My son, who lives in California, texted me about 1:30 this afternoon to tell me that Strider’s fastball looked pretty good. That was the first time I realized that the Braves were playing a day game this afternoon. I probably should have realized that, as it’s a travel day–and I have recap duty for Wednesday games–but I just had not been paying very close attention. With their uninspired play so far in 2025, it hasn’t been easy to focus on the Braves so far this year.
I would have turned the game on, but I was just about to go to a 2:00 class that I teach, followed by a faculty meeting that was to last from 3:30 to 5:00. So I missed the game entirely. The good news for me is that those kinds of conflicts won’t get in the way of my enjoyment of Braves baseball much longer. I’m retiring at the end of this semester, so I will never miss a baseball game again due to a faculty meeting. In fact that was my last ever faculty meeting, so this was a good day. After the faculty meeting I went out with friends to have a few beers and a sandwich just to celebrate.
When I do retire in a few weeks, my wife and I will be relocating to be near our daughter and son-in-law and our two oldest grandchildren. That’s great for us for many reasons, one of which being that our place will be less than five miles from Truist Park. I expect to go to many more games in person.
The not so good news is that just as I am able to go to many more Braves games, the team has forgotten how to hit a baseball. It is no doubt boring for y’all to hear about my life and my retirement plans, but I doubt it’s any more boring than watching this Braves team in 2025. If you want to know, the Braves lost to the Blue Jays this afternoon by a 3-1 score. You probably know more about the game than I do.
Our guys had five hits on the afternoon. The only real bright spot for the offense is that Drake Baldwin hit his first big league homer, a solo shot in the ninth. Otherwise, three of the four other hits were by Eli White (two singles) and Orlando Arcia (one single). Harris, Riley, Olson, Murphy, and Albies were a combined 1-18. Our team struck out 19 (!) times. As unpleasant as a faculty meeting can be, I suspect I had a better time this afternoon than those of you who suffered through watching this one.
I suppose the most newsworthy and potentially positive aspect of today’s game is that Spencer Strider made his first start of the season, a little more than a year after his season ending elbow injury last year, and he pitched pretty well. Aragorn went five, striking out five and surrendering five hits and two runs. In fact, if Vlad Guerrero wasn’t in the lineup, Strider would have pitched a shutout. With the two Spencers and Chris Sale leading the rotation, the future isn’t hopeless. On the other hand, unless these guys remember how to hit, I may find other things to do this summer instead of frequenting Truist Park.
Still, there are 144 games to go, starting with a home series with the Twins this weekend back home in Atlanta. Perhaps these Braves hitters will start to figure it out. It can’t get much worse.
I think I might’ve convinced myself that losing Wash has been a bigger deal than what I previously thought.
Same page with you on that one.
Tfloyd, congratulations!
I’d rather watch a live stream of the faculty meeting than watch this team try to hit. I’m now like 75% convinced that we were somehow stealing signs in 2023.
Congratulations on your retirement, tfloyd!
Positives – Strider is back and looked okay for the first time out. Baldwins first HR! White looked decent at the plate.
There is suddenly a photo next to my name – this is not me?!
Jonathan F will be assigning us all photos based on what he imagines we probably look like
Timo, not sure how that picture got there but in general the avi here is via Gravatar. You can create or manage yours by going to gravatar.com. (Mine is the cover art for Television’s self-titled 1992 reunion album.)
Tfloyd, congratulations on your upcoming retirement!.
And Timo, i noticed that a pc was there all of a sudden and now its an imposter! lol
The wheels are falling off rapidly
I can’t believe we lost both games started by Spencer.
If this season goes the way most reasonable people think it will, then they need to take a hard look at AA. You simply cannot tell me this team is better off with Kelenic, Olson, Murphy, and Arcia when you could have had Freddie, Dansby, Langeliers, and Contreras for a similar amount of money. Someone can break down the math, but is the second group not about $10-15M per year more? And you didn’t have to keep Contreras if you didn’t like his defense. But you sure as hell could have done something better with the Freddie, Dansby, and Contreras situations than what we did. And at the end of the day, that’s why we’re in this mess.
Also, AJ Minter has an FIP of 0.15 so far.
Not having Minter, in and of itself, isn’t an insurmountable problem. But not having enough warm bodies very clearly is. And that’s on the front office.
I thought for the longest time that this team had a basic floor of 90 wins. I no longer believe that. The floor is lower than I ever could have imagined. This is starting to feel like the seemingly out-of-nowhere gutpunch of the 2014 season, which ended the Wren tenure and resulted in an absolute teardown of the last disappointing roster we built up out of prearbitration extensions.
It doesn’t have to end that way! But things have to change!
