‘It’s definitely the culture here’: How the Braves keep moving forward — no matter what gets in their way
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Jesse Rogers, ESPN Staff Writer
Just over two weeks into the MLB season, the Atlanta Braves are exactly where they’re expected to be: atop the National League East standings. But any thought that the coming months would be about coasting through the regular season until the real challenge begins in October quickly went out the window when Spencer Strider felt discomfort in his right elbow during his second start earlier this month.
On Saturday, a team news release confirmed every Braves fan’s worst fear: Their ace needed season-ending elbow surgery, leaving Atlanta to navigate the rest of 2024 without the pitcher who set the franchise strikeout record a year ago. The situation is similar to last season, when lefty Max Fried left Opening Day because of a hamstring ailment then later missed much of the year because of a forearm strain. The Braves not only survived that blow but went on to win their sixth straight division title while providing a blueprint for their latest challenge.
“You can never replace frontline, Cy Young-caliber starters with internal depth,” Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos told ESPN on Saturday. “But it’s not like the NBA where one guy can dramatically change the impact, you’re going to have to do it as an entire 40-man group and beyond.
“I know it’s a cliché, but we really are going to take it day by day. People will get opportunities, no doubt about it. At some point if someone seizes that opportunity and gets a long period to start, that’s fantastic.”
Anthopoulos cited righty Bryce Elder’s opportunity, after Fried went down last season, as an example of what can come of a bad situation. Elder made the All-Star team, flourishing in the first half.
So on one hand, it’s a devastating blow to a perennial powerhouse. On the other, overcoming adversity is exactly what the franchise has excelled at doing. Instead of dwelling on the negative, the Braves just keep moving forward, owning the NL East in part by savvy management, continuity among their players and a history steeped in winning that began in the 1990s. It begins with an organizational mindset that Strider described in the days before his injury.
“It’s definitely the culture here,” Strider told ESPN. “It starts in development. They told us they’re trying to create championship pitchers, not just big leaguers. It’s an interesting thing to hear verbalized in Low-A.
“Your goal isn’t just to be a big leaguer, it’s to help the team win the World Series. That’s what they’re looking for.”
Winning in October is always the expectation in the Atlanta clubhouse, but only once over the past six seasons have the Braves finished the postseason atop the baseball world. And that title came in the most unlikely year, when the 2021 Braves caught fire late in the season and won the World Series despite entering August with a sub-.500 record.
Better regular-season results and greater expectations going into the next two postseasons only led to playoff disappointment, with the Braves bowing out in the past two division series rounds.
The constant, though, has been Atlanta’s ability to turn the page and dominate the division during the next regular season. Raising a World Series trophy in 2021 didn’t bring a hangover in 2022 — instead it was yet another division win, this time running away with the NL East by 14 games. And falling short during the 2022 playoffs didn’t stop Atlanta from winning its sixth straight division title last season, also by 14 games. Even after watching their ace get hurt during a series opener earlier this month, the Braves went on to sweep the Arizona Diamondbacks and moved into first place once again.
“We have a great team,” first baseman Matt Olson said. “We absolutely feel like we should be playing in the postseason. but you have to earn it. It’s the build-up throughout the season that gets you to that spot and gives you the confidence to go perform in that setting. Nothing is given.”
It’s a practice preached by their 68-year-old father figure of a manager, Brian Snitker. In some ways, his situation is a manager’s dream: He has a talented team filled with self-motivated players he’ll have to drag out of the lineup for a day off. Keeping stars happy while prioritizing daily goals, instead of fixating on the big picture, is harder than it seems. Under his leadership, the Braves excel at not fast-forwarding their brains to October.
“I talked to the guys about that early on,” Snitker said. “It’s easy to do. It’s easy to say — but you have to win today. You can only control today. If you want to fast forward, you’ll realize it doesn’t work that way. Our guys know what’s ahead of them.”
With that message preached to them from the first day of spring training through the sometimes monotonous grind of the 162-game season, the Braves have learned to embrace that winning each day along the way makes reaching their loftier long-term goals taste even sweeter.
