Even though I don’t pay nearly as much attention to baseball as much as I used to, it can’t be said that I don’t know the Atlanta Braves. Going into the offseason it was painfully obvious what the team’s needs were, which was pitching, pitching, pitching and moar pitching, because as the Braves were painfully exploited, their lack of pitching absolutely blew up in their face once the playoffs began.
They might have had the greatest offense in a century, and even with Ronald Acuña pulling a disappearing act in the playoffs, you can’t win baseball games if you can’t prevent the other team from scoring more runs than you do.
But in spite of the very obvious glaring need, I what was going to happen to the Braves before the offseason even really began. Their name would be thrown into the hat on just about every notable starting pitching candidate, but one-by-one, they would lose in every single sweepstakes, usually because the Braves were too cheap, or unwilling to outbid any competitive suitors in terms of money or trade chips. And once all the major names were off the board, the Braves would then land on picking up a starting pitcher that was too old, coming off injury/down year, both, or some other reason that made them available to the Braves and not all the other teams who are willing to dole out money like white people raising taxes on minorities.
And the Braves front office would pat themselves on the back and applaud themselves for not going over-budget, not locking themselves to a free agent contract that has any modicum of chance of being labeled a colossal bust, and then the contingent of Barves fans who believe Alex Anthopolous or any of the other Braves’ front office stooges are incapable of making bad business decisions with applaud them to, and the Braves will go into 2024, not a terrible team, but not exactly the world beaters that are expected to compete for the World Series.
Sure enough, that’s pretty much exactly what happened this off-season, and absolutely nothing that has transpired throughout the entire baseball winter has been a surprise to me, as it pertains to the Atlanta Braves.
To quickly summarize, the Braves’ name was associated to quality pitchers like Aaron Nola, Sonny Gray, Tyler Glasnow, Dylan Cease and even lol, Shohei Ohtani. Nola used the Braves to leverage moar money before re-signing with the Phillies. Sonny Gray signed a fairly reasonable deal with the St. Louis Cardinals so it stands to believe the Braves probably low-balled him and he joined a rebuilding Cards squad instead. Dylan Cease talks appear to have evaporated for the time being, so the Braves probably were not willing to acquiesce on whatever the White Sox wanted from them, and not only did the Dodgers naturally win the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes, days later they managed to swipe Tyler Glasnow from the Rays and secure him for several years, before doing the same thing with Yoshinobu Yamamoto, building a monster super squad in the process.
So with one part of my predicted Braves offseason complete, the second part came to fruition when the Braves traded one of their better prospects, Vaughn Grissom, to the Boston Red Sox for, Chris Sale.
A decade ago, landing Chris Sale would’ve been a boon, because he was easily one of the best pitchers in the game in the 2010’s decade. But here’s a guy that almost as soon as he turned 30 years old, fell off a cliff. His numbers started plummeting, he blew out his arm and required Tommy John Surgery, and has been battling a parade of random injuries since then. He did manage to pitch over 100 innings last season, but to a far less effective 4.30 ERA than when he was still good at baseball. His strikeout rates were still decent, but he was getting hammered when people did connect, allowing 15 homers in his limited duties.
The Braves landing Chris Sale at the expense of a prospect the caliber of Vaughn Grissom, I told my friend, was about the most Braves transaction ever, because it truly was. They biffed on all of the available high-tier starting pitching options, and then settled on getting a high-risk, formerly-good player, because of cost, and with a litany of hopes and dreams attached that he can bounce back to being the dominant force he was throughout the 2010’s, a decade later and through tons of injuries.
And to make matters worse, they locked themselves into this union by extending him for two more years at $38 million, and I’m too lazy to look up the specifics, prior to this, they were only on the hook for around $500k of his 2024 salary, while the Red Sox had to pay the rest, but I’m assuming that that’s no longer the case with a new contract in tow.
But basically, the modus operandi of the Atlanta Braves is always avoid the risk of high-cost assets, even if means the team as a whole is hampered by mediocre alternatives. They will never splurge on top-tier talent, and always pick up guys who are coming off of down years, injuries, or assumed to just be needing “a change of scenery.” The Braves always seem to think they can always operate by getting okay talent and that they’ll magically outperform their expectations because they’re playing for the high and mighty Atlanta Braves, which is fine if you went into every single year with no aspirations other than not sucking.
They’re basically the High-Expectations Asian Dad of baseball, where they’re always banking on everyone to outperform their peripherals and history, and are full of nothing but loathing disappointment if and when they don’t succeed.
The Braves haven’t really played with their balls out since Ted Turner unloaded the team to Liberty Media, and Braves Corporate hasn’t shown that they don’t care about on-field results as much as they care about appeasing the shareholders, so I guess if that’s their goal, then they’re doing a bang-up job of being above average.
Seriously though, Chris Sale and Jarred Kelenic aren’t going to fix the team and get them any closer to getting over the hurdle of the October Phillies or any other playoff team they run into, should they even make the playoffs in 2024. As good as Spencer Strider has been, it’s been two straight Octobers in which he’s faltered, Charlie Morton isn’t getting any younger, Chris Sale is still a gigantic question mark on what we’re going to get from an older, busted up version, and Max Fried might be the only reliable pitcher the team has, and only because it’s his walk year, and he’s going to be pitching for his next contract.
Not very promising going into 2024, but then again, I’m not convinced that Braves Corporate really cares about the team’s success as long as the annual report continues to show high profits. But as much as the Braves have sucked throughout yet another offseason, there’s always a measure of satisfaction at knowing that I’m still usually right when it comes to matters pertaining to the Braves being the Barves, and being right always feels good.
