in 2026, too. But the new numbers get me a lot closer to a goal of mine - figuring out why the Braves made certain decisions and guessing what they might do next - than the old numbers or my eyes would.1

Principle #2: Give the front office a strong presumption of competence.

Long before I wrote about the Braves - and before I even wrote for my college newspaper’s sports section - I wrote for the Green Bay Packers’ SB Nation affiliate. My favorite thing to write about was the draft.2 I loved putting together seven-round mock drafts and watching Day Two and Day Three in hopes that the Packers would arrest the unexpected slides of various draft community favorites.

In 2019, the Raiders hired Mike Mayock as their general manager. Mayock hadn’t ever worked in a front office; he came from NFL Network, where he was widely seen as the gold standard of draft analysts. I realized that if any other GM quit his job and started posting his own big board online, fans would take that big board just as seriously as they took Mayock’s. And Mayock didn’t even turn out to be a particularly good drafter!

It’s about then that I gave up on mock drafts. Everything I knew about draft-eligible players I learned from people like Mayock - people who were probably no smarter than the Packers’ decisionmakers and no more aware of the Packers’ needs or of the players’ off-field characteristics. So it was more rational to trust the Packers’ front office than to judge steals or reaches based on public big boards.

I know more about baseball now than I knew about the NFL Draft 10 years ago. And I think it’s easier to be well informed as a baseball fan than as a football fan; baseball teams don’t assign diverse situational responsibilities to players and there aren’t messy questions of scheme fit. But the same idea holds. As I alluded to with Payamps, it’s very clear from the Braves’ decisions that Alex Anthopoulos and his team apply the sabermetric lens that I apply here. They just happen to be doing it with more information, more resources, and smarter people. Many of the people in Atlanta’s brain trust are people I’d be looking to for insight if they were public commentators. (One of them used to run the most popular public projections system.) And even assuming they aren’t smarter than me, who am I to say the Braves were wrong to non-tender Alek Manoah when I didn’t see him throw a single pitch in the last two months but the Braves probably did? So, because the Braves’ front office cares deeply about the Braves winning and because they’re better positioned to evaluate potential acquisitions and the existing team than I am, it’s rational to presume that they know what they’re doing.

I’m not saying anything short of shilling for the front office is irrational. I’ve written in the past, for example, about how the Braves have spent too much on relievers or how they’ve erred in abandoning their signature offensive approach. I think I’m on reasonably strong foundation to make these sorts of arguments since the results of the Braves’ decisions on both fronts are well borne out by data. Also, my generosity is not boundless. I will revoke the presumption if presented with strong evidence that non-baseball people are interfering with baseball operations, a la Woody Johnson with the New York Jets, or that baseball people are making decisions for non-baseball reasons, like trying to save their jobs or sell seats through some means other than putting the best possible team on the field. But I’m not close to being convinced of any of those things.

Principle #3: Accept that others think Principles #1 and #2 are stupid.

I know that lots of fans think every stat invented since OPS is nonsense and view the Braves’ front office with suspicion. There is a tendency to describe fans who don’t see things your way as “casuals.” This tendency is noxious, it’s tactless because you’ll never change someone’s mind while insulting him, and it isn’t even accurate here. Many people who disagree with me are diehard Braves fans whose critiques begin, “Having watched every Braves game this season . . .” or “Having watched the Braves for 35 years . . .” Contemporary statistics are becoming a bigger part of mainstream baseball discussion - there are stadiums that show exit velocities and spin rates on their scoreboards, for example - but most fans don’t have Baseball Savant open while watching the game. And most fans would rather talk about whether the Braves ought to sign Framber Valdez than about how doing so would break every rule this front office has set for itself and how we should be talking about acquiring someone like Cody Ponce instead.

That’s okay. My approach to following the Braves brings me peace. It means that I don’t have a default attitude of pessimism but also that I’m not surprised when the Braves don’t sign Dylan Cease. It lets me be the best armchair GM I can be. And I hope that my writing has a similar effect on my readers. But while I think Principles #1 and #2 are transferable to other pursuits where process matters a great deal, baseball fans should maximize their own fun. If what makes someone happiest is rooting for his favorite pitcher to reach 20 wins, I’m not any worse for it, and neither are the Braves.

Fully internalizing Principle #3 means accepting that this site has a fairly low ceiling on its subscriber count. But today, the day after Thanksgiving, feels like a good time to say how gratified I am by your readership. Because some of you have signed up for ArmchairAlex with your work emails, I have learned that among my readers are people who work in professional baseball, writers for outlets I read religiously, and also a weird number of fellow lawyers. You span 37 states and 12 countries.3 It means the world to me that such an eclectic group of people reads what I write. I’ve heard from some of you that I’ve changed a long-held conviction of yours or that you’ve shared one of my articles when debating a relative. That never fails to make my day. And I hope you’ll continue to share your thoughts with me, whether in the comments sections here and on Reddit or by emailing me at harshasridhar12@icloud.com.

My views on the Braves will continue to evolve. And when they do, you’ll be the first to know.

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As the only team publicly traded as a standalone entity,1 Atlanta Braves are the only team in Major League Baseball that gives guidance about payroll in quarterly earnings presentations. On November 5, they held their third-quarter call and an analyst asked if, in light of the Dodgers winning the World Series for a second consecutive year, the Braves had any plans to “substantial[ly] change [their] approach” to spending. McGuirk answered as follows:

Well, I won’t comment on the expenses that the Los Angeles Dodgers had. But back to the Braves, we’ve always professed to try and be a leader in player compensation from a team standpoint. I think I’ve stated in the past that our goals are to be a top-five salary team. We’re currently a top-10 [team] and haven’t been out of that in quite some time out of that range. I think aiming back to the top five is a place that I want to get to. I think we’re capable of doing that.

This is a very fluid decision-making concept last year, as you’ve seen from our financials, we were below where we were the previous year . . . but I think it’s a good aspiration to get back to those goals in the coming year and years. And I think you’ll see us quite active in the free agent market and the trade market.

As I stated in my remarks, we’re a win-now team we want to fill in the places where we might have players that need replacing. But the majority of the reason for last year was injuries, as we know and even back into the previous year. So everybody is back at full speed, except Smith-Shawver, who’s coming back probably about midyear from Tommy John. So we’re very, very optimistic about what the team looks like for next year.

As Lindsey Crosby at Braves Today has pointed out, this has been incorrectly interpreted in some circles as a pledge that the Braves will run a top five payroll in 2026. McGuirk has made comments about wanting to eventually run a top five payroll in the past and they haven’t yet gotten there. A cynic will say, “Talk is cheap!” But as I pointed out a few months ago, with the exception of a post-COVID drop in 2021 and whatever 2025 was, the Braves have been really good about increasing payroll in Alex Anthopoulos’ tenure.

So, let’s do an exercise. Say McGuirk gave Anthopoulos the resources to run a top-five payroll in 2026. What would the offseason look like?

Step one: What’s the budget?

FanGraphs’ Roster Resource has the Braves with an estimated cash payroll of $193 million including arbitration estimates for José Suarez, Alek Manoah, Dylan Lee, Eli White, Vidal Bruján, Nick Allen, and Joey Wentz.

Per Cot’s Contracts, the fifth-highest cash payroll in 2025 was $254.1 million (Toronto) and the fifth-highest cash payroll in 2024 was $244.8 million (Houston). Let’s assume that as payrolls continue to rise leaguewide (your humble local baseball player feels the pain of inflation, too!) so does that marker. Let’s set the marker for fifth in payroll at $265 million. This would be a new Braves high (the previous high was $231 million in 2024), but the Braves continue to post strong financials and this wouldn’t be so different from the $27 million payroll jump the team made from 2023 to 2024.

Then, let’s squirrel away $10 million for Anthopoulos to use on mid-season moves. That leaves the Braves with roughly $60 million to spend this offseason. (That’s not so different from Mark Bowman’s unsourced guess that the Braves have at least $50 million to spend this offseason.)

Step two: How should the Braves spend it?

Anthopoulos has made clear that the team’s top priorities are finding a starting pitcher and a shortstop, then filling spots in the bullpen. So what if he put me in charge of trying to fill those holes?

Acquire SP Sonny Gray and $15 million from the St. Louis Cardinals for SP Blake Burkhalter

Sonny Gray and the Braves are a thuddingly obvious pairing. Gray lives in Nashville and would probably like to stay close to home. The Braves would like to obtain a playoff-caliber starter without giving up major prospect capital or making a long-term financial commitment.

Gray is owed $35 million in 2026 and has an option for 2027 that most likely ends with his employer paying him a $5 million buyout. $40 million is a large commitment for Gray. But the Cardinals are willing to kick in some cash. It’s a sliding scale; the more cash the Cardinals add, the more they can expect in prospect return. I call new Cardinals POBO Chaim Bloom and we reach an agreement: the Cardinals will trade Gray to the Braves and kick in $15 million, bringing the total expected outlay to $25 million. Does a one-year deal for $25 million carry surplus value? I think it does. And that’s where the prospect comes in. I think Blake Burkhalter, who’s entering his age-25 season and is Rule 5 eligible until the Braves protect him (as they surely will), is fair compensation. Burkhalter, a 40+ FV prospect on FanGraphs’ latest list, gives St. Louis an interesting high-minors arm to add to the mix with FanGraphs Top 100 prospects Tink Hence and Quinn Matthews, whether they choose to convert him to a full-time reliever or allow him to continue dabble as a starter. Meanwhile, the Braves have enough young, close-to-the-majors arms of interest (Didier Fuentes, Hurston Waldrep, JR Ritchie, Lucas Braun) to stomach giving up Burkhalter.

