Our season is still alive, but whatever happens over the next week, this season has to prompt some soul-searching in the coaching staff and front office.

Not Their Fault

Now, some things are not their fault. (Or not clearly, obviously, beyond question their fault.)

• I’m not going to blame the rash of injuries on the team; we certainly seem to have suffered more than our share.
• It certainly seemed like we had a lot of balls die at the warning track this year; some amount of home run rate is luck-based.
• A lot of our guys went through slumps; some of that is luck-based.

I looked at a lot of the team-level stats on baseball-reference, and the Braves’ rates of moving baserunners over and getting them home are uniformly in the bottom half of baseball teams. Not only was our offense substantially below its previous norms, but our offensive efficiency also plummeted, and I think it’s fair to ask the coaching staff why the players so routinely failed to bring runners home, at rates far worse than other teams.

But the roster construction is within the front office’s control, and that’s where I’m focused right now.

Retreads

Alex Anthopoulos made an uncharacteristically few number of moves. But of the moves he did make, many of them involved reunions with players who had previously been on the team, and whose 2024 results were less impressive than they had been in years past, like:

• Eddie Rosario
• Forrest Wall
• Luke Williams
• Luke Jackson
• Eli White
• Jorge Soler

Why the moves didn’t work

There were really two main problems:

  1. First, in an ordinary year, the performance of a guy like Forrest Wall really wouldn’t matter. It makes a lot of sense to bring back a previous benchwarmer to fill the 25th man role again. The trouble is that Forrest Wall was forced to take meaningful at-bats because the team’s depth was so thin that there just wasn’t anyone else.
  2. There really were no other major midyear acquisitions to reinforce the team. The biggest midseason acquisition was Jorge Soler, who was acquired as a salary dump, who had no position to play, and whose modestly positive offense has been almost exactly offset by his as-poor-as-advertised defense, for which he’s played six innings a night. The team needed a full-time frontline starting player, and he just isn’t one. That’s why he was available as a salary dump in the first place, and that was true both times we acquired him.

Ultimately, the fact that Brian Snitker’s reserves are as thin as they are, in both the bench and the pen, is squarely on Alex Anthopoulos. That Aaron Bummer was allowed to load the bases in a literally must-win game yesterday, with Jesse Chavez warming up in relief, is on Anthopoulos.

(Of course, the way in which Bummer loaded them up was a classic of his oeuvre: on two bunts, the second of which he made a poor throw to try to get the lead runner, neglecting to take the out, stupid. He gets killed by soft contact.)

Many of Alex’s midyear pickups have worked out. Gio Urshela and Whit Merrifield have been more or less fine. Grant Holmes has been a revelation from the farm system. Ray Kerr looked great before he was foolishly pressed into spot starting duty. Ramon Laureano has, improbably, been a star.

In the end

But it hasn’t really been enough. The team has suffered monthslong injuries to most of its starting lineup: only Olson, Ozuna, and Arcia have been spared, and the team nearly wilted when the latter was himself on the shelf due to injury, as emergency replacement Zack Short was entirely inept. Jarred Kelenic, one of AA’s biggest offseason acquisitions, has stayed healthy, but he’s been badly exposed. The top relievers – Iglesias, Jimenez, Johnson, and Lee – have stayed healthy, as have Sale, Fried, Morton, and Schwellenbach, but all have been ridden pretty hard, and there really aren’t any other starters or relievers Snitker can trust.

As the man responsible for the 25-man and the 40-man rosters, that’s ultimately on AA. We came into this year with a championship-caliber roster and high hopes of a deep October run, and now we’re on the playoff bubble in danger of outright missing the postseason.

In AA I trust, but he was in a slump this year, too.