What Happened
The past four games have all felt very similar, haven’t they? The offense has been quite good and the starting pitching has been dreck. Last night, this combination finally produced a win, as the bats overcame Yonny Chirinos‘s four-homer stinker.
THEY DREW FIRST BLOOD
Ronald Acuña hit a 448-foot leadoff homer, and in the sixth, the Bucs plunked him. Was it intentional? In context, probably not. It was the sixth inning; the Braves had a man on first and the Pirates were nursing a two-run lead, and brought in a new reliever to face Ronald. His first pitch was just a little bit inside and Ronald overreacted in silly outrage that the pitcher had come in on him. Two pitches later, on a 2-0 count, Holderman stuck it in Acuña’s elbow.
The pitch location is fairly damning; it was easily a foot inside and kept tailing in from there. But there would be simply no reason to hit him in that situation, and Holderman had missed off the plate with his previous two pitches (a fastball in though not that far in, and a slider outside), suggesting that he came into the game lacking his command.
Luckily, X-rays were negative, and Snit said it probably caught him “where the crease is on the [elbow guard].”
About Ronald’s Production
I’ve been wondering a bit lately about Ronald’s power. His homer last night was a moonshot, but while he had 20 homers through July 1 – he was hitting .334/.413/.595 through the first 81 games – he only has six home runs since then, as he’s been hitting .350/.445/.564, as his ISO has dipped from .261 to .214. So, has he been subtly changing his approach to prioritize average over power?
Maybe – or maybe it’s just luck. Per Statcast, from March through June, Ronald’s EV was 94.9 and his HardHit% was 55.5; since July, it’s 95.4 and 58.8%. He may not challenge Matt Olson for the team lead in homers, but the dude is cooking with gas.
About the Other Guy
The same cannot be said for Ronald’s countryman, Yonny Chirinos. He has now made three appearances in a Braves uniform and has yielded 13 earned runs in 13 2/3 innings. While his 3.25 K/BB looks superficially positive, his deeply crappy 7.5% swinging strike rate tells you what batters think of him; the league average is 11.1%. His Faberge-blue Baseball Savant page makes Bryce Elder‘s look like a Miami sunburn. And while his first name inspires all the confidence of a 1940s radio-show Minnesota Norwegian, I feel confident that his last name will be emblazoned upon a different jersey before too long.
Why We Won
Last night, the last two hitters in the order, Orlando Arcia and Michael Harris II, were 5-9 with a walk, three RBIs, and two runs scored. Arcia hit a homer to bring the Braves to within one, and then in the top of the 9th he hit the go-ahead double that provided the game’s final margin against the Pirates’ All-Star closer, his teammate a month ago. Arcia is hitting .302, and every game like this feeds the nagging suspicion that maybe he’s actually good.
Harris, meanwhile, is up to .286, and while his walk rate is only slightly higher than it was last year, his strikeout rate is appreciably better, and while his BABIP is 38 points lower than it was last year, his average is just 11 points lower. While he has slightly reduced the number of pitches he swings at that are outside the strike zone, he has significantly improved the percentage of those pitches with which he makes contact. In all, it appears that his swing decisions have gotten better across the board. Poor approach was really the only flaw in his game, and he’s addressing it. Since his three-hit game on June 7, he’s hitting .370/.396/.613 over the past two months. And he won’t turn 23 till next March.
Yeah, the starting pitching has been terrible of late. But this team sure can hit.
https://www.mlb.com/news/braves-2023-lineup-one-of-the-deepest-ever?partnerID=mlbapp-android_article-share
Nothing to add other than thank you for the great recap, AAR.
This year’s garbage time is different than 2021’s garbage time. That year, we needed to scratch and claw at the end of the regular season, so if we fell way behind or had a big lead late in a game, the priority was to conserve all our conventionally-useful bullets for tomorrow, via the use of an unconventionally-useful mop-up reliever.
This year, because of the size of the divisional lead we enjoy, every fifth start can be a mop-up start. Enter Yonny Chirinos, a garbage pitcher for a garbage time. Mop-up guys fascinate me–not just the way they mop up innings, but also the way they mop up fanbase abuse just for doing their jobs.
Part of my fascination stems from the reality that Yonny Chirinos is the result of a clash between what a front office knows it needs to do for the long-run good of a team vs what fans want, which is both to win every single game and to enjoy watching the players.
To which I’d respond: 1) grow up and 2) cultivate a broader sense of baseball aesthetics, because Yonny Chirinos mopping up, trying his best to stay in the league, is beautiful too. Even Yonny manages to be good even for a half-inning, lol, gravy, and in the likely event that he’s bad, also lol. If anything he does is any more consequential than mop-up innings are for the 2023 Atlanta Braves, then that would mean a great many things would have had to have gone horribly, horribly wrong.