Total cost: $20 million for 2026, potentially $5 million for 2027

Sign SS Ha-seong Kim to a 1 year, $16 million deal with a $16 million player option

I think the predictions of Kim getting a lucrative multi-year deal are off base. His offense numbers were basically fine in his Atlanta stint, and I’m convinced his surgically repaired shoulder isn’t affecting him at the plate. But his arm strength was way down and he posted poor defensive numbers in a small sample. Kim plainly isn’t a star, and it seems possible - even likely - that his best baseball is behind him.

But Anthopoulos has been explicit about his interest in acquiring a shortstop, and for good reason; Nick Allen is a phenomenal defender but, given how inert he is at the plate, an unacceptable everyday starter. Bo Bichette might be a shortstop in some technical sense but it’s widely agreed that his future is at second base. And teams with good shortstops don’t want to trade them. So Kim seems to be the best option the Braves have.

Ben Clemens at FanGraphs projected Kim for a 2 year, $26 million deal. I think that given the paucity of options on the market and Kim’s willingness to play second base, he can do bit better than that. After a battle of puns with Scott Boras (he says Kim “won’t be had for a Seong”; I say it’s “Kimpossible” for Kim to do any better than another short-term, medium-AAV deal), I get Kim to sign a slightly richer version of the deal he signed last offseason to account for the fact that he isn’t slated to miss half of the first year with injury. It’s one year and $16 million with a $16 million player option for 2027. Anthopoulos doesn’t like player options but given that he acquired Kim recognizing that Kim might exercise his player option for 2026, he agrees to suck it up just this once.

Total cost: $16 million for 2026, potentially $16 million for 2027

Sign RP Emilio Pagán to a 1 year, $9 million deal

We’ve taken $36 million of our budget already and we still need “a lot of relievers” - Anthopoulos’ words, not mine - and hopefully a bench bat. So forget about Edwin Díaz, Robert Suárez, and Devin Williams. We need some quantity. Let’s start with Pagán. He’s had serious home run problems over his career and doesn’t induce ground balls; it’s why he has a career 4.00 FIP/4.08 xFIP despite a 28.3 strikeout rate and a 7.2 percent walk rate. But his Stuff+ grade and his fastball velocity are as good as they’ve ever been entering his age-35 season. And Pagán’s recent service as the Reds’ primary closer might give Walt Weiss some comfort as he tries to figure out initial roles in an overhauled bullpen (although strict bullpen roles are dumb and so on.)

Total cost: $9 million for 2026

Sign RP Gregory Soto to a 1 year, $5 million deal

The Braves bullpen lacks a true fireballer. Jhancarlos Lara could make his debut in 2026 and change that in a hurry, but as it stands, if an opposing hitter’s kryptonite is high velocity, who are you bringing in to face him. Hope that Daysbel Hernández comes back healthy and can throw strikes?

Enter Soto, who not only throws hard but throws hard from the left side. He’s familiar with new Braves pitching coach Jeremy Hefner since the Mets traded him at the deadline in 2025. Soto’s Mets tenure doesn’t look great on the surface; his walks plummeted but so did his strikeouts. But if you look under the hood, Soto was arguably a meaningfully better pitcher under Hefner’s tutelage. His Stuff+ and PitchingBot arsenal scores improved, and although his strikeouts dropped, the components that result in a strikeout - called strikes and whiffs - got better in Queens.

Soto didn’t make FanGraphs’ top 50 free agents list, so I’m spitballing a $5 million deal for Soto. That seems fair for a pitcher who’s never posted 1.0 fWAR in a year but who has an intriguing skillset.

Total cost: $5 million for 2026

Acquire RP Ryan Zeferjahn from the Los Angeles Angels for 3B Nacho Alvarez Jr.

This is a swap of players who disappointed in their 2025 major league stints and could use a change of scenery. Finding a trade partner for Alvarez is a priority for me; the Braves don’t trust him to play shortstop, he’s blocked at second and third, and at any rate his offensive approach (extreme passivity, contact over power) is not interesting to me.

Who might want a player like that? How about the Braves’ favorite trade partner? The Angels drafted slap-hitting first baseman Nolan Schanuel in the first round and immediately stuck him in the majors; if anyone appreciates hit-over-power corner infielder profiles, it’s them. With Yoán Moncada a free agent, the Angels are in the market for a new third baseman but don’t want to spend a lot of money. How about a pre-arbitration player to cheaply fill the spot while they figure out what they’re doing?

In return, I want Ryan Zeferjahn. FanGraphs wrote a complimentary profile about him in April and things went poorly from there. Who actively seeks a pitcher who posted a -0.6 fWAR campaign? Well, Zeferjahn’s arsenal grades out great (15th in composite Stuff+ among all pitchers who threw at least 10 innings in 2025) and he’s a cheap, controllable reliever with minor league options. Zeferjahn shouldn’t get penciled into a high-leverage relief spot but he’s more interesting than the random veterans (Hector Neris? Enyel de los Santos?) they rotated through the middle-relief corps in 2025. Plus, the Angels aren’t exactly experts at optimizing their pitchers; I think Zeferjahn could be a fun project for Hefner.

Total cost: $0

Acquire OF Jesús Sánchez for SP Bryce Elder

Another change-of-scenery swap! Bryce Elder was a bit overrated in 2023 and over-hated for the rest of his career; he’s been useful to the Braves as a sixth starter. But Elder is out of minor league options, so his time on the Gwinnett Shuttle has come to the end. Do the Braves want him in their Opening Day rotation? Do they think he’d have meaningful utility as a reliever? My uneducated view is that he’s not appealing in either role.

The Astros acquired Jesús Sánchez for backend starter Ryan Gusto at the deadline. Sánchez was supposed be a strong-side platoon bat; he’s been that for much of his career. Instead, he flopped down the stretch, and the Astros might not be enthusiastic about the $6.5 million he’s estimated to be owed in his penultimate year of arbitration.

Houston’s looking for backend rotation depth, and I’m sure they wouldn’t mind the cost savings of swapping Sánchez for Elder, since the latter isn’t even arb-eligible yet. And I’m looking for a way to strengthen the Braves’ lineup without splurging, given how little of our budget is left at this point. Sánchez fits into Atlanta’s lineup as a regular starter against right-handed pitching. And he’s a better outfield defender than Jurickson Profar or Ronald Acuña Jr., so one of them can rest their legs on days Sánchez is playing.

Total cost: Approximately $5.7 million for 2026

My takeaways

I’m open to feedback to the contrary, but overall, this feels pretty realistic to me! I’m giving every free agent on the FanGraphs Top 50 list as much or more than Ben Clemens projected for them. And while maybe the Sonny Gray sweepstakes will ratchet up to the point where St. Louis will want a better prospect in return for eating $15 million, I think it’s plausible that Gray’s no-trade clause narrows his market enough that the Braves have to top three other offers, not 15 other offers.

My plan results in roughly $55 million in new 2026 commitments. The only post-2026 commitment is a potential $5 million buyout to Sonny Gray. And, of course, the Braves could tender Sánchez a contract for 2027, or they could walk away with no additional cost.

Here’s what the Opening Day roster looks like.

It feels realistic in part because it’s imperfect. The Braves will likely need to use some of their in-season cushion to add to the bullpen at the deadline. And Jeremy Hefner will have to earn his salary with projects like Zeferjahn, Soto, and likely call-ups like Hayden Harris and Jhancarlos Lara. But we’ve solved the big problems. The Braves get a legitimate starting shortstop and a playoff-caliber starting pitcher. They add an intriguing, low-cost bat to the mix. And they trade away two players - Alvarez and Elder - who I don’t think are a good fit on the major league roster.

Some folks might read this and think, “Wow, for being a top five payroll, that roster isn’t that much better than what we’ve had of late.” And I think that’s a reminder that (A) with the exception of 2025, the Braves have spent quite aggressively in recent years, and (B) with so much of the roster under long-term control, the vast majority of realistic offseason plans will involve more shaping around the edges than wholesale change. I think this plan fits the bill.

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Last week, I spotlighted some position players I thought the Braves should target this offseason. Now, I’m back to do the same with starting pitchers and relievers.

Starting Pitchers

Dylan Cease

Why he’s available: Cease hits free agency entering his age-30 season.

What he’s done: Since 2021, Cease has been one of the game’s premier workhorses. In that time period, he’s started 32 or 33 games each season, accumulated the fourth-most fWAR among starting pitchers, and has put up a 3.72 ERA/3.37 FIP/3.65 xFIP. You could imagine teams being a little worried about the tread on his tires, but how harshly are they going to penalize a player for being too available? While his ERA ballooned in 2025, his underlying numbers remained rock solid. While his rate statistics put him more in “really good number two” territory than “bona fide ace” territory (26th in FIP and 37th in xFIP among qualifying starters in that time period), he’s a stronger bet than certain rate-basis darlings (Chris Sale and Tyler Glasnow, for example) to eat a bunch of innings in the process - and thus accumulate a ton of value.

Why he fits: A Boras client who’s likely to get offers in the low $200 million range generally wouldn’t be a fit at all. And I still think signing Cease is a long shot. But it’s not that hard to make the case. Cease is an Atlanta native who spends his offseason in Georgia. Alex Anthopoulos has publicly confirmed that the team tried to trade for him two off-seasons ago. The one big-name free agent the Braves have seriously pursued under Anthopoulos was Aaron Nola, and it’s easy to frame Cease as a slightly wealthier man’s Nola: a very good starting pitcher with an uncommonly clean bill of health.

Sonny Gray

Why he’s available: After refusing to waive his no-trade clause last offseason, Gray has signaled a willingness to do so this offseason given St. Louis’ apparent commitment to a rebuild. Gray is entering his age-36 season and has one year and $35 million left on his deal. He also has a weird club option/opt-out for 2027 wherein his team has to pay $5 million if they don’t want to pick up his $30 million club option, but he can opt out if they do pick it up. (Basically, it’s unlikely that Gray remains on his team under this contract in 2027; if he’s bad in 2026, his team will eat the $5 million, and if he’s good enough for his team to be comfortable paying him $30 million in 2027, he’ll probably figure he can get a more lucrative multi-year deal.)

What he’s done: Y’know that list of qualifying starters by fWAR since 2021 we just talked about? Gray ranks 10th on that list. And he’s hit his stride as he’s gotten into his mid-thirties, posting a runner-up AL Cy Young finish in 2023 and following that up with seasons of 3.8 and 3.6 fWAR. Gray isn’t quite Cease in terms of durability, but he’s made 32 starts in two of the last three seasons (and 28 starts in 2024, which isn’t bad, either), and he’s a good bet to run great strikeout and walk rates. Like Cease, he had an unimpressive ERA in 2025, but like Cease, his FIP and xFIP provide no cause for concern.

Why he fits: The Braves were interested in Gray as a free agent two offseasons ago. Gray, who spends his offseasons in Tennessee and has expressed a preference for being close to Nashville, is likely interested in playing in Atlanta. And the short-term nature of his deal aligns with how the Braves like their pitching acquisitions. The multimillion dollar question will be to what extent the Cardinals are willing to pay down Gray’s contract; as it stands, it works out to a one-year, $40 million deal (baking in the $5 million buyout), which is an underwater deal. If the Cardinals would kick in, say, $10 or $15 million, I’d be happy giving up a lottery ticket for Gray.

Chris Bassitt

Why he’s available: Bassitt hits free agency entering his age-37 season.

What he’s done: Like Cease and Gray, Bassitt has put up a ton of innings in recent years, making at least 30 starts in every season since 2022. Unlike Cease and Gray, though, you wouldn’t be thrilled to have Bassitt in your postseason rotation. (The Blue Jays used him out of the bullpen in seven postseason outings this year.) Steamer projects him to post a low-4s ERA with accompanying peripherals and to hit the 2-fWAR mark on pure volume.

Why he fits: The Braves could certainly use a frontline starter, and Bassitt isn’t that. But he’s dependable, to whatever extent anyone can ever depend on any pitcher for anything. With so much health-related volatility in the Braves rotation (Spencer Strider a year removed from Tommy John recovery, Spencer Schwellenbach recovering from a broken elbow, Reynaldo López recovering from shoulder surgery, Grant Holmes recovering from an elbow ligament injury, AJ Smith-Shawver recovering from Tommy John surgery), the Braves could use someone who can keep them in games with more consistency than the current next man up (Bryce Elder?) could.

Relievers

Devin Williams

Why he’s available: Williams hits free agency entering his age-31 season.

What he’s done: Ever since coming up as Josh Hader’s setup man in 2020 and winning NL Rookie of the Year, Williams has been one of the game’s best relief pitchers. Yankees fans might say, “Sure, until he had to pitch under da big lights in da Bronx!” But while Williams’ ERA (4.79) suffered and he had some high-profile implosions in pinstripes, his underlying numbers remained very good. Williams will have no shortage of suitors. But I wonder if he finds himself looking at short-term, high-AAV deals (like the 2 years and $24 million that Fangraphs’ Ben Clemens projects for him).

Why he fits: After declining club options on Pierce Johnson and Tyler Kinley and with Raisel Iglesias hitting free agency, the only somewhat known commodities in the Braves bullpen are post-injury Joe Jiménez, Dylan Lee, and Aaron Bummer. Since the 2019 trade deadline, the Braves have invested a ton of money into relievers. This isn’t the wisest play given the volatility of reliever performance. Perhaps with a new pitching coach (and, who knows, a more flexible approach to reliever deployment), we’ll see a change in resource allocation. If not, Williams doesn’t have a qualifying offer attached (unlike Edwin Díaz, who’s the unquestioned star of the reliever market) and would immediately be the Braves’ best reliever by a solid margin.

Phil Maton

Why he’s available: Maton hits free agency entering his age-37 season.

What he’s done: Maton just had the best season of his career, accumulating 1.5 fWAR between St. Louis and Texas. Till 2025, Maton had a mostly undistinguished career between five teams. The last of those teams - the Mets, who acquired him at the 2024 deadline - might have saved his career. The Mets had Maton halve his slider usage, ramp up his sinker usage, and slightly increase his curveball usage. Maton went from a sub-replacement player with the Rays to a high-leverage reliever for the Mets down the stretch. With similar pitch usage percentages in 2025, he continued his strong work.

Why he fits: The Mets’ pitching coach who worked with Maton? New Braves pitching coach Jeremy Hefner. Maton likely has some preexisting comfort with Hefner. And Maton is a capable reliever who won’t demand a long-term deal or a closing role (10 career saves).

Tyler Rogers

Why he’s available: Rogers hits free agency entering his age-35 season.

What he’s done: Rogers is a funky sidearm guy with a rising slider. He’s also one of the league’s best relievers despite not throwing hard or getting whiffs. He’s allowed a sub-.300 xwOBACON over the last three years. No reliever with a similar workload has posted a similar number.

Why he fits: If you thought Maton working with one current Braves coach in 2024 was good, how about Rogers working with two current Braves coaches in 2025? Rogers started the season in San Francisco, where he worked with new bullpen coach J.P. Martinez, and was traded to the Mets, where he worked with Hefner. There’s a preexisting rapport here. And Rogers is an excellent, platoon-proof pitcher.

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After a monthlong search in which we heard whispers about up-and-coming bench coaches like Danny Lehmann and George Lombard, the Braves hiring Walt Weiss as their next manager felt like punting on third down.

When you have the most attractive managerial vacancy in the sport, why give the job to a 61-year-old who last managed - unsuccessfully, by any metric - a decade ago? I wasn’t alone in the immediate disappointment; there’s even a quickly-spreading conspiracy theory that pits Alex Anthopoulos and Terry McGuirk in a power struggle involving whether John Gibbons should be a bench coach.1 The broader complaint is that handing the job to Weiss feels like complacency from an organization that might value continuity to a fault.

I’ve spent the last day doing my homework on Weiss. I looked into his tenure managing the Colorado Rockies from 2013 to 2016 and listened to his comments today - both at his introductory press conference and during his follow-up interview on 680 The Fan. Here are my thoughts.

The Rockies years

Walt Weiss’s time managing the Rockies was bad. In four years, the Rockies never won more than 75 games. You could say, “Well, it’s the Rockies,” but they posted back-to-back winning seasons in the first two seasons after he left and even took the Dodgers to a Game 163 for the division in 2018.

Offensively, the Rockies swung at everything; they were third league-wide during Weiss’s at swinging at strikes (Z-swing%) and first at swinging at balls (O-swing%). They also ranked sixth in sacrifice bunts, which is weird given that they played in an offensive environment that really rewarded hitting the ball in the air. Pitching-wise, they were a mess, but in fairness, their rotation didn’t have much to write home about until the first year post-Weiss, when Germán Márquez, Kyle Freeland, and Antonio Senzatela pitched their first full seasons in the majors.

None of this is encouraging. Weiss had the Rockies playing a brand of baseball that’s dumb, period, but especially dumb when you play 81 games in an offensive launchpad.

But managing the Rockies was Weiss’s first ever Major League Baseball coaching job. Weiss and then-general manager Jeff Bridich apparently didn’t get along or communicate well. While the Braves have front office members whose primary job is talking through game strategy with players and coaches (see Doug Wachter and Michael Schwartze), Weiss probably didn’t get a smooth flow of information from the Rockies front office. And I’m not even sure the Rockies front office had great data in the first place! And here’s where I get to say, “Well, it’s the Rockies.” This is not a smart organization! This from a 2021 article on the Rockies’ dysfunction:

Bridich oversaw the building of the Rockies’ research and development group, but during his tenure the team’s attention to analytics has been halting, frequently behind that of other clubs. Several players in recent seasons privately have expressed concern about the lack of analytics information from the front office to the clubhouse. Some of those players cited a lack of available resources to help them improve, especially in their efforts to overcome Coors Field’s disadvantages.

I wonder why they don’t have those resources! Well:

The use of front-office staffers as “clubbies,” part of the organization-wide effort to maximize an operation team officials already consider lean by major-league standards, lasted for the 30 home games during the 2020 regular season. Members of the analytics and player-development staffs might work their normal jobs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., then assist in the clubhouse from 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. “I’d be holding a pile of dirty jerseys and a coach would come up to me, ‘Can I get this data for this pitcher?’ (or) something like that,” one former member of the baseball operations department said. “I’d be just like, ‘I can’t do that right now.’”

