To start, Braves starters are a big question

THEN

Kris Medlen; 34-20; 2.95; 512 2/3

Mike Minor; 32-24; 3.90; 507 1/3

Julio Teheran; 15-9; 3.44; 211 2/3

Brandon Beachy; 14-11; 3.23; 276 2/3

Totals; 95-64; 3.39; 1,499 1/3

NOW

Julio Teheran; 15-9; 3.44; 211 2/3

Alex Wood; 3-3; 3.13; 77 2/3

Aaron Harang; 110-116; 4.28; 1,945 1/3

David Hale; 1-0; 0.82; 11

Or Gus Schlosser; no big-league appearances

Totals; 129-128; 4.14; 2,245 1/3

Note: These are the rotations before adding a fifth starter.

As pitchers and catchers reported and the Braves awoke to another season, one question trumped all others when it came to their starting rotation:

Where’s the ace?

But, then, stuff happened. Bad, ugly stuff. The line of players outside Dr. James Andrews’ waiting room began to form even before the calendar start of spring. Now it was not so much a matter of identifying the best of a promising group but rather the merely functional among them. And, so, the question about this staff turned dark:

Where’s the Ace bandage?

Fortunes dangle at the end of a little bundle of fibers on the inside of the elbow. Best-case scenarios can turn to talc on the stress of a single pitch.

Presumptive opening-day starter Kris Medlen walked straight off the mound to his second elbow surgery. Brandon Beachy sought opinions high and low and could not avoid another elbow overhaul. The team that once built a 14-year-long bridge of championships upon the rock of its starting pitching was looking uncommonly rickety.

Living daily with all the unnatural torque a pitcher places upon certain joints, hardened baseball men know the physical truths of their business. That doesn’t mean they are totally heartless cynics.

“You never get used to it,” the general manager, Frank Wren, said. “You know you got to be ready for it. You know you’ve got to build depth, and people get tired of hearing about depth and hearing all those disclaimers like ‘if we can stay healthy.’ But they’re true.”

“When you see a guy like Medlen walk off the mound, you get a sick feeling in your stomach,” Wren said. “Not unlike when you see Tim Hudson get stepped on during a routine play to first (last season). Things happen. You can’t control them; it’s just the nature of the business we’re in.”

The Braves lost 205-game winner Hudson to a fractured ankle in July in a gruesome collision with the Mets’ Eric Young.

A season opens Monday in Milwaukee with the Braves already in full survival mode. ’Tis the time of year when optimism is supposed to rule, and here are the Braves operating with a rotation that is covered up in duct tape.

Instead of talking about bursting out of the gate, the GM openly advocates treading water, about making do rather than making hay for a couple of weeks until Mike Minor and new acquisition Ervin Santana are operational.

Take what comfort you can from the words of young Alex Wood, who has had such a lovely spring (0.45 ERA in 20 innings). Things are just going to work out, said the grizzled 23-year-old, with five major league starts.

“If there is one thing people in here can appreciate is that once the dust settles, somehow, someway the pitching staff finds a way every year to get it done and far exceed all expectations they had going in,” Wood said.

Uncomfortable as it may be, this team is working on the fumes of faith as much as any concrete evidence spelled out on the back of their starters’ bubble-gum cards.

“Roger (McDowell) will never let anything go wrong,” said first baseman Freddie Freeman, placing all trust in the Braves’ pitching coach.

“We have a couple veteran guys waiting in the wings. Ervin will be ready after the first couple of weeks of April. Gavin (Floyd) is almost ready. We have young pitchers who have a couple starts under their belts. Last year David Hale and Wood pitched really well. Julio (Teheran) and Mike are just going to have to step up,” Freeman opined.

Thanks to a couple of front-end off days, the Braves can make do with four starters through the first two weeks of the season. Even then, the team went into the last week of spring debating between Hale and his two career starts and non-roster invitee Gus Schlosser for that No. 4 spot.

Most telling item from the spring about the uncertainty in the rotation: There was such a thing as The Schlosser Factor.

In reaction to the Medlen and Beachy blowouts, the Braves paid one-time American League All-Star (2008) Santana $14 million for seven months of his time. They exchanged last season’s emergency acquisition — Freddy Garcia — for a slightly younger temp, Aaron Harang.

“I was uneasy (about the pitching) before we went out and got Santana because I wasn’t sure about the depth we had with the kids at those spots,” manager Fredi Gonzalez said. “After we got him, I was sleeping a little better.”

How fortunate the Braves are that there are 162 games in a season, not 16. The rotation should look significantly different in August than it will the first of April, we are told. Best case: Minor’s sore shoulder is not a persistent thing; Floyd returns from ligament-replacement surgery and is the .500 pitcher that his resume suggests; Santana pitches his ears off in search of his next contract.

And if all else fails, it’s Teheran and Wood and pray for something good.

There is just more the penny-stock than blue-chip feel to this rotation right now. The highest degree of speculation. Which brings us back around to the ace question.

It would be helpful if a member of this evolving cast emerged as one, however “ace” is defined. A clear top-of-the-rotation guy. A 20-game winner. Someone you can send out against the likes of a Cliff Lee or a Stephen Strasburg or a Jose Fernandez or a Clayton Kershaw without a FEMA disaster response team on stand-by.

“That’s yet to be determined,” Wren said. “Based on where we are right now, Ervin Santana is obviously a candidate for that, as is Minor, as is Teheran. I think they are all three capable of being guys who can pitch at the front end of a rotation.”

When last we saw opening-day pitcher Teheran he was being drawn and quartered by the Los Angeles Dodgers in October — six runs in 2 2/3 innings. Not ace-ly at all. But he said he’s over all that, thanks to a little pep talk from McDowell in the aftermath.

“Roger sat beside me and asked if I tried my best. I said, ‘yes, I tried my best.’ He said, ‘OK that’s all that matters; that’s all I want to hear.’

“That was my first (playoff appearance). And if I have another opportunity it’s going to be very different.”

Teheran will happily volunteer to try out for the role of ace. “That’s my goal. I always wanted to be the ace of the team, be the first starter. I’ve been working on that. If I’m the second or the third (starter), I’ll keep working on that.”

He has well-placed support in his quest. “It’s going to be special to watch Julio. I think he has chance to be one of the best in the league this year,” Freeman said.

Others are less covetous of the title.

A difference between blackjack and baseball, some say, is that one can be played quite handily without aces.

“I’ve gotten asked (who’s the ace) 20 times, and I give the same answer 20 times: ‘I don’t really care,’” Minor said.

“I don’t know why people really do care as long as we’re winning. Last year we had three guys in the high threes in ERA. We won 96 games, went to playoffs, won a division title, yet they said we really didn’t have pitching,” he said. The Braves had a majors-low ERA last season.

This season, with but one starter who has pitched 200-plus innings in a season since 2007, with four postseason starts between them and two key members beginning the season on the disabled list, it is difficult to project any kind of certainty upon the rotation.

Here we go sailing into the great unknown with the Braves’ starting pitching. And what a vaguely unfamiliar and uncomfortable feeling that is.