We’re only a few days away from Braves pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training and by the looks of things, there won’t be too much need for name tags since there’s going to be plenty of familiar faces once the rest of the team starts reporting. Brian McCann, Josh Donaldson and Nick Markakis have been the only big acquisitions of the offseason for the Braves so far.
The Braves aren’t alone when it comes to their lack of major acquisitions. For the second straight season, things have been very slow during the offseason and normally even Atlanta’s small number of moves would have been only slightly concerning but still leave them firmly as favorites in the division.
Unfortunately for the Braves, the NL East has three other teams who actually went out and made moves. The Nationals have been doing their best to prepare for life after Bryce Harper and they’re going to be good if he goes elsewhere and great if the sluggish market ends up sending Harper back to Washington.
The Phillies haven’t quite gone out and spent “stupid money” like their owner gave them the blessing to do, but they’ve done a good job of fortifying their lineup. While they may have paid a steep price to get J.T. Realmuto, they don’t have to worry about the future at the moment since they’ll at least be going into 2019 with arguably the best catcher in the game in their employ. Plus, they’re still in the mix for both Manny Machado and Bryce Harper and that would be a legit gamechanger for the rest of baseball if the Phillies got him — not just the division.
Then you have the Mets, who are actually acting like a New York team and adding talent to their roster. Granted, you aren’t going to intimidate anybody if you’re adding Robinson Cano and Jed Lowrie in the year 2019 but that’s still enough to give them a decent offense at this point. Plus, they realized that their bullpen was incredibly unreliable in 2018 so they got Edwin Diaz in the same deal that brought in Cano. That move alone is going to make the Mets bullpen at least competitive with the rest of the division, which means that there should be fewer nights where Jacob deGrom is cursing his luck because he didn’t get enough help from his teammates.
The main point is that this division figures to be extremely competitive in 2019. It’s honestly refreshing to see as a fan of the game in general since this will hopefully make things exciting and fun in the NL East. From the standpoint of a Braves fan, it stinks because it’s almost as if the Braves returned to relevancy at the wrong time.
It would have been lovely to see the Braves make further additions to the roster, but it sure looks like they’re going to at least enter spring training with a squad that is very similar to the one that they fielded last season. The main question now is whether or not it’ll be good enough to stay on top of the division or at least be in the Wild Card race.
In my opinion, the Braves as of right now should still be in the conversation to win the division and should absolutely be a Wild Card contender. Unless injuries and/or regression hit this team extremely hard this season, the Braves should still be in the mix for the postseason — even if it’s just the Wild Card game that nobody wants to deal with. Still, the Braves should be able to compete this season.
If Josh Donaldson can stay healthy, the Braves could potentially have one of the best infields in all of baseball. Of course, a lot of this depends on Ozzie Albies hopefully staying above water when it comes to getting on base and an offensive rebound from Dansby Swanson would also go a long way towards making sure that this unit as a whole lives up to the potential.
The Braves should also benefit greatly from getting a full season of Ronald Acuña Jr. Ender Inciarte will be perfectly fine as well since at this point it’s clear that he’s going to give you mediocre-to-decent offense with elite defense. With those two around, that means that the pressure on Nick Markakis and/or Adam Duvall to succeed is pretty low. I wouldn’t bank on Markakis replicating the first half of his 2018 season but it would be lovely if he did.
The pitching is what is the most intriguing part. There’s no real “ace” on the Braves roster right now but at the same time, there’s the tantalizing hope that with the sheer amount of young talent that’s available and looking to fight for spots on this team this year, one or even some of those guys could break out and turn into something special. If we do see a breakout or two, then that could make things very interesting when it comes to the vast amount of young pitching that this team has.
Even with the lack of acquisitions that the Braves made during the offseason, the team is still in a decent enough position to where you could understand the front office being of the belief that they didn’t really need to make moves to counter-act what the rest of the division did.
It’s just that they are putting a lot of faith in players either developing on the job or completely overperforming what they’re projected to do. I’m not going to sit here and say that it’s a safe bet that Atlanta’s young talent will turn into what we all hope they will or even completely blow our wildest dreams out of the water. However, from the brief glimpses that we got of some of the young pitchers from last season to the extended looks that we got from Ronald Acuña Jr. and the first full season from Ozzie Albies, it’s understandable to see why the Braves believe they may have something special when it comes to their young core.
I will say that it’s definitely disappointing that the Braves ended up being one of the many baseball teams who had plenty of financial ability to make additions, only to seemingly just sit on that money. That’s another conversation for another day and that’s going to be a very shaky bridge for baseball as a whole to cross once labor negotiations get going again.
But as far as this year is concerned, the Braves are betting the house on their young talent and core being enough to withstand the rest of the division making additions to improve their squad. The Braves were ahead of schedule with their success in 2018 and hopefully what they did (or didn’t do) after 2018 won’t come back to haunt them in 2019 when it comes to their newly intensified competition.