“But what we really needed was another ace at the deadline–or at least a pitcher that’s better than Morton/Elder–not a mop-up guy off the scrapheap.”
I agree, but the one starter who fit that bill and was actually traded was a Met and therefore was almost certainly not coming to Atlanta. Otherwise, in a small sample, your Lance Lynns could easily be a lot better or a lot worse than Bryce Elder. We see this sort of thing play out after every trade deadline. And if there were other clearly superior pitchers available at the deadline, no other team–even the significantly needier playoff-bubble teams–managed to acquire one either, which suggests they weren’t available. So, like, what do you want here?
It makes it extra delicious that Yonny is “blocking” Soroka. As if Soroka has done much of anything to show he belongs in the majors this season or has even mastered AAA.
“But how else will we know what we have?”
lol, my favorite question. Who is “we,” here? The Braves know full well what they have right now in Soroka, and so should you.
“But how else will he learn?”
Look, it’s OK to have a sentimental attachment to Soroka. We all do. But it’s another thing to pretend like you know what’s best for his re-development. You don’t know. If you were honest with yourself, you’d admit that what you are is a very invested but ultimately casual baseball fan. You’re not a scout. There is no reason anybody should put any stock in whatever armchair pitching development philosophy you’ve concocted.
It’s fine to want Soroka back for sentimental reasons. It’s fine to be enthusiastic about prospects in general, Smith-Shawver in particular, and to a lesser extent, Shuster and Dodd. But…just say those things.
I completely agree with the point on cannon fodder. Yonny’s job is to soak up innings and suck. If he can’t even soak up innings, though – if he gets knocked out so early that his starts all just turn into taxing bullpen games – he can’t really help. It would be nice to figure out whether someone in the Soroka/Shuster/Dodd/Smith-Shawver group can turn into Bryce Elder, too. Of course, if the team doesn’t really believe that any of them is mechanically ready for prime time, then there’s no need to put them in a position to fail.
Chirinos’s great benefit is that any damage to his confidence is immaterial because he’s going to get waived sooner or later. He has no place in the team’s future, and only a sliver of possibility of having a place in the team’s present. On the other hand, it’s definitionally not that hard to find a guy who can soak up innings and suck. For example, the Red Sox just DFA’d Dinelson Lamet today!
(The 2023 version of Lamet is almost certainly worse than Chirinos, but the point is, if your search criterion is “GUYS WHO SUCK,” Google’s gonna come back with results.)
Yeah, I’d say the “AA can do no wrong!” folks are starting to get a bit insufferable. We’re now writing soliloquys about garbage-time junkballers who can’t throw anything but pitches out of the zone and meatballs right down the middle and acting like forcing us to watch them every five days is a genius maneuver that we should be thankful for.
Nobody’s forcing you, my dude.
Being 30 games over .500 and commanding a 10-game lead over the next most relevant playoff team in August means you don’t have to care at all who starts every fifth day for a month! If you can’t bring yourself to appreciate that Yonny’s badness is actually a measure of the 2023 Braves’ goodness, it’s your loss.
No, nobody is forcing us to watch them – true statement – except for the fact that we love baseball and love the Braves.
It’s true, Chirinos is bad, he’s on the team to eat innings and not be great. But as AAR said, if he is so bad he can’t eat innings, then he has to go.
Thank God it is Friedday today, then we will just have to hope and pray the next four or five starts that command improves and crooked numbers are fewer for the opponent.
The other thing I’d say is that the acquisition/appropriate usage of a mop-up guy isn’t genius; it’s totally normal baseball stuff that every team does over time.
I hope everyone can see that AA and the team staff are playing a waiting game to see when and if Lee and Wright (and maybe Chavez and Anderson) are ready. Someone like Chirinos or McHugh (the guys looking most expendable), will go out when Lee is activated. I still think Yonny will be optioned even if he refuses to accept the assignment. Some of these guys will for sure not be around when Matzek and Ynoa come back next year. There has to be a way to save enough money to sign (I hope) Max. And I think that comes from declining some mid-level options on guys like Rosario, McHugh, Yates, etc… Lee is the only one that might come back before rosters expand in September. At that point Wright may be able to come back without dropping anyone.
I anyone thinks Chirinos is the only one not commanding the strike zone then you haven’t been watching the games. Morton, Elder, and Strider had pretty much the same outcome as Yonny. Only Max didn’t issue a boatload of walks. The Braves are still 6-4 in their last 10 games. It’s not like it’s a big disaster. AA and the staff are being patient and playing a waiting game.
P.S. Lee pitched another shutout inning at Gwinnett.
Of course, like with Tomlin in 2021, if Yonny manages to hang around for the rest of the season, let alone make the playoff roster, that would mean the Braves have significantly bigger problems than Yonny himself.
Enjoy him while you’ve got him.
Game thread is up: