Atlanta’s Pitching Injuries Keep Piling Up

Bad injury news for a member of your rotation is always unwelcome, so the Braves had a very unhappy Wednesday, with two starting pitchers hitting the IL to go along with a loss in their series closer with the Red Sox.

In Atlanta’s current era of success since its last rebuild, there’s no pitcher that has been more crucial to the team’s fortunes than Max Fried. Since his debut in 2017, he has amassed 14.4 WAR, more than double that of any other pitcher on the roster (next up is Charlie Morton at 6.5). He’s already missed time this season due to an injury, a hamstring strain that cost him two weeks in April. The current injury, however, is far more serious, one that will measure in months rather than days or weeks.

Expectation has been Fried and Wright will both be sidelined for at least two months. With this being his second shoulder ailment of the year, Wright thinks he could be out longer than Fried.

— Mark Bowman (@mlbbowman) May 10, 2023

A forearm strain is usually enough to cause serious and forlorn eyebrow-raising, but the silver lining here is that the MRI on Fried’s elbow didn’t reveal an injury severe enough to require surgery. This is especially important given that he already had Tommy John surgery back when he was a prospect with the Padres. That previous procedure cost him part of 2014 and all of ’15, and the basic truth is that though medicine has made progress and that Tommy John surgeries aren’t career-enders to the degree they used to be, repeat procedures have considerably less success. In this 2016 study of so-called revision Tommy John surgery, less than half of the pitchers looked at even pitched in 10 major league games afterward, and they saw their average career length drop in half compared to first-time patients.

If losing Fried wasn’t enough, Kyle Wright was pulled from his last start in the third inning due to shoulder pain and will also miss an indeterminate amount of time with a shoulder strain. It’s his second shoulder issue this season, and all indications are that this one may leave him out for even longer than Fried.

Kyle Wright said he will probably be sidelined longer than fellow #Braves starter Max Fried, because the shoulder strain was a repeat for Wright. So the #Braves and medical staff will be cautious and let it heal fully before he resumes throwing, to avoid more issues and surgery.

— David O'Brien (@DOBrienATL) May 10, 2023

Generally speaking, I haven’t known pitchers to give bearish analyses of their own health unless something is very wrong.

After Wright’s breakout 2022, he clearly hasn’t been sharp at the same level this season. His walk rate, a problem in the majors he finally appear to conquer last year, has ballooned in his five starts; his velocity was down; and the exit velocity against him went up.

Replacing either one of Fried or Wright in the short term will be very difficult. President of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos quickly threw cold water on the idea that a trade to remedy the situation is imminent or even likely to happen:

“Trade season doesn’t really begin until the All-Star break so trades aren’t likely,” Alex Anthopoulos told The Athletic Wednesday. “Of course, everyone still stays engaged, but realistically there’s a reason almost all deals get done around the trade deadline.”

Does he feel any level of urgency to add to the rotation, given the circumstances?

“It’s hard to answer it that way,” he said. “I just know before July 31 you’re always likely to look internally. That’s for all teams, so whenever we have performance or injury issues early, we always follow the same process.”

It’s not difficult to understand why Anthopoulos is shooting down the idea of a quick trade. It’s highly accurate to say that teams rarely trade excellent starters at this point of the season for any reason. In our current playoff probabilities, only seven teams project with less than a 20% chance of making the playoffs. Of these seven, most have already been stripped bare of most of their pitching: Colorado’s best pitcher is out for the season, and Washington, Oakland, Cincinnati, and Kansas City are devoid of any interesting veteran starters. (I’m guessing the Nationals would be happily willing to trade Patrick Corbin, but unless science discovers that throwing crushable sliders is the greatest medical breakthrough of the 21st century, I would not recommend that.) That basically leaves the Tigers and White Sox. Eduardo Rodriguez would be an interesting acquisition for someone — he’s only allowed nine runs across eight starts — but he’s signed to a long deal, and Detroit may not be motivated to trade him. You could see Chicago start to sell if the team doesn’t surge into relevance, but probably not until later this summer.

The further problem in making a trade is that Atlanta doesn’t have as much to offer other teams as it used to. The farm system has been incredibly productive over the last six or seven years, but graduations, trades, and time have emptied out the larder. Not a single Braves prospect made our Top 100 list this year, and ZiPS was no more optimistic, with no Braves in its top 100 and only a single player in its top 200 (Jared Shuster). If the Tigers suddenly made it known they were shopping Rodriguez, teams like the Orioles or Cardinals could more easily put together a winning package for his services.

But there’s good news! Well, sort of. Even with our depth charts now reflecting significant time missed due to injury, ZiPS and Steamer still combine to rank the Braves sixth in baseball in starting pitching. Spencer Strider seems likely to end up in the Cy Young award picture this fall, Morton has pitched well (though his strikeout drop is concerning), and Bryce Elder, though far less explosive than either, has been quietly competent; we can feel more confidence in his contribution than we did at the start of the season. Michael Soroka could conceivably return to the majors this year, and the projection systems, while not enthralled with either, see both Shuster and Dylan Dodd as safely above replacement level.

Perhaps most crucially, the Braves have been fortunate in their enemies this year. While the Mets were largely expected to put up a serious fight against the Braves, they’ve had their own pitching injuries/woes and are currently just trying to get over the .500 mark. The Phillies have had struggles of their own, and the Marlins’ offense looks like it could get shutout in a tee-ball game. A 6 1/2-game lead is hardly an impregnable barrier for an also-ran, but it’s also a fairly comfortable cushion for this point in the season. Assuming two months for Fried and three months for Wright, the ZiPS projections still paint a rosy picture for Atlanta:

Even with the losses due to injury, which also include Ian Anderson, who underwent Tommy John surgery in April, there have been enough improvements elsewhere that ZiPS sees Atlanta’s current rest-of-season roster to be only six points of winning percentage weaker than the squad that started the 2023 season (.578 versus .584). Over a 162-game season, that only amounts to one win, and since those preseason projections, the team’s most dangerous divisional rival, the Mets, have lost nine points of projected roster strength. The net result is that the Braves project, at least by ZiPS’ reckoning, at a much higher probability of winning the division now (77.6%) compared to March (52.3%).

Just how effective is Atlanta’s cushion? To gauge this, I asked ZiPS the inverse question: how little do you have to like the Braves’ roster before their divisional playoff probability drops below preseason levels? In this case, it takes dropping them all the way from .578 to .527, the latter a mere 85-win pace over 162 games. In other words, even if you think the computers are being optimistic or you expect some additional misfortune, that’s a pretty big buffer Atlanta has. Losing Fried and Wright for the year — which has not yet been discussed as a possibility — still leaves the Braves as heavy divisional favorites without a trade (64.4%). The Twins currently have the best divisional probability of any team that’s not the Braves, at 63.1%

The Braves faced some bad news yesterday, but this is a well-constructed team with a healthy lead in the division. To send Atlanta on vacation in October will likely require a lot more disasters than these two unwelcome losses.