If this is what it was like in the early 2020s, what do you think it was like when Weiss was the Rockies’ manager?2 Remember that the Statcast era only began in 2015, halfway through Weiss’ tenure. Even league-average front offices were miles behind where they are today. And the Rockies have not had a league-average front office.

So, my thoughts on the Rockies years: Weiss was a bad tactician, but it would’ve been a miracle for him to have been a good tactician, given that he had no prior coaching experience or exposure to an analytically progressive organization and given that he had a poor relationship with a front office that probably didn’t have much information to share with him anyway.

Weiss’s comments

One of the first questions Weiss was asked at his introductory press conference was how he felt about analytics. My friend Lindsey Crosby at Braves Today transcribed the answer as follows:

Look, I’ve evolved with the game. I think if you don’t, you’re a fool. My philosophy is: why would anybody, especially in a position of leadership, turn their back on information? And Alex has done a great job and his team has done a great job of blending the wisdom that comes from being in uniform for a number of years and the information that’s available to us today and the technology that’s available to us today. So, I’m very curious when it comes to the information. I want it. And then there’s a point where you got to put context to it. I always say there’s an art and a science to everything. The information gathering is the science part of it, and the art is putting context to it in the dugout and making it practical and pragmatic over the course of a nine-inning game. So yeah, I think you have to evolve. The game has changed, like I said, and you’d be a fool not to evolve with the game.

At the end of the press conference, Weiss got another analytics question and said (edited for clarity):

Look, we can go on and on about this, but like I said, you get the information and then it’s up to us [as a coaching staff] to put context to it. The scoreboard always has a say, so that’s a factor. But we have a great team that works with Alex and works with us and those relationships are rock solid and deep-rooted. So there’s a lot of trust there. I value the information that I get from our team upstairs and - it’s tough go into the specifics of it, because there are so many ways we can go when you talk about the analytics and the information - but [I’m] very open and always very curious to get better in that realm.

In an interview with 680 The Fan, Weiss got a similar question and answered like this (edited for clarity):

Look, I mean, the sweet spot is the blend, right? It’s gathering of the information and technology that’s available to us today and combining that with the wisdom that comes with being in uniform for a long time and being around a lot of smart people. Finding that sweet spot is the key and it’s a competitive advantage. I’m as curious as anybody, and I get a kick out of people who talk about analytics as some mystical term. It’s just information, and we have more of it in this day and age, but we’ve always used information in this game. There’s just more to sift through these days. So it’s not this complicated topic, analytics; it’s pretty basic, really. It’s about putting context to the information that helps you win a game every night.

It isn’t groundbreaking stuff (except in the sense that we can replace “My god” with “Look” as the default sentence-starter for postgame press conferences, but I think this is about the most positive attitude you could expect towards analytics from someone with Weiss’ background. If it’s not just for show, then it’s good enough! The manager doesn’t have to have a working knowledge of biomechanics or be able to explain the differences between various stuff models. He just has to be able - and willing - to understand the information presented to him by the front office and trust that information as a significant input when making decisions.

And you know what’s funny? One of the few times Weiss spoke publicly as the Braves’ bench coach was to praise the front office’s provision of data to the coaching staff. This from a 2021 article:

“It’s about guys doing a lot of hard work upstairs,” bench coach Walt Weiss, who joined Snitker’s staff following the 2017 season, told MLB.com’s Mark Bowman before Tuesday’s Game 4. “The guys who are digging in on our defensive alignments have done a really good job.”

“Early on, there was some trial and error with some things. There were too many ground balls getting through. So we got together and we started to discuss how we could fix this. It’s a credit to [general manager] Alex [Anthopoulos’s] team up there. The adjustments they made on the fly. I mean, after the first four or five weeks of the season, [the infield defense] has been airtight.”

“There’s no egos involved, we just try to get better,” said Weiss. “That relationship has been really good. You combine the information with the wisdom that comes with experience and that’s the sweet spot.”

And it wasn’t just talk! Before 2021, the Braves hardly ever shifted. Since then, they’ve been among the more aggressive teams in the league and did progressive things like playing Austin Riley in shallow left field as a rover before MLB implemented shift restrictions.

My thoughts

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I wanted in a manager. I wanted someone who could manage clubhouse vibes, who would trust data, and who had some familiarity with the front office. Given what we know about Weiss, how does he fare on those three criteria?

As to clubhouse vibes, it’s going to be a while until we know if Weiss is any good. But it’s a good sign that Weiss is apparently close with Ronald Acuña Jr. While they had a civil relationship, it’s pretty obvious that Acuña and Brian Snitker were not especially close. Not only is it important that Weiss and Acuña apparently get along, it might signal Weiss’ general comfort with the way modern baseball players conduct themselves. You don’t want your manager mad about your franchise player having a long home run trot. And Weiss walks in with a strong understanding of existing clubhouse dynamics.

As to the data, the quotes above give me optimism. As I said in the previous article: “[I]t’s not critical to me that the next manager is an in-the-weeds advanced data aficionado. That’s what I want from the front office. What I want from a manager is someone who, if presented with a strong, data-based case, won’t invariably revert to his ‘instincts’ or ‘feel for the game.’” At the very least, Weiss talks a good game about being open-minded towards the data he’ll receive. The million-dollar question is how he’ll reconcile differences between his long-held understanding about how the game should be played and the data. But I think the Great Shifting Shift of 2021 is a positive sign, particularly given Weiss’ willingness to publicly credit the front office for driving that change.

Finally, they don’t get any more familiar with the Braves front office than Weiss. Anthopoulos mentioned that he saw the interview process as his first opportunity to talk to Weiss about how he’d manage a team if given the chance. But Weiss has been in Atlanta for basically as long as Anthopoulos, and when Weiss was asked about analytics during his press conference, he brought his answer back to Anthopoulos’ staff each time.

This is where we get to what a cynic might call “hopium” (or even “copium”). But it' also happens to be one hundred percent true. Nobody has better insight into what Walt Weiss will be like as a manager than the people who just gave him the job. The Braves no doubt spent hours with Weiss during the interview process, and they’ve worked with him as a bench coach for years. I’m sitting here cobbling together public-facing comments from someone with no incentive to show his hand. It’ll take a while for us to get as much information on Weiss as the Braves have right now.

But now you know what I know. Until the spring, that’ll have to be enough.

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Last weekend, I teed up the Braves’ offseason payroll and personnel situation. Now, I’m back to spotlight some position players the Braves might acquire. The team has occasionally been creative in the positions it’s set out to improve - I don’t think anyone had catcher high on their list of needs in the 2022-23 offseason - but I feel pretty safe saying that the two positions where they’re most likely to seek an upgrade are shortstop and corner outfield. Let’s talk about what they can do at those spots.

Shortstop

Ha-Seong Kim

Why he’s available: Kim seems likely to decline his $16 million player option and enter free agency entering his age-30 season. Ordinarily, his injury-marred, spotty 2025 would make it appealing to pick up the option and try again in a year. But the shortstop market is incredibly weak - other than Kim, the only available player likely to be a good starter in 2026 is Bo Bichette - and with a potential lockout looming next offseason, you couldn’t blame Kim for wanting to find a port ahead of the storm.

What he’s done: Kim had a rough 2025, complicated by spending the first half of the season rehabbing from a shoulder surgery that ended his 2024 season prematurely. In a small sample, his defense was bad (-3 DRS, -3 OAA) and his arm strength was down significantly from his pre-injury form.

Why he fits: There’s no better proof that Kim fits than that the Braves acquired him late in the season knowing fully well that they were out of a playoff spot and that Alex Anthopoulos explicitly said after the season that they were hoping to keep him in the fold. If you came here for slightly more sophisticated analysis, I think I covered it pretty well a month ago. Kim is unlike any shortstop to hit free agency in recent years; he’s not a superstar, but if you buy that he’s fully healthy (while his throwing arm might generate concern, his bat, including his ability to hit for power, looked as good as ever in September), he’s a solid bet to post 3-4 fWAR. If that version of Ha-seong Kim is your fifth or sixth-best position player, you have some really good position players.

There won’t be a shortage of teams interested in a shortstop. Most notably, the Yankees might see Kim as a good stopgap to top prospect George Lombard Jr. So I wouldn’t be shocked in the bidding gets beyond the Braves’ comfort zone. But Kim simply isn’t the kind of player who receives $100 million; I think re-signing him is practical, especially given that Anthopoulos has explicitly named shortstop the Braves’ top priority.

Willi Castro

Why he’s available: Castro hits free agency ahead of his age-29 season.

What he’s done: Castro is more a utility player than a shortstop. He’s played every position except first base and catcher (including 4.2 innings on the mound) over the course of his career. In fact, he’s played at least 500 innings at each of those positions. He’s also been a roughly league-average hitter for his career (95 wRC+), posting a Kim-esque .315 wOBA/.312 xwOBA over the last three seasons. Just for fun, he’s also a switch hitter. Castro’s Statcast page is uninspiring; he’s fast, throws hard, and puts up great peak exit velocities, but his average quality of contact is poor, as are his swing decisions.

