If Braves fans and fantasy-baseball participants are racking their brains trying to figure out how the Braves are going to fit Brandon Beachy into their starting rotation, team officials feel their pain.
They are the ones who have to make the decision, which is shaping up as one of the most difficult of its kind in recent memory for the Braves. Beachy is a proven high-quality starter who appears fully recovered from reconstructive elbow surgery, but the current five-man rotation is on a roll and finally has all engines humming at once.
Barring an unlikely move to a seldom-seen six-man starting rotation, the Braves have to move someone to the bullpen or make a trade, unless there’s an injury in the next week or two. Beachy is scheduled to come off the disabled list to start one of the games in a June 18 doubleheader against the Mets. And after that ,,,
“I don’t know — that’s my honest-to-God answer,” Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez said Sunday. “I don’t think there’s a clear-cut answer right now. People think, ‘Fredi’s hoping somebody gets hurt.’ And I don’t want that. I want everybody to be pitching healthy and then we’ve got to come up with some kind of plan. But right now we don’t have a plan.”
In Beachy’s next-to-last scheduled rehab start Saturday in Triple-A he had eight strikeouts in five innings and allowed four hits, one run (on a homer) and three walks in 94 pitches. Braves reports were “pretty good” stuff, including fastballs at 89-94 mph.
Gonzalez and pitching coach Roger McDowell discussed the situation Sunday morning.
“We’re waiting to make sure nothing happens,” Gonzalez said. “Roger and I were saying, if we had to do it today, what would you do? We’ll see what happens. I don’t know.”
On June 18, the Braves could use the 26th-man rule that allows teams to add a player to the major league roster specifically for doubleheaders. But that would be only a temporary solution to the dilemma.
“We’ll see how we go (with the decision) when we see how pitching does between now and then,” general manager Frank Wren said.
If Beachy, who had a 2.00 ERA in 13 starts last year before “Tommy John” surgery, is added to the rotation, who gets bumped?
Left-hander Mike Minor has become the staff ace and one of the top pitchers in the National League since last summer. Safe to say the left-hander is not going anywhere for the forseeable future.
Kris Medlen is the only one with bullpen experience, which makes him a candidate. But he hasn’t allowed an earned run in 13 2/3 innings over his past two starts, and he has a 2.63 ERA and 42 strikeouts in his past eight starts.
Lefty Paul Maholm is 4-2 with a 3.55 ERA in his past eight starts, with two earned runs or fewer in six.
Rookie Julio Teheran has made major progress, developing into the pitcher the Braves hoped he’d be. He’s 4-2 with a 2.13 ERA in his past eight starts, with 43 strikeouts and eight walks in 55 innings.
The Braves presumably wouldn’t ask 37-year-old Hudson, who has one relief appearance in 419 games, to move to the bullpen. He struggled for a few weeks but has allowed just one earned run in 14 1/3 innings over his past two starts.
Maholm seems the most-likely trade candidate, in the last year of his contract and attractive to pitching-needy contenders.
More on Medlen – A day after he hit his first major league home run and threw a career-high 116 pitches in 6 2/3 scoreless innings, Medlen was still smiling and answering questions Sunday about his big night at Dodger Stadium.
His homer proved decisive in a 2-1 win Saturday, and he joined Hudson and Minor to give the Braves three pitchers with home runs in the same season for the first time since Greg Maddux, John Smoltz and Kevin Millwood in 1999.
It was Medlen’s second homer as a professional — he hit one in Double-A in 2008 — and only his third extra-base hit in the majors. When he hit it, he threw his bat down in anger and cursed, thinking he had not hit it squarely.
“I thought I just missed it,” he said. “It looks like I pimped it (styled it). Rossy (former Braves catcher David Ross) texted me, ‘Yeah, man, you pimped it.’ No. I just thought I missed it. I threw my bat.”
When he got to second base, Medlen wasn’t sure and stopped to ask the umpire whether it bounced over the fence.
He got it together fast enough to remember to do something he thought about doing if he got the chance — he flashed the “I love you” sign-language message to his family as he crossed the plate, as retired Brave Chipper Jones did for years.
“I Chipper’d my family,” Medlen said, smiling. “From second base on it was sweet — a solid trot. But that (home to second base) was kind of a circus.”