“When you’re playing MLB The Show, you can just simulate the playoffs, it’s human nature,” Morton said. “You want your ‘want’ now. Thankfully, we’re still in reality. We have to go through the process so if and when we win the division, we’re looking around the room and they have the tarp up and there is a toast and a feeling of satisfaction and it’s like we’ve been here before. Now let’s find a way to get it done this year.”
Anthopoulos and the rest of the Braves’ front office have learned that roster building is about focusing on the entire picture in a profession in which you are ultimately judged on the final result. The elation of winning a World Series in 2021 lasted about three days before the GM meetings and offseason ahead demanded their full attention. In the early October exits that followed, they learned that the simple difference between winning the World Series and losing in your first round is more time to prepare for the winter — but also more time to stew.
“As a front office, you kind of mope and feel sorry for yourself but then, ‘Hey, the offseason is here, we have to build a team,'” Anthopoulos said. “You don’t forget, but you have to turn the page because all your competitors are doing the same thing.”
If six straight division titles sounds impressive, then just imagine walking into work every day and staring up at the 14 banners the Braves won from 1991 to 2005. The standard of success is ever-present motivation within the organization. It also keeps everyone humble, from the decision-makers in the front office to the players on the field.
“We think six is a lot, right?” Morton said. “You can acknowledge the past because you really are standing on their shoulders. But you also have to find your own way as a group. That’s a year-by-year thing. It’s a delicate balance because you want to keep some of the guys involved in that in the room. You have to be careful who you’re moving and what those guys mean in the clubhouse.”
That’s Anthopoulos’ job. Praised for locking down his stars on multiyear deals, he still needs to find the right balance from season to season. Losing in October in consecutive years can distort your vision. The Braves GM tries to remember a simple principle.
“[Former executive] Pat Gillick said this, turning 20% of your roster over each year is a good idea,” Anthopoulos said. “That’s five players. We don’t force moves, but the way the game is set up it’s going to happen anyway.”
This offseason, that turnover came via a spree of trades primarily focused on creating pitching depth. Chris Sale, Aaron Bummer and Reynaldo Lopez joined the pitching staff, while outfielder Jarred Kelenic came over in a trade with Seattle. All told, Anthopoulos made a half-dozen trades this winter to surround the core of the team led by Ronald Acuna Jr., Austin Riley, Olson and Ozzie Albies.
But losing their ace early in the season means the biggest decisions could come in the days leading up to this summer’s trade deadline when the front office will have to decide whether to augment the pitching staff or roll with what the Braves have. The timing allows the front office an opportunity to do whatever it takes to put the best roster on the field when the games matter most in October.
“What team would you rather have going into the playoffs?” Morton asked rhetorically. “The 2021 Braves or the 2023 Braves? We won 104 games last season but came up short. When you get there, there’s just no way to know. There’s no way to know how the first couple games of a five-game playoff series are going to go. All you can do is the best you can do for six months. That’s our goal every year.”
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Bradford Doolittle
Which version of the 2025 Atlanta Braves is the real version of the 2025 Atlanta Braves?
The first few weeks of the season were quite a journey, one akin to a roller-coaster ride that, like the amusement park attraction, ended more or less where it began — at the beginning.
Entering the season, the Braves were considered the biggest threat to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ supremacy in the National League. While the Dodgers (preseason over/under of 103.5 wins at ESPN BET) were in a tier of their own, the Braves (93.5) topped the next tier, just ahead of a pair of division rivals in the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets.
Then Opening Day arrived, with the Braves starting off on a tough seven-game road trip against the San Diego Padres and Dodgers. Atlanta lost all seven games, scoring no runs or one run in four of those defeats.
That is not the way to knock the Dodgers off the mountaintop. Indeed, the old adage about early-season baseball has always been that you can’t win the pennant in April, but you might very well lose it. In becoming the 30th team since 1901 to begin a season with seven straight losses, the Braves flirted with some discouraging history.
Still, the Braves’ April story was as much defined by how they eventually responded to that early slump. Atlanta continued to flounder into the middle of the month, but then reeled off nine wins in 11 games, nearly leveling the ship.
The Braves haven’t yet reached the .500 mark this season, but it seems inevitable they soon will — and they already pushed their run differential out of negative territory. All in all, Atlanta can at least exhale after the initial stumbles.
To sum it up: Atlanta entered the campaign anointed as the Dodgers’ prime challenger — 2025 Braves version 1. They proceeded to put up one of the 30 worst starts in 125 years — 2025 Braves version 2. And before April was over, they’d already climbed back to break-even (or thereabouts) which, in effect, resets their near-disastrous season — 2025 Braves version 3.
Three very different versions of the same team. Which leads back to our initial question: Which Braves are the real Braves?
The 0-7 Braves make ugly history
As mentioned, the Braves are now one of 30 teams to begin a season 0-7, and it’s the fifth time a Braves club has appeared on that list, joining 1919, 1980, 1988 and 2016. That ties the Detroit Tigers for the most of any franchise.
Historically speaking, a start that bad and that prolonged rings the death knell in terms of pennant contention. None of the first 29 teams on the list made the playoffs. Indeed, only two managed to finish over .500, and none of the 29 ended with a positive run differential.
Thus, if the Braves complete their rapid climb back to .500 and keep that run differential in the black, they will have already subverted every other team on the 0-7 list. This really is not that surprising, because the 2025 Braves are way better than those other 29 teams.
In my historical database, among the various team measures I have are three-year power ratings, used to identify how strong (or not strong) teams were in multiseason windows. If we use Atlanta’s season-opening over/under figure as a proxy for their 2025 level, we can estimate their three-year power rating at 95.6 (or 95.6 wins per 162 games).
Only two of the other 29 teams on the 0-7 list had three-year power ratings of 81 or better — the 1945 Boston Red Sox and the 1983 Astros. Boston had a 86.6 three-year power rating, but it was a special case because of the sudden change in rosters across baseball tracing to players returning from military service. The 1945 Red Sox did not have Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr or Johnny Pesky. But the 1946 Red Sox had all of them, and won the pennant. A very different case than the 2025 Braves.
The 1983 Astros were more akin to these Braves, and were one of the two 0-7 starters that climbed back over .500 by the end of the season. (The other was the 1980 Braves, who finished 81-80 while being outscored by 30 runs.) Houston ended up 85-77 after its terrible start, which actually stretched to nine straight season-opening losses. The Astros finished three runs in the red in differential, however, and had a three-year power rating of 81.4, more than 14 wins shy of the current Braves.
So, of the 30 teams that started 0-7, the Braves were the most likely of them to bounce back from such a terrible beginning. They spent the last half of April proving that to be the case.
How the offense has helped fuel their turnaround
We’ve already noted how anemic the Braves’ offense was during their opening road trip. Atlanta averaged just two runs per game and batted .151 as a team during the skid. The Braves’ collective team OPS (.485) was the worst in baseball.
It took a while, but the Braves’ bats have heated up. Heading into their series with the Dodgers, Atlanta had scored 4.9 runs per game (10th in MLB) and posted a .779 OPS (fifth) since their slump. They’ve done this even as they continue to wait on Ronald Acuna Jr.’s season debut after last year’s knee surgery.
The drivers of the offensive uptick have been a little surprising. Sean Murphy had clubbed seven homers in 17 games since coming off the IL, one season after he hit 10 in 72 contests. Young catcher Drake Baldwin had a 1.009 OPS since April 3 and 30-year-old Eli White was at 1.012.
Those surprising outbursts, along with the expected contributions of Marcell Ozuna and Austin Riley, have helped the offense recover even as Matt Olson (.767 OPS), Michael Harris II (.614) and Ozzie Albies (.664) were still seeking to reach their career levels.
Still, issues linger
The Braves’ pitching still rates as roughly league average for the season as a whole. Last season’s NL Cy Young winner Chris Sale has been inconsistent so far, leaving Spencer Schwellenbach as the only rotation member producing at league average or better.
Sale should be fine, but the Braves very much need their big two to become a big three because of what looks like a lack of high-quality rotation depth. In other words, after getting just one start out of Spencer Strider over the season’s first few weeks, they need him to get healthy and stay that way. Strider (Grade 1 hamstring strain) is expected to return later this month.
In the bullpen, the Braves have been so-so, mostly because of the struggles of star closer Raisel Iglesias to keep the ball in the yard. After surrendering just four long balls in all of 2024, Iglesias coughed up five homers in his first 11 outings. Because the pitching has underachieved, the Braves’ bounce-back has been more warm than boiling.