Why he fits: Castro barely played any shortstop in 2025, but graded out well at the position by OAA and extremely poorly by DRS in 2024. Call it mixed reviews. If the Braves want to get back to the “encourage players to swing big and hit it hard” idea, Castro might be someone who could benefit from the talk; he runs large gaps between his 90th percentile and average exit velocities. (Alex Verdugo was also like this and was unwatchable in Atlanta, but the offensive approach messaging was a mess team-wide.) I think Castro is more useful as a super-utility player who gets starts across the diamond, but if the Braves are insistent on improving at shortstop, Castro might be the most feasible option other than Kim.

Corner outfield

Lars Nootbaar

(NOTE: I put Nootbaar on this list before it was reported that he might miss the start of 2026 with his double heel surgery. I think the injury uncertainty around him makes him less likely to be moved, but I’m intrigued with him anyway so I’m putting him here.)

Why he’s available: With two more years of control entering his age-28 season and the Cardinals undergoing a bit of a rebuild under new president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom, Nootbaar seems like a good change-of-scenery candidate.

What he’s done: Nootbaar has struggled with health and underperforming his peripherals - and even those peripherals took a step back in 2025 - but there’s a lot to like in his profile. Nootbaar avoids chase at an elite rate (100th percentile in 2024), hits the ball very hard, and until 2025 played good to great corner outfield defense. (That he missed time with a knee injury and then got surgery on both heels in the offseason maybe doesn’t bode well here.)

Why he fits: This might not seem like a glowing write-up for a player I’m saying the Braves ought to acquire, but Nootbaar’s warts might also lower his prospect cost into the Braves’ price range. If the Jurickson Profar signing last offseason signals that the Braves have a newfound interest in avoiding chase, even at the expense of passivity towards strikes, Nootbaar fits into that trend.

Randal Grichuk

Why he’s available: Grichuk hits free agency ahead of his age-34 season.

What he’s done: After a very successful part-time stint with Arizona in 2024 (139 wRC+, 1.6 fWAR in 279 PAs), Grichuk had to wait till February to get an invite to come back for one year and $5 million in guarantees. Grichuk did what you shouldn’t do as a part-time outfielder in your thirties: he posted -0.4 fWAR over 293 PAs with an atrocious 82 wRC+. So why am I interested in Grichuk at all? His offensive inputs remained good (.338 xwOBA), and he’s one of the league’s most fearsome hitters against southpaws. That’s not an exaggeration. Over the last three years, only 20 hitters in baseball (min 250 PAs) have a better xwOBA against left-handed pitching than Grichuk (.378). Grichuk puts up better inputs against lefties than the likes of Kyle Schwarber, Fernando Tatis Jr., Austin Riley, Pete Alonso, and Bryce Harper.

Why he fits: This is the type of player you can add to your roster when you don’t have a full-time DH. Sure, Drake Baldwin will DH some when he’s not catching, and if Sean Murphy looks rejuvenated post-hip surgery, perhaps he will, too. But at the very least, there are going to be days when the Braves want Jurickson Profar or Ronald Acuña to get a DH day. On those days, Grichuk - who isn’t a good outfielder, but whom the metrics like more than they like Profar or Acuña - can hold down an outfield corner spot. If Grichuk really takes off, as he did in 2024, it should be easy enough to make sure he’s in the lineup against every lefty, either as a DH or playing one of the outfield corners.

Mike Yastrzemski

Why he’s available: Yastrzemski hits free agency ahead of his age-35 season.

What he’s done: In Community, the Dean of the Air-Conditioning Repair School takes Troy Barnes to the Room Temperature Room, the room from which the phrase “room temperature” apparently derives. If that room is the Room Temperature Room, then Yastrzemski is the League Average Outfielder Outfielder. He’s been worth between 1.7 and 2.5 fWAR every season of his career. Since 2021, he’s put up a wRC+ between 99 and 111 every season, including 106 on three occasions. “Yaz,” as he is called by people tired of trying to spell his name correctly, is a cromulent offensive player and a pretty good corner outfield defender.

Why he fits: If the Braves indeed make meaningful acquisitions at shortstop and starting pitcher, which Anthopoulos described as the team’s top priorities, then they probably won’t be in the market for a top-tier outfielder. Although he’s coming off a much better season than Grichuk, Yastrzemski is a 35-year-old without a whole lot of upside. He’s likely going to get a contract not far above the $9.25 million he and the Giants settled on to avoid arbitration last offseason. He’s leagues better as a defender than Profar or Acuña and is plausibly receptive to a role in which he plays a lot but not necessarily every day. That’s been the story of his career so far anyway.

Taylor Ward

Why he’s available: Entering his final year of control in his age-32 season, Ward doesn’t fit the Los Angeles Angels’ contention timeline, whatever that timeline may be. That doesn’t guarantee that the Angels will shop Ward, but it sure would be sensible to do so.

What he’s done: Ward isn’t quite a star, but he’s a very good starting corner outfielder. Over the last three seasons, he’s averaged 2.5 fWAR/600 PA by hitting for a lot of power, making great swing decisions, and playing acceptable defense. He’s also been available over the last two seasons, playing 313 of 324 possible games.

Why he fits: Ward fits in between the options we’ve already discussed. He’s probably cheaper in terms of prospect cost than Nootbaar, but the $13.7 million he’s projected for his final year of arbitration is almost certainly more than Grichuk or Yastrzemski will make in 2026. Like Grichuk, Ward kills lefties (.371 xwOBA over the last three years) but with a career 110 wRC+ against righties, he’s not a strict platoon bat. Ward is a good enough defender and hitter that if you acquire him, he should probably be the everyday starting left fielder with Jurickson Profar becoming something like a full-time DH. Sure, that reduces the team’s flexibility a bit if you’re a believer in the sunk-cost fallacy as to Profar. But it would give the Braves a legitimate middle-order bat without any long-term financial commitment and probably without back-breaking prospect outlay, either.

Last offseason was my first full offseason at ArmchairAlex; I started the site in January 2024, at which point the team had finished its heavy lifting for the 2023-24 offseason. I made a lot of predictions. Making at least $25 million in 2025 salary commitments! Didn’t happen. Signing Willy Adames! Also no. Not resetting the luxury tax! Wrong.

If we grade my work sympathetically, it wasn’t a total failure. For example, I was right that Jeff Hoffman made a lot of sense for the Braves, given that the Braves would’ve signed him but for a failed physical. I might have been right that Nick Pivetta was a good fit, qualifying offer be damned, given that the Braves apparently had significant interest in him. And Ha-seong Kim was among the (admittedly many) players I spotlighted late in the offseason.

So what have I learned from last offseason? It turns out the Braves’ hitter archetype might have changed significantly. From 2019 to 2024, the team prioritized maximizing the value of balls in play, even if that meant sacrificing some contact. The Braves didn’t turn into a bunch of slap-hitting merchants overnight; that would be tough given the personnel. But the 2025 Braves certainly placed a greater emphasis on avoiding chase and a lesser emphasis on swinging hard. I’m not thrilled about the new approach, but given that players like Jurickson Profar and Ha-seong Kim were weird offensive fits in the old approach but make a lot of sense in the new approach, I’ll be looking a little more at chase rates and a little less at xwOBAcon. On the other hand, I feel pretty good about my rough heuristics for pitchers. The Braves are conventional in that they like guys with good stuff model scores and high strikeout rates, and while we don’t know for a fact what they would’ve done with Hoffman, I imagine they remain open to converting relievers to starters.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post my lists of targets for each of the Braves’ positional needs. In the meantime, let’s talk about how much money they’ll have to address those needs - and precisely what the needs are.

What’s the status of 2026 payroll?

Keeping in mind that I was dead wrong about this last year, let’s first figure where the Braves’ 2026 cash payroll stands, and then compare that to various benchmarks that might represent their 2026 budget. Thanks to Jon Becker and the team at FanGraphs for Roster Resource, which makes this exercise much easier.

The Braves owe $151.5 million in guaranteed salaries in 2026. That covers Austin Riley, Matt Olson, Ronald Acuña Jr., Spencer Strider, Sean Murphy, Reynaldo López, Michael Harris II, Joe Jiménez, Jurickson Profar, and Aaron Bummer. I’m aware that some people want Bummer shot into a cannon, but (a) I think he gets an undue level of hate and remains a valuable, if slightly overpaid reliever and (b) if the Braves, who really value relievers, think Bummer is overpaid, then it’s hard to imagine that another team would be inclined to take his contract. I’ll be treating this $151.5 million as basically set in stone unless I’m given a hard reason to think otherwise.

Next, club options. The Braves will certainly exercise Chris Sale’s $18 million club option. Ozzie Albies’ $7 million club option has a $4 million buyout, meaning that the Braves would only save $3 million by declining the option. That would be ridiculous; I fully expect the Braves to exercise this option and pencil Albies into the bottom third of the lineup. That leaves a $7 million club option for Pierce Johnson and a $5.5 million club option for Tyler Kinley. Johnson was more good than great in 2025 (3.58 xERA/3.91 FIP/4.03 xFIP). Meanwhile, Kinley had great numbers in Atlanta that were probably inflated by unsustainable homer suppression (2.65 xERA/2.74 FIP/4.37 xFIP). While I would have no objection to declining either or both options (so long as there’s a plan to replace Johnson and Kinley with veteran free agents), I think that given the Braves’ love for relievers and the fact that the 2026 bullpen as currently constructed is “Dylan Lee, Aaron Bummer, post-surgery Joe Jiménez and a bunch of unknowns,” I’ll lean towards the team picking up both options. The Braves also owe $1 million to Orlando Arcia for declining his 2026 option (no, the Rockies don’t owe that buyout; they picked him up after the Braves released him) and $1.5 million to David Fletcher for declining his 2026 option. That gives us $40 million in accepted club options.

