Braves manager Brian Snitker said the team sent shortstop Dansby Swanson to Triple-A Gwinnett for more playing time. And considering that Swanson didn’t play a lot of minor league games before he was called up, Snitker said Swanson can use more seasoning.
“That’s hopefully the plan, is that he does relax and goes back and things slow down,” Snitker said Friday. “All we want him to do more and play more and I think everything else will take care of itself. In the long run we will look back on this four or five years from now and it won’t have been a bad thing.”
The Braves demoted Swanson, 23, following their game at Arizona on Wednesday. After an off day for the team, Snitker explained the club’s reasoning for the move.
The immediate circumstance is that Swanson was struggling to produce and Johan Camargo had supplanted him as a lineup regular. But Snitker also noted that Swanson’s relative lack of professional experience: Swanson had just 569 plate appearances in the minors before the Braves promoted him from Double-A Mississippi last August.
“It’s hard to play sparingly in the minor leagues and then come up here and maybe not have a setback where you have to go back,” Snitker said. “It’s the at-bats, the total number of at-bats. We pushed him and we brought him up and he’d done really well. And then he had a stretch where it wasn’t going so good.
“You don’t just look at a time (to send him down) or anything. You look out there and see how the player is responding to things and how he’s doing. You know when it’s time. The organization, we talked about it and it was time for him to go back and start playing every day.”
Swanson was hitting .213 with a .287 on-base percentage in 95 games this season. He hit .302 with a .361 OBP in 38 games last season.
Snitker said Swanson took the news of his demotion well.
“He’s very, very early in his career,and we’ve asked a lot of him in a short period of time,” Snitker said. “He will be fine. The kid’s makeup is off the charts. We’ve all said that and lived that. In talking to him after the ballgame, he’s very good and he’s going to go back and work his butt off, as he has here.”
