We’re within two weeks of opening day, which for our local nine will be staged in the borough of Queens, N.Y. The opener most on our minds will come in Cobb County on April 14 — that’s a Friday, when metro Atlanta’s roads are always at their worst — and that’s really what we talk about when we talk about the 2017 Braves. Traffic and parking, not necessarily in that order.
Seldom do we discuss pitchers and hitters, which mightn’t be a bad thing. The Braves, who are 6-20-1, have the worst record of any major-league team for the second consecutive spring. This can mean nothing. A year ago it suggested a little something: Those Braves lost 29 of their first 38 for-real games. This team should be better than that. If it’s not, by July we’ll have found a way to circumvent the Cobb congestion: We’ll just avoid SunTrust Park.
We stipulate that this spring hasn’t been a usual spring. The World Baseball Classic has been ongoing, and things are never the same when key members are doing their patriotic duty — Julio Teheran for Colombia, Ender Inciarte for Venezuela and that noted Canadian Freddie Freeman. We also stipulate that the spring focus isn’t to win but to get ready.
On the pitching side, Mike Foltynewicz has struck out 14 in 18 innings while walking five, which is pretty good. Aaron Blair has struck out nine in 8 2/3 innings, which would be good if he hadn’t generated 19 base runners for a WHIP of 2.19. The old-timers Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey have been awful — between them, they’ve yielded 43 hits and 14 walks in 29 2/3 innings — but you tend to worry less about veterans, and they’re are as veteran as it gets. Mauricio Cabrera has walked more men that he has struck out, but calibrating a 103-mph four-seamer can take time.
As for position players: Kurt Suzuki, imported as half of a catching tandem, has an OPS of 1.136. His career OPS is .683. Dansby Swanson tweaked his side and missed time, but was hitting .333 with an OBP of .417. He’s really good. Jace Peterson has had a bad spring — he’s batting .204 with more strikeouts than hits — which makes it fortuitous that the Braves landed Brandon Phillips (.297 with one strikeout) as cover.
Moves like the Phillips trade — and the Matt Kemp and Jaime Garcia trades, and the signings of Colon and Dickey — have led some to wonder what the Braves are doing. On the Feb. 27 installment of FanGraphs' Effectively Wild podcast, Ben Lindbergh asked yours truly why a rebuilding team had so few young players in its projected lineup. My response was that the Braves feel some obligation to field a competitive team in their new environs and that the older guys were hired as a bridge to the future being cultivated in what's universally seen as baseball's best farm system.
Of the five plus-30/40 players mentioned above, only Kemp is under contract for 2018. Don’t lose sight of that. Or this: For all the young pitchers the Braves have amassed, the ones they love most are those they’ve drafted the past two Junes. They traded for Foltynewicz and Blair and Matt Wisler and Max Fried and Touki Toussaint because they were available. They selected Kolby Allard and Mike Soroka and Ian Anderson and Joey Wentz and Kyle Muller because they were exactly what they wanted — teenage arms with massive upside.
I'll concede that the 2017 Braves are an odd assemblage. The average age of their announced starting rotation is 33. (This for an organization rebuilding around young pitching!) Assuming Phillips is the starting second baseman, the everyday eight will feature three players under 31. Stat-based projections have this as a sub-.500 team: FanGraphs has the Braves going 73-89; Baseball Prospectus has them at 76-86. And yet …
In his newsletter, Joe Sheehan writes: “If you wanted to — and I’m not going to be that guy, but if you wanted to — you could squint and see a wild-card sleeper here. The Braves would need near-perfect health, some real big years from the young arms in the bullpen and the kind of sequencing luck that one or two teams fall into each season.”
I’m not going to be that guy, either. I wrote last fall that I thought these Braves would win 80 games. Minus the utility-man-who’s-more-than-a-utility-man Sean Rodriguez, whom I considered the biggest acquisition of this offseason (insert Colon joke here), I’ve dialed that down to 77. I can see them being within sight of a wild card as the trade deadline nears, which would make for fascinating in-house discussion: With so many old guys on expiring contracts, do they sell or buy?
But that’s another matter for another day. It’s spring, when hope springs eternal. I very much hope it won’t take me more than two hours to drive to SunTrust Park. I live 7.7 miles away.
