With spring training officially rocking and rolling, this is definitely as good of a time as any to hear from both Atlanta Braves President of Baseball Operations/General Manager Alex Anthopoulos and the newly-promoted manager, Walt Weiss. Both of them spoke with the media one-after-the-other on Friday afternoon and the first thing on my mind was to confirm how AA felt about the state of the rotation.
“We’ve got four guys right now in Strider, Sale, Holmes and López in our rotation We’ll have competition for our fifth spot,” confirmed AA when I asked him about the rotation. “We know what Strider can be, we know what Sale has done. López was an All-Star the year before and Holmes did a nice job for us in the rotation before he went down. We like some of the arms we have and some of the talent we have.”
He went on to add that he feels like the team as a whole can step up in order to make sure that the burden of bringing this team back to success is equally spread amongst the squad. “I think the big key for our club is that offensively for the past two years we haven’t performed the way we hope,” said Anthopoulos. “Part of that is performance, part of that is injury. We have a deeper group of position players, a deeper bullpen and that should take a lot of pressure off of the other parts of the team.”
Anthopoulos was also asked about Ha-Seong Kim during the press conference and we got a tiny bit of good news on that front. “We’re hopeful and optimistic that he’ll be back at the beginning of May,” revealed AA. That bit of information is new, as that appears to be on the shorter side of recovery from Kim’s icy calamity.
“That’s why we have guys like Mauricio Dubon. He can play everywhere and we’re excited to see him at shortstop where he’ll have an opportunity, ”Anthopoulos affirmed shortly afterwards. “If we didn’t sign Kim then we were prepared to go with Dubon at shortstop. Hopefully it’s not that long of an absence for him and he’ll have the remainder of the season to have a chance to have a lot of at-bats and make a big impact on our team.”
AA also shared his reasoning behind the signing of catcher Jonah Heim, as he confirmed that he’ll be getting an opportunity to serve as the backup backstop around here. “He had a tremendous 2023 as starting catcher on a World Series team. He was a Gold Glove, it was great. The last two years offensively, he hasn’t performed nearly as well and the numbers certainly bear that out. Even defensively, he hasn’t been the same,” stated AA.
“He’s still young — he’s only 30. He’s got a switch-hit bat with a lot of upside and Walt Weiss talked about during his interview about how he wants to get Drake Baldwin’s bat in the lineup as often as he can with the DH spot. Having someone who’s been durable as an everyday guy, I’m not going to put it on him to be the guy he was in 2023 but he’s young enough, he’s capable and he’s done it before. We think he can do better offensively and defensively as well.”
We also got a bit of an update on Sean Murphy’s status as well, which was basically just confirming that they’re expecting to have him back in May as well before evaluating their options at the catcher spot. “We think Sean Murphy will be probably be back sometime in May but we start at the end of March so that’s a long period of time,” said AA. “Having a guy like Jonah who’s been a starter and we think he has upside, it was a no-brainer for us. He knows when Sean Murphy comes back that we’ll see where we’re at with the roster but we’re excited to have him. We think he’s certainly capable of being a better player than he’s been and that’s certainly the goal and we think our staff might be able to unlock some things.”
With two players already heading to the 60-Day IL in the form of Spencer Schwellenbach and Joe Jiménez, AA also had to talk about the injury situation as well. He did acknowledge the issues with injuries but also made sure to bring up everybody’s track record in that regard.
“We’ve been a healthy club, we had a bunch of durable players. Some guys had pre-existing things, especially some of the guys that pitched,” said Anthopoulos. “We knew that there was some risk with some of those guys. [When it comes to] position players, guys getting hit in the hands, sliding into a base, I don’t know that you can really address those things.” He went on to say that the Braves were looking into “their throwing programs, their bullpens. We’ve looked at if a guy has had a recurring injury on the position player side. It’s obviously an issue across the game and we had a really good run of success with the same group of coaches and trainers and all the medical staff — a long run of success that led to six divisions and seven postseasons in a row. We had injuries but not like we had the last few years. Like anything, you should review and tweak and make adjustments and we’re certainly going to try to do that as well.”
I also asked Alex Anthopoulos about how he envisions new outfielder Mike Yastrzemski fitting in with the current Braves squad. As you can tell, he’s pretty excited about having Yaz in that clubhouse at the moment. “Right now with Sean Murphy being out, the thought is that Jurickson Profar will get the majority of DH at-bats against right-handers. Mike Yastrzemski would start in left field against right-handers. Against left-handers, Walt Weiss will move some things around.”
AA went on to talk more about how he’s looking forward to seeing Yaz get deployed heading into the new season. “Knowing Yastrzemski is the strong side of a platoon facing the right-handed starter should get a lot of playing time. We also like the fact that he can cover us at all three outfield spots. We don’t view him as an everyday center fielder but he can certainly fit in there short-term and we just like the upside,” stated AA. “We thought he got back to some of the really good things he had done with his swing when he went to the Royals so we like that. We think there’s offensive upside as well as a left-handed bat and the fact that he protects us at so many positions. He’s just a great fit.”
Overall, AA seems pretty optimistic about the state of the club — though to be fair, everybody’s excited about the state of their club at this time of year. With that being said, there is actual reason to be optimistic about things surrounding the Braves heading into the new season and we’ll have to see how things play out going forward. We’ll have more information from Walt Weiss in the near future so keep an eye out for that. For now, what do you think abut AA’s comments here on Friday?
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