On to arbitration. MLB Trade Rumors has posted its arbitration projections, which are the best in the business. Dylan Lee at $1.9 million and Eli White at $1.2 million are easy yeses. Joey Wentz at $1.1 million is fine given that he pitched intriguingly in 64 innings in Atlanta; he’s an early candidate for the 2023 Michael Tonkin/2024 Grant Holmes swingman role. Likewise, $1.5 million for José Suarez feels acceptable given his intriguing stuff model grades and his strong September (2.05 FIP/3.21 xFIP, though both were driven by one excellent start against the Nats. I think the Braves will pick up Nick Allen at $1.5 million as a utility infielder, and I think they’ll non-tender Brujan at $800K because his skillset is redundant with White’s and Allen’s. That leaves Jake Fraley at $3.6 million, Joel Payamps at $3.4 million, and Alek Manoah at $2.2 million. Personally, I’d non-tender all three; Fraley isn’t particularly good in any regard, Payamps struggled mightily in 2025, and Manoah scuffled at Triple-A. But the Braves acquired them in the last six weeks of a lost season, which suggests an inclination to keep them in the fold for 2026. Note that if the Braves take these players to arbitration (as opposed to reaching a pre-arbitration settlement), their salaries aren’t fully guaranteed; the Braves could DFA them early in the season and only pay a prorated portion of their arbitration-determined salaries. That might be the move here. As a conservative estimate, though, we’ll add up the arbitration projections of everyone but Brujan to get $16.4 million in arbitration salary.

Finally, pre-arbitration salaries. Six players - Grant Holmes, Spencer Schwellenbach, AJ Smith-Shawver, Hurston Waldrep, Bryce Elder, Drake Baldwin - remain in pre-arm and will earn roughly $750,000 apiece. That gives us $4.5 million in pre-arbitration salary.

So here’s where that leaves us:

For reference, the Braves spent $214 million in 2025, $231 million in 2024, and $204 million in 2023. The Braves could easily save $10 million by non-tendering (or just DFAing in Spring Training) Fraley, Payamps, and Manoah, but beyond that, cutting salary will probably raise more questions than it will provide answers. For example, you save $6.75 million (when accounting for his buyout) if you decline Pierce Johnson’s option, but if you’re going to spend more than $6.75 million replacing Pierce Johnson, that’s not a route to savings.

The one additional uncertainty is whether Ha-seong Kim picks up his $16 million player option. If he does, it means the Braves are already probably past their 2025 payroll mark. But of course, it also means that they’ve secured their top offseason priority.

What do the Braves need?

In his end-of-season press conference, Alex Anthopoulos listed the Braves’ priorities as shortstop and starting pitcher, then bullpen, then corner outfield. That sounds right. My view is that it doesn’t really matter where you pick up marginal WAR - adding 2 marginal WAR in the outfield is probably just as valuable as adding 2 marginal WAR in the rotation - but obviously the worse the Braves’ situation at a position, the easier (and cheaper) it is to make marginal improvements.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll cover these four positions, taking position players as a single group. (Frankly, it would be hard to do a shortstop market preview when that market probably has something like three players, tops.) My goal will be to spotlight players who I think are realistic fits. I’m not going to write up Kyle Tucker, incredible as it would be to sign him, because there’s no precedent whatsoever for the Braves spending the $300 million on the free agent market that Tucker will probably get, even after a down year by his standards. On the other hand, I’m thinking for the third offseason in a row that Randal Grichuk would make a ton of sense as a lefty-killing part-timer.

Stay tuned for more!

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During last weekend’s media availability, Alex Anthopoulos got plenty of questions about the team’s upcoming managerial search. He said lots of words, but unsurprisingly, not a whole lot of substance. The Braves will be looking for a manager with “integrity” (and here I thought they were looking for a scam artist!) and Anthopoulos anticipates that the next manager, like Brian Snitker, will have ultimate control over the lineup card and in-game decisions.

As Anthopoulos pointed out, he didn’t choose Snitker so much as he inherited him. While Anthopoulos has consistently gone out of his way over the years to praise Snitker and their partnership, it’s not hard to imagine that Anthopoulos’ ideal successor to Snitker isn’t simply a Snitker clone.

But enough about Alex. To quote Kevin Malone from The Office, “What do I want in a manager?” This is my effort to rank-order my priorities.

#1: Vibes management

The most important aspect of a manager’s job is keeping a clubhouse in good spirits over a 162-game season. Even good teams having good seasons have bad stretches. The same is true for good players.

Snitker was mostly very good at this part of the job. Players have often praised Snitker for his consistent demeanor. What we as fans might perceive as disengagement is perhaps a feature, not a bug, of Snitker’s management style.

But there’s room for improvement here. Snitker’s uneven treatment of gaffes by different players took center stage early this season with Jarred Kelenic/Ronald Acuña Jr. Pimped Double-Gate. And while Snitker consistently drew praise from fluent English speakers in the clubhouse (including polyglot Ozzie Albies), it’s fair to wonder if he had an equally strong connection with the Spanish-speaking half of the roster.

What I’m looking for: Being bilingual would be a huge plus, if not a must. Comfort with modern baseball culture is important; I don’t want a manager who sees Acuña’s three-part home run celebration or Michael Harris II’s on-field accessories as excesses to be tamed. And I’d like recent experience in a major league coaching role.

#2: Belief in evidence

Talk of analytics seems to divide fans into two camps: those who think it’s unacceptable for a manager to ignore data when making decisions and those that think “analytically inclined” is a euphemism for “willing to be the front office’s puppet.” But I think there are really three camps of managers: managers who complain about analytical input for in-game decisionmaking, managers who are open to it, and managers who are genuinely enthusiastic about it.

I think Snitker fell into the second category. To his credit, Snitker never complained to the media about the game being overrun by nerds with calculators, and in some ways - the 2019-24 offensive approach, shifting, the rejection of bunting - the team was pretty progressive in its in-game strategy. In other ways, though - the seeming apathy towards to the third-time-through-the-order penalty for starting pitchers, the assignment of relievers to rigid roles, the deployment of certain players (Héctor Neris, Craig Kimbrel) in leverage shortly before Anthopoulos DFAed them - it’s hard to imagine the front office being pleased with how Snitker was using the ingredients they purchased for him.

While I’d be thrilled if the Braves hired a Rays alumnus like Craig Albernaz or Rocco Baldelli, it’s not critical to me that the next manager is an in-the-weeds advanced data aficionado. That’s what I want from the front office. What I want from a manager is someone who, if presented with a strong, data-based case, won’t invariably revert to his “instincts” or “feel for the game.” Don’t get me wrong - there are times when a manager should make decisions based on something other than what the data tells him. The regular season is long, and it’s reasonable to put players in spots that wouldn’t ordinarily make sense so that they can gain confidence. On the other hand, when a pitcher (2021 Drew Smyly, 2022 Ian Anderson, 2023 Yonny Chirinos . . .) consistently self-destructs after 18 batters, I’d like for the next manager to read more into that than Snitker did.

What I’m looking for: Here’s the tough part. The vast majority of managerial candidates have learned that it doesn’t pay to openly deride the use of analytics. Take a look at these interviews by managers and managerial candidates in 2018. With the exception of Rick Renteria, everyone - including Snitker and Fredi Gonzalez - knows to at least say something like, “Analytics aren’t going away, more information is good, and as a manger you have to balance the eye test and the analytics.” Since I don’t get to interview the managerial candidates myself, the best I can do here is to prioritize candidates who have worked for analytically progressive teams, like the Rays, Dodgers, Guardians, 2020s Tigers, and mid-2010s Astros.

#3: Pre-existing comfort with the front office

Because the manager will operate in a partnership with Anthopoulos, it would be helpful (as a distant third consideration) for a managerial candidate to have a relationship with Anthopoulos or one of his lieutenants. The Braves front office isn’t really populated with classic “Braves Way” guys. Instead, the most prominent trees are the mid-2010s Blue Jays and Dodgers (Anthopoulos), mid-2010s Astros (Pete Putila, Mike Fast, Collin Wyers, Ronit Shah), and early-2020s Giants (Putila, Michael Schwartze). Anthopoulos spoke in his availability about the importance of doing background work on candidates, and I imagine that’ll be significantly easier where he and his staff have pre-existing relationships.

What I’m looking for: Someone who’s worked in one (or more) of these organizations.

Some names

First, my criteria lead me to rule out certain popular candidates. Mark DeRosa has never coached in the majors (or minors, for that matter) and made some attention-seeking comments about Braves players’ work ethic earlier this season. John Gibbons was Anthopoulos’ manager in Toronto and recently left his job as a bench coach for the Mets, but has complained a fair bit about the analytics movement in a way that makes it easy for me to imagine him sending Bryce Elder out for a 20th batter in a one-run game because he was “throwing the ball well.” There’s no reason to think that Walt Weiss is any different from Snit tactically. David Ross had the Cubs bunt a lot.

I’d be happy with a number of options - as examples, Rays bench coach Rodney Linares (bilingual, works with a cutting-edge front office), ousted Twins manager Rocco Baldelli (managerial experience, Rays alumnus, regarded as a player’s manager), Guardians field coordinators Craig Albernaz and Kai Correa (experience in San Francisco with Putila and Schwartze, worked with multiple cutting-edge front offices).