But the recovery has been undergirded by pretty strong indicators. Atlanta’s run differential during the recent 14-9 stretch is equivalent to a 94-win team over a full season, putting the Braves on par with preseason expectations during that span. The problem of course is that 0-7 start.
The other problem is that the National League is full of really good teams.
Have you heard the NL is stacked?
The Braves sat at 14-16 through 30 games. Let’s say they maintain the 94-win quality they reached during their recovery over their remaining 132 games. That’s a .580 winning percentage, which gets Atlanta to 90 or 91 wins by the end of the season.
If all the teams in the NL were to maintain their current paces (which is admittedly unlikely), there would be five teams that finished with 96 wins or more — the Mets, Dodgers, Padres, Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants.
You can see the Braves’ dilemma: Only one playoff slot would be up for grabs. If Atlanta is able to get to 90 or 91 wins, it would be in the mix, but would need to hope that neither Philadelphia nor the Arizona Diamondbacks (both on pace for 88 wins) catch fire, or that one of the top five fall off.
The forecasts don’t rule out anything. At FanGraphs, the Braves are making the playoffs in about 70% of simulations, as their model sees the NL East contenders as better than the non-Dodgers contenders in the NL West. Baseball Prospectus has the Braves getting to 92 wins but reaching the playoffs just 54% of the time.
Finally, at ESPN BET, the Braves’ over/under for wins has fallen to 88.5, the same as Arizona but less than the Mets (94.5), Phillies (91.5) and Padres (89.5). The upstart Giants are at 84.5.
The Braves are back in the running, but those seven games, along with the strength of the top of the NL, have reduced their margin of error considerably.
How well will they play in May — and beyond — and will it be enough?
Atlanta’s season might depend on, well, May, or these key upcoming weeks before Strider and Acuna rejoin the team. However they got here, the Braves are currently a middle-of-the-pack team at the bottom line, both in the win-loss column and by run differential. If they continue at this level while waiting for their stars to return, the strong upper tier of the NL could move away from them.
The upcoming schedule, beginning with the current series against the Dodgers, is tough in ways both obvious and sneaky.
After L.A. departs on Sunday, the over-.500 Cincinnati Reds visit, before Atlanta travels to play the Pittsburgh Pirates. There are two series against the Washington Nationals, one at home and one away, and if you’re still thinking of the Nats as pushovers, you haven’t been paying attention.
There’s a return match with San Diego, a trip to Boston, a visit from the Red Sox, and a key three-game set on the road against the Phillies. It’s not an easy docket for any club, but especially for one missing two of its biggest stars.
The Braves have mostly righted their teetering ship after their stunning start. Since those seven opening losses, they’ve been what we thought they would be. Chances are, as the season progresses, players find their level and the roster gets healthier, that will continue to be the case.
The real Braves weren’t the team that started 0-7. They might be the team that’s played much better since. Now, in what’s shaping up as a crowded and strong upper tier in the NL playoff hierarchy, they have to hope that even if they maintain their expected level, it proves to be good enough for another trip to October.
BOSTON — Red Sox first baseman Triston Casas suffered what manager Alex Cora called a “significant” left knee injury after he awkwardly fell near first base in the bottom of the second inning against the Minnesota Twins on Friday night.
Speaking after Boston’s 6-1 win, Cora said Casas was taken to a local hospital, where he was undergoing more tests on the knee. He said the team would have more information Saturday.
Casas sent a slow roller up the first-base line that Twins starter Joe Ryan bobbled before making an underhand throw to first baseman Ty France. Casas, who was ruled safe on the Ryan error, collapsed to the ground holding his knee as he crossed the bag.
He was carried off the field on a stretcher and replaced by Romy Gonzalez.
“Seemed like he was in shock, to be honest with you,” Cora told reporters. “He said it right away that he didn’t feel it. …. It’s tough.
“He put so much effort in the offseason. I know how he works. Everything he went through in the offseason getting ready for this. He was looking forward to having a big season for us. It didn’t start the way he wanted, but he kept grinding, kept working. And now this happened.”
Casas entered Friday hitting .184 with three home runs in 28 games.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
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