The second group on an average per-year basis — and this is including Contreras being in the year-to-year mode of his arb years — is roughly $20.26 million more. But there’s also the cost of shipping off the prospects, not so much in what they would have brought to this team, but how they could have been used for deadline deals to bolster the bullpen, etc.
I’ll never understand the Contreras trade. A catcher who could actually hit for a decent average — crud, something this lineup actually needs — switched out for someone whose only plate attribute was power. Despised the deal the day it happened; hate it more now.
Sometimes I think AA is trying to prove he’s the smartest guy in the room rather than trying to build the best team. “I can fix Aaron Bummer and prove those peripherals are correct, and he’s actually a quality seventh-inning man!” “I can fix Jarred Kelenic!” Well, we’re a year-plus into those experiments and the results are crap. No, AA, you can’t. They are who they are. Bummer pitches to contact and is a tire fire when he inherits runners. Kelenic strikes out more than ever. Stop trying to make fetch happen.
It would be interesting to truly comb through the AA ledger post-2021. The defenders will point to the hits like Chris Sale, and the 2021 flag obviously flies forever, but more and more it seems like he’s skating by on past glory, although I suspect he had the rug pulled from under him by ownership in the last offseason re: budget, so I have some empathy for him here. There’s no way he possibly thought this bullpen was viable unless he’s completely lost his marbles — although the Profar signing was a move that was uncharacteristic for him, so perhaps he has?
So, I’m not sure I trust him with a rebuild if this season truly bottoms out and results in a 2014-style teardown. But it would be interesting to see the overall ledger post-2021. My hypothesis is that the misses outnumber the hits, at about a 55-45 rate.
Thanks insect. By the way, I was today years old when I put together that Brockmeyer from the Hank Azaria show and Kent Brockmeyer, the broadcaster from The Simpson’s, are the same name.
Anyway, to offset some of that gap of the extra $20M due to the second group, you could have undoubtedly traded Conteras for a starting pitcher. In my scenario, you have a gap between trading Conteras and when Langeliers would have been ready that d’Arnaud wouldn’t have been able to fill, so that would be an additional cost. But in that scenario, you have Freddie over Olson (win) and Dansby over Arcia (massive win). But already, Langeliers was a 2 fWAR player last year and is on an absurd 7 fWAR short sample pace this year. So Langeliers has to be baked into the equation for evaluating the Freddie/Olson situation. Yes, the Braves saved $5M per year with Olson and got more prime years of Olson than you would have gotten out of Freddie, but you’ll have also given up probably 20 cost-controlled WAR of Langeliers, so that trade looks pretty horrible now.
Dansby was the one most of us were OK with letting walk, and that would make everything a wash. If it were my money I would’ve signed him bc it’s hard to fill SS, but he was never a good enough hitter for me to want to pay him like Cory Seager or Trey Turner. You can replace a glove much more easily than a bat.
Just took a quick glance at BABIP for both pitchers and position players on our team. Most of our players have been unlucky, but you probably knew that.
To quote Branch Rickey’s favorite aphorism: “Luck is the residue of design.”
Verdugo up, BDLC down.
https://www.mlb.com/news/braves-injuries-and-roster-moves?partnerID=mlbapp-iOS_article-share
Sad when there is excitement surrounding Verdugo, but alas, he is better than what we have been trotting out there.
And what kind of teardown could this team even have? what bad contract could you really dump? if these guys if dont perform we could be in a bad place for a while.
Maybe if we do stink we could unload a Pierce and a Bummer near the deadline as people always need relievers.
Man, havent been this down on the Braves in a long time. 🙁
I don’t think the teardown back then was actually a good idea – I think it was largely an overreaction. While the Heyward trade worked out quite well, he was going to be a rental, and it made sense to sell high. The Simmons trade, however, was absolutely brutal and set the team back years.
I do not think this team should tear down. It would take a long time to get as much talent in the clubhouse as we currently have! I think the suits need to pull their heads out of the sand and authorize some real spending, and we may need to clear house on more of the coaching, scouting, and player development staff.
In general, the success of the rebuild was extremely mixed. The front office largely targeted pitching prospects, and with the benefit of hindsight, we can say it largely failed. Max Fried was a superstar, and Mike Soroka and Kyle Wright had individually excellent seasons with careers ruined by injury; and we managed to include some of the other prospects in trades, particularly at the 2019 and 2021 trade deadline when we acquired a bunch of relief pitchers and outfielders.
The most successful trades of the rebuild were almost certainly Justin Upton for Max Fried, Justin Heyward for Shelby Miller, and Shelby Miller for Ender Inciarte and Dansby Swanson. But nearly all the rest of the prospects we obtained during that period via trade and draft eventually proved to be busts, and overall, I think it’s clear that the entire John Coppolella regime (along with, arguably, the John Hart conservatorship) was a failure.