The candidate who fits in the Venn diagram overlap between “people I like” and “people I think the Braves will like” is George Lombard Sr. Since 2021, Lombard has served as Detroit’s bench coach, which places him as the right-hand man to manager A.J. Hinch. Hinch managed the mid-2010s Astros teams that employed much of the Braves front office. Before that, he was the Dodgers’ first-base coach and overlapped with Anthopoulos in Los Angeles. Lombard is bilingual-ish (his wife and children speak fluent Spanish; he speaks Spanish less well), he’s an Atlanta native, he was drafted byand played for the Braves, and he spent a year before his Dodgers tenure coaching in the Braves minor league system.

Maybe the Braves will interview Lombard. Maybe they have no interest in him. Maybe they have interest in him that’ll be dispelled by things they learn during background work or the interview process. But given all we have - the resumes of various candidates - he makes the most sense.

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The Braves’ acquisition of Ha-seong Kim on waivers was remarkable. Good shortstops are almost never available in late August. Teams that are all but mathematically eliminated almost never acquire players without contractual control beyond the present season. And the Braves almost never deal with player options - or, for that matter, with Scott Boras.

Well, it all happened! And that means that as the season wraps up, the Braves are in a position unprecedented in the Anthopoulos era: they’re hoping to convince a player currently on the roster to make a decision that’s in his sole control, and that player is being counseled by an agent who’s famously intent on getting his clients their true market value.

For as much as he talks, Boras doesn’t often say much. And Kim has (rightly) been quiet about his intentions. Their silence has resulted in a wide range of views on whether he’ll exercise his $16 million player option for 2026, from local beat writer/Twitter troll Mark Bowman saying “probably no” to national beat writer/blind squirrel who occasionally finds acorn Bob Nightengale saying “obviously yes”.

Five days after the World Series, Kim will have to declare his intentions one way or another. But let’s get a jump on figuring out what he might do.

What Kim does

I wrote plenty about Kim’s game a few weeks ago. In short, he’s comfortably a tier below the game’s best shortstops but has produced like a fringe All-Star when healthy since his breakout season in 2022. Kim’s game isn’t flashy; like his friend Jurickson Profar, he’s historically generated most of his average-ish offense from good plate discipline and ball-in-play ability, and his defense is more good than great, 2023 Gold Glove notwithstanding.

But “pretty good hitter and good defender at the most premium defensive position” is a valuable profile. Kim’s production since 2022 is in the same neighborhood as that of Carlos Correa, Bo Bichette, Elly de la Cruz, J.P. Crawford, and Geraldo Perdomo. All but de la Cruz have played more games than Kim in that timeframe.

Note that while Kim has been on a heater as a Brave (.361 wOBA, 132 wRC+), his .315 xwOBA is virtually identical to his inputs from 2022 through 2024, and if you mark him up for small-sample offense, you have to mark him down for small-sample defense (-3 OAA and -3 DRS through 42 games). I’m inclined to do neither, though Kim’s arm strength (which has been down significantly this year) is a fair point of concern given his recent shoulder surgery.

Kim’s comparables (or lack thereof)

I just compared Kim’s production to that of four prominent shortstops. So would it surprise you if I told you it’s difficult to find a recent free agency deal that’s a good comparator?

I looked at every multiyear free agency deal signed by a starting shortstop from the 2021 offseason onwards. Here’s what that list looks like.

Put simply, I’ve got nothing. Kim is older than all of these guys were when they signed their deals. On a rate basis and an accumulation basis, he’s been worse than all of these guys. What about those guys I mentioned who’ve been similar to Kim? Correa has been similarly valuable in the last three years, but he was significantly more valuable than Kim when he signed his deal. de la Cruz is playing for a pre-arbitration salary, Bichette is in his final year of arbitration, and Crawford and Perdomo are playing on extensions. There’s no recent precedent for a shortstop of Kim’s caliber - very good everyday starter who’s not a star - hitting the open market.

Kim’s potential market

The shortstop market is weak this offseason. Outside of Kim, it’s Bichette (who may not even be a shortstop in the long run) and nothing. It’ll be weak for a while. Next year, it’s a 33-year-old J.P. Crawford and nothing. The year after, it’s maybe Jeremy Peña, probably a 36-year-old Trevor Story, and nothing. Things don’t get remotely interesting until 2029, when we might have a strong class headlined by Gunnar Henderson, C.J. Abrams, and (if he returns to shortstop between now and then) Oneil Cruz. So Kim might want to get his long-term money now, and he only gets older with every passing year, but it’s not like next offseason’s market will be any less advantageous in that regard.

Who needs a shortstop? (Kim can also play second base, but appears to prefer shortstop, and would certainly prefer the higher-value position if he’s picking between short-term offers.) Here’s a preliminary list of teams that might be interested in Kim at short and have money to spend:

• The Blue Jays will likely lose Bichette to free agency and probably don’t want to slot Andrés Giménez into that position.

• The Guardians lack a credible shortstop; neither Gabriel Arias nor Brayan Rocchio is that.

• The Yankees might be ready to call it quits on the Anthony Volpe experiment.

• The Tigers might be ready to call it quits on the Jávy Baez experiment.

• Hilariously, the Rays - who, don’t forget, waived Kim about a month ago - could use a stopgap shortstop with top prospect Carson Williams flailing in a brief run in the majors.

Given that the rest of the shortstop market is just Bo Bichette, it’s plausible that some or all of those teams remain in the market for a shortstop next offseason.

So what does a Kim contract look like?

If his goal is maximizing guaranteed money, Kim could obviously get better than the 1/$16 million he’d pocket from opting in for 2026. Ben Clemens at FanGraphs projected Kim for 5 years and $100 million last offseason, and while I’d downgrade that a bit - he’s a year older, was injured for much of the year, has the weird short-sample defensive underperformance, and he almost certainly wouldn’t have signed a short-term deal with Tampa if he was receiving similar offers in free agency - it’s not difficult to imagine Kim ending up with, say, 4 years and $70 million. Given the likelihood of a lockout at the end of next season, I wouldn’t be surprised if Kim wanted to secure a long-term payout.

The good news for the Braves is that such a deal wouldn’t be way out of the league of what they’ve paid for players in free agency, their high under Anthopoulos being the 4 year, $65 million pact they signed with Marcell Ozuna prior to the 2021 season. When the Braves picked up Kim, they committed to paying him $16 million for 2026 if he opted in; this would just be extending that commitment over a few more years.

I think it’s unlikely that Kim just picks up his player option, but I wonder if he tries to replicate his deal from last offseason, getting a team to commit to him in 2026 with a player option for 2027. This would insulate Kim from concerns about a lockout-tainted free agent market, but it would also give Kim some upside if he put up a 4-win campaign next year. Before they acquired Kim, I would’ve said you could count Anthopoulos out if that’s the proposed deal. But given that he was willing to deal with Kim’s player option for 2026, perhaps Anthopoulos would be able to stomach offering a player option for 2027.

If you were playing a baseball video game and Kim was your career mode character, you’d probably want to put him on the Braves, even if you weren’t a Braves fan. Team chemistry boost? His good friend plays left field. Playing time at his preferred position? The team has nothing approximating serious competition at shortstop. Contention? It’s been a terrible year for the team, but its long-term prospects remain bright. A broken aspect of career modes, though, is that salary doesn’t matter. Salary doesn’t buy your created player stuff, but it certainly buys Ha-seong Kim stuff.

I think the Braves will bid competitively, though. Their position player core is largely locked down, but shortstop is the one position where the potential for improvement is obvious. Plugging in shortstop with a solid starter instead of a black hole (even a black hole who plays tremendous defense) will go a long way towards improving the team’s 2026 outlook.

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Alex Anthopoulos has been the Braves’ general manager for eight seasons. The 2025 Braves will be his first team not to make the playoffs. Like the 2024 Braves, the 2025 Braves dealt with poor injury luck - look no further than the current rotation for proof. Unlike the 2024 Braves, the 2025 Braves neither banked wins during a healthy period nor were so outstanding in one aspect of the game (pitching for the 2024 Braves) to overcome the attrition.

The 2024 season was, in my view, basically just really bad luck. Good process, undesirable outcome. As I pointed out when the Braves snuck into the playoffs, the 2024 Braves were a top ten team in terms of xwOBA and FIP. “Good hitting, good pitching” should make the playoffs - especially the expanded playoffs - most of the time.

The 2025 team is different, though. The Braves aren’t just getting different results than they got when they won six straight division titles; they’ve done things differently. I’ll try to convince you with a couple of charts.

Offensive approach

I wrote about this early in the year, and now we can revisit it with nearly a full season’s data.

From 2019 to 2024, the Braves had a coherent, unified offensive approach. Swing at strikes as often as possible (high Z-swing ranking), even if this comes at the cost of chase (low O-swing ranking), and swing big rather than simply trying to make contact (low Z-con ranking), resulting in elite quality of contact (high xwOBACON ranking). Even the 2024 Braves, which had future trivia answers playing multiple positions by the end of the year (Gio Urshela was a Brave? Zack Short?), implemented the same approach.

