LAKELAND, Fla. — Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez is leaning toward batting B.J. Upton second and Chris Johnson in the cleanup spot when the season begins. He realizes those might be unconventional choices, given Upton's .184 batting average and .268 on-base percentage last season, and Johnson's modest 12 home runs.
“I think the lineup we’ve been running out the last couple of days is the one that we may start with (Monday) in Milwaukee,” Gonzalez said before watching the Braves pound out 16 hits in a 12-3 Grapefruit League win Tuesday against the Tigers at Joker Marchant Stadium, including a mammoth homer by Jason Heyward at a place where he’s done that a few times.
Braves backup catcher Gerald Laird also homered against his former Tigers team, and Ramiro Pena tripled for his team-high 10th extra-base hit including nine doubles. The Braves got six runs and 10 hits in six innings against Rick Porcello.
B.J. Upton’s shown some encouraging signs this spring, carrying a .350 OBP and four stolen bases through 18 games before going 0-for-4 Tuesday to drop his batting average to .259.
Gonzalez has had Johnson in the cleanup (fourth) spot in the past week, having changed his mind after initially planning to have catcher Evan Gattis bat there. Johnson’s .321 average was second in the National League in 2013, but only 56 of his 514 at-bats came in the cleanup spot, where he hit .286 with two homers and a .322 OBP.
Johnson had 100 or more at-bats in the fifth, sixth and eight spots, moving up the lineup after starting out at the bottom.
“I like Chris Johnson (at cleanup),” Gonzalez said. “He gives you good at-bats. And he’s a guy that’s not going to change his approach. He’s going to put the ball in play. He uses the whole field and has some big at-bats.”
Gonzalez cited one recent at-bat by Johnson, batting fourth at the time.
“The other day, first inning we get a man on third, two outs,” he said. “If you get a guy in there who punches out (the inning is over). Chris hit a double to get us that run. I think that right there changed the whole momentum of the game. And that’s the type of hitter he is.”
Johnson’s three-run homer Monday against the Astros was his first of the spring. He had a two-out RBI single in the first inning Tuesday and has a .290 average with six doubles, 10 strikeouts and 10 RBIs in 62 at-bats, albeit with only two walks.
The Braves used mainly Freddie Freeman (313 at-bats) and Gattis (179 at-bats) in the cleanup spot last season, but Freeman moved to the 3-hole in the second half and is entrenched there.
Heyward will bat leadoff after thriving in that role when he was moved there late last summer, and Justin Upton is likely to bat fifth, followed by Dan Uggla and Gattis (in either order) in the sixth and seventh spots, and Andrelton Simmons eighth.
Heyward tied Uggla for the team’s homer lead this spring with his fourth Tuesday, a towering solo shot off Porcello that cleared the scoreboard in right-center field in the sixth inning, drawing oohs and ahhs from the crowd.
“He hit that ball hard,” Gonzalez said. “I don’t care if the wind was blowing out to right field, he got all of it.”
Heyward’s first big-league homer was a tape-measure shot off Max Scherzer in a 2010 spring-training game at Lakeland in Heyward’s rookie year, a homer that landed on and bounced over the metal roof of a batting-cage building beyond right field. He hit another homer on that roof in a game earlier this spring.
Gonzalez made frequent lineup changes last season, tinkering with it almost nightly before finally finding a formula he liked with Heyward in the leadoff spot.
“The dynamic of the lineup changes,” he said. “I don’t know why people make a big deal out of the lineup.”
With the lineup he outlined Tuesday, when Laird starts at catcher he could bat seventh without disrupting the order as much as it would need to be changed if Gattis hit cleanup in his starts behind the plate.