Trading Andrelton Simmons for Sean Newcomb should be a cautionary tale for any team who ever considers a rebuild. This organization should be adding to the strong core that they have, not hoping that they’ll ever manage to assemble a group of players this talented if they tear it down and start again.
What I’m afraid of is ending up like the modern Cardinals, in-between: they’ve got a bunch of half-launched prospects like Nolan Gorman, Matt Liberatore, Jordan Walker, Lars Nootbaar, Alec Burleson, plus guys like the recently departed Tyler O’Neill and Dylan Carlson, all of whom have failed to live up to their potential and struggled to establish themselves while the major league team seemingly can’t decide whether it’s going or coming. The GM has been in charge for nearly 20 years and in the organization for a full 30 years, and it’s clear that things have just stagnated.
Firing people doesn’t solve problems in and of itself, but you can’t do anything until you admit that there is a problem and work to identify its cause. The Braves need to do that, and then they need to take action.
Alex, I had attempted to create a counterfactual back in the day to see how the Braves could have avoided rebuilding, and it was met with almost universal condemnation. Of course, it’s hard to create a reliable counterfactual and I probably didn’t even do the best job that could have been done. I think I probably did it in 2017 or somewhere in there, so it was before we found out that Newcomb, Soroka, Wright, Anderson, Allard, Wilson, Gohara, Davidson, et al didn’t work out. I think now that we have more hindsight, we can see that, at minimum, the attempt to stockpile pitching did not work.
To answer the original post, no, I don’t think this team has a lot of pieces to tear down. If we’re out of it, I would say deal Ozuna. If any of the relievers with limited control pitch well, I would deal them.
I was reading a tweet this morning from DOB where he mentioned how big the loss of Wash was for the attitude and culture of the team. If DOB is starting to participate in that narrative, we can only hope people that matter in the org. also are seeing the funky culture and attitude and make some changes. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
I don’t think the team should tear down. It’s good enough to go on a run especially once RAJ is back. We miss him dearly in the lineup. It’s not that difficult to get into the playoffs nowadays and the Braves are better than 80% of the NL teams. Once we hit the playoffs, I like our chances with the top 3 starting pitchers and a healthy lineup. Way too early to overreact. Go Braves!
Happy retirement for tfloyd!!!
It’s early, but the NL West is looking like a juggernaut so far. That division will produce four playoff teams at the current pace. If that’s the case, then only the NL East winner will make the cut. FanGraphs playoff odds have sunk to 56.7% for the Braves. Absent a quick turnaround and a really hot streak in this team, it looks to me like the cake is baked. To get to 95 wins — which might not even be good enough for the division — the Braves have to win at a 101-win pace the rest of the way.
This is probably the worst time to be happy about such a thing, and I wish the beat writers would discuss it more, but the Braves do have a lot of money to spend. They had $17M, I think, before they hit the luxury tax, and they have a portion of Profar’s salary to save. Montero cost them $3M, I think. So if there are teams who just want to unload salary or dump bad contracts at the deadline, the Braves are certainly in a position to be huge buyers. And in the case of Montero, there are teams that may want to dump a little payroll before then. If you had $17M to spend at the deadline, you could bring back the equivalent of around $40M+ in annual player salary.
Like could you take Kyle Freeland’s $17M salary from Colorado? Sonny Gray’s $25M salary from St. Louis? A portion of Carlos Correa’s $37M salary from Minnesota? Chris Bassitt is dealing, and he’s owed $22M. Kenley Jansen and his $10M salary will almost certainly be available at the deadline. There’s got to be some teams out there that wants to shed payroll.
2014 was during a period when Liberty Media wasn’t really spending that much (14th in payroll), and the farm system was ranked around 24th. Brandon Beachy and Medlen both had elbow injuries that derailed their careers; Upton and Heyward were both gone after 2015; BJ Upton, Chris Johnson, and Dan Uggla completely collapsed. Even if Liberty dumped a bunch of money into the team, I don’t really see how the tear down could have been avoided. It was the compounding effect of a lot of bad decisions and injuries.
Keeping Simmons wouldn’t have made a difference either way. To be clear, I didn’t like the trade. Newcomb was the Angels’ best pitching prospect and was ranked within the top 100 overall prospects, but his command issues were well known. He just wasn’t a good enough prospect to trade for Simmons.
The philosophy of the organization has been that because pitching is extremely expensive to acquire in free agency, we should draft and develop pitching to 1) fill our own rotation and 2) to use in trades since “pitching is currency”. The problem is of course that pitching is so expensive because it is so difficult to develop. All pitching prospects should be discounted as such but especially high schoolers. Neglecting position talent is folly and honestly we should recalibrate given how lavish contracts for position players have been.
Nobody is even considering this talk of a tear down if we have some corner outfield and middle infield prospects knocking at the door.
Y’all sure about no tear down? This is the worst team in the league and we have them locked up forever.