There’s clearly been a concerted effort in 2025 to do something different. Partially, it’s an effort to reduce chase, which is why the Braves are running their best O-swing rate in the Anthopoulos era. Maybe it’s more broadly an effort to draw more walks, which is why we’re seeing a more passive, contact-forward approach approach at the plate. Whatever it is, it’s not working. For the first time since 2018, the Braves just aren’t particularly threatening from a power standpoint.

Maybe there’s some personnel group that can make this approach work. Maybe there’s some personnel group for which it’s better than the old approach. But it’s not this roster. Players like Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies don’t run low walk rates because they’re electing not to walk. They just have poor strike zone recognition! If you tell them their new goal in life is to walk as much as possible, they’re going to end up in a lot of pitcher’s counts by virtue of taking hittable pitches. Neutering a player’s most valuable skill to make him marginally better at his worst skill is a bad trade-off.

What are the Braves going to do about this in 2026? It’s not as simple as “blame it all on Tim Hyers.” As you can see, the 2018, Kevin Seitzer-coached Braves adopted a slap-hitting offensive approach. Seitzer didn’t drive the 2019-24 approach, and likewise, I doubt that Hyers is driving the 2025 approach. If change comes, it’ll be by directive from the front office. Time will tell weather acquiring Ha-seong Kim - whose game doesn’t fit the 2019-24 Braves offensive approach - is a signal that the team is fully abandoning that approach or simply a result of the conclusion that there’s nobody better on the market.

Payroll

The drastically different offensive approach explains much of the Braves’ underperformance this year, but there’s one more way in which 2025 has been aberrant for the team in the Anthopoulos era.

The Braves moved to Truist Park (then SunTrust Park) in 2017, and the pitch to fans was simple. Sure, we’re relocating from the heart of Atlanta to outside the Perimeter. And sure, it’ll cost taxpayer money. But we’re going to make so much money off of the Battery, and that money will get funneled right back into on-field product!

The amazing part is that until 2025, this promise held up. With the exception of 2021, which was the first post-pandemic season, the team’s payroll increased every year. Not only that, the share of baseball revenue - this is largely ticket sales, the TV deals, and retail - allocated to payroll increased significantly over that period. We saw a peak in 2024, with the Braves spending nearly half of their record-breaking 2023 revenue on payroll and surpassing the second CBT threshold.

2025 was weird in this aspect. Just as Anthopoulos said in his postseason press conference that the full coaching staff would return and fired Kevin Seitzer (among others) a week later, Anthopoulos said in the same conference that he expected payroll to increase and it didn’t. The drop in cash payroll is less dramatic than the drop in CBT payroll, but it’s still a drop. Anthopoulos has said for years that the team is much more focused on their cash payroll than their CBT payroll, and that they just think of the tax as an additional small sum to be paid, but given that the Braves had gone over the CBT threshold the previous two years and were facing significantly higher tax rates as a repeater, it’s at least plausible that they intentionally reset the tax this season.

We won’t know what the Braves’ Opening Day payroll plans for 2026 are until Opening Day 2026. I’m once bitten, twice shy when it comes to Anthopoulos’s press conference comments. But I think it’s a good sign that they’ve already committed to pay Ha-seong Kim $16 million should he opt into 2026 with the team. One thing is clear: they certainly have the financial capacity to operate the way they did in 2023 and 2024.

The 2025-26 offseason is a big one for the Braves. Not just because they’ve got to decide which pitchers to target in free agency or what to do about the designated hitter position - though they certainly have to do those things - but also because they have to decide what their organizational direction will be. Are they going to double down on trying to draw walks at the expense of contact quality? Is 2025 a blip or a new trend from a payroll standpoint? We’re just half a month’s worth of meaningless games from beginning to answer those questions.

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It’s really hard to find a good shortstop. Virtually no team has more than one. Good shortstops are either signed to lucrative extensions or command nine-figure sums in free agency.

The Braves just got one via a September waiver claim. Sure, he’s had some recent injury trouble, he’s a Boras client with a player option for 2026, and he doesn’t fit the offensive approach the Braves prized from 2019 to 2024. But could the Braves do any better than this? Almost certainly not.

The market

As I discussed when I highlighted Kim this offseason, and even before that, the shortstop market is bleak. I was confident the Braves would sign a shortstop in the 2022-23 free agent class, both because the options (Carlos Correa, Xander Bogaerts, Trea Turner, Dansby Swanson) were strong and because if they didn’t sign someone that offseason, future classes looked bleak. That remains true. This offseason, it’s Bo Bichette and nobody. Next offseason, it’s JP Crawford (assuming the Mariners don’t extend him), maybe Kim, and nobody. The offseason after that, it’s Jeremy Peña (assuming the Astros don’t extend him) and nobody.

It’s clear that the Braves have enough money allocated to their core that they’re not going to do something they haven’t yet done under Anthopoulos: pay top-of-market free agent prices for a position player. So it’s obvious why the Braves jumped at the opportunity to acquire Kim. Assuming that he opts into his $16 million player option for 2026, it’s the rare opportunity to commit only one year to a shortstop in his prime.

The player

I’ve talked ad nauseam here about what the Braves valued offensively from 2019 to 2024 (hit the ball as hard as possible as often as possible) and the degree to which that’s been muddled this year. Offensively, Kim is much more “weird new Braves” than “good old Braves”. In fact, he’s quite similar to pre-2024 Jurickson Profar. From 2022 to 2024, Kim put up slightly above-average outputs (106 wRC+) and slightly below-average inputs (over that period, Kim’s xwOBA was .311 and the leaguewide average was .314). He’s done this not by getting the most out of his balls in play (a puny .330 xwOBACON, compared to a .368 league average) but by putting a lot of balls in play and by walking a lot. He’s not entirely incapable of hitting for power - he hit 17 home runs in 2023 and was on track for a similar figure in 2024 before his season-ending shoulder injury - but Kim has never hit the .400 SLG mark in his career.

Maybe it’s obvious from the tenor of my description or the other content I’ve written, but this isn’t my favorite offensive profile. Home runs win postseason games, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Do you think of the October 2021 Braves as a tour de force of bunts and well-timed groundouts and soft line drives to the opposite field? It’s annoying to have seen players like Ozzie Albies and Michael Harris II struggle for so long this season as they tried to become players they’re not.

That said, the pickings are slim at the shortstop position. There’s no “Ha-seong Kim but he’s SLG-heavier at the expense of contact” sitting out there. So the bar isn’t that hypothetical player; it’s Nick Allen and Vidal Brujan. And Kim is an obvious offensive upgrade over those players.

Defensively, Kim is no Nick Allen, but he’s no slouch either. He’s accumulated 23 DRS and 10 OAA at shortstop over his big league career so far - and that’s with him spending time at second and third base (both of which he plays very well). He won the 2023 Gold Glove, though I’m not inclined to judge players on voted awards when we have fairly good defensive metrics.

This is a player who, if he’s the player he was pre-shoulder injury, is pretty good offensively, defensively, and on the basepaths (where he stole 38 bases in 2023.) Most importantly, he’s pretty good at everything while playing shortstop. From 2022 to 2024, Ha-seong Kim accumulated value at a rate of roughly 4 fWAR per 162 games. On a rate basis, that put him ahead of the likes of Xander Bogaerts, Oneil Cruz, Bo Bichette, and Zach Neto.

The outlook

I fully expect Kim to opt into his $16 million player option this offseason. Even if his agent weren’t Scott Boras, negotiating a longer-term pact at this point would make little sense for either side. The Braves surely want to see a healthy Kim for a full season before making a decision to commit to his thirties. Likewise, when Kim hired Scott Boras signed the pillow contract with the Rays last offseason, it was presumably to give himself another shot at a market-rate deal.

So take $16 million out of the Braves’ offseason budget and cross a need off the list. We’ll have lots of time to talk about offseason targets, but it’s already pretty clear that the Braves need to acquire at least one starting pitcher (hopefully of the “could credibly start a playoff game” variety). With Kim in the fold, everything else is slightly more flexible. Sure, they should get a few bullpen arms and whether it’s tendering Jake Fraley a contract or looking elsewhere, it would be nice to give Eli White some serious competition for the fourth outfielder spot. (Particularly if the Braves don’t sign a DH or extend Marcell Ozuna, they’ll may well end up rotating Ronald Acuña Jr. and Profar through the DH spot when Drake Baldwin is catching, leaving a spot in the outfield.) But the Braves could go into next year with Kim and the position players currently under contract for 2026 and I’d feel very good about that group.

Let me wrap up with a few more thoughts about why acquiring Kim is so interesting to me. First, while his arm strength numbers are weak in a short sample so far in 2025 and his overall offensive inputs have flagged, he’s actually hitting the ball better than he’s hit it historically; he’s running the best xwOBACON of his career and his 107.4 groundout on Wednesday night was one of the top 20 hardest-hit balls of his career. Second, it’s neat that Kim is reunited with his former Padres teammate Profar, who he described yesterday as “one of [his] best buddies and closer to family almost.” (More on their friendship here.) And finally, for the first time in more than a decade, the Braves have an Asian-born player on the roster. I’ve wondered for a while if there was a chicken-and-egg problem with the Braves not being widely deemed a strong landing spot for these players - if you’re coming from Japan or Korea, why would you want to play for a team that hasn’t employed one of your countrymen in years when you can play with a bunch of them instead?

Ha-seong Kim holding up a World Series trophy with his Braves teammates in November 2026 would make for a pretty good recruiting pitch, wouldn’t it?

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