One of the foundational assumptions of the past 10 years in baseball is that the Braves will always figure something out. Their run of six straight division titles from 2018 to 2023 placed them in a conversation with the Dodgers and Astros as the one of the most consistently successful teams in baseball.

The Braves run a big payroll, but not on a level that allows them to outspend their mistakes. And those mistakes have been few. They always make smart trades, always get their star players to sign under-market extensions, always develop their own talent well. You could argue that the Braves have had more success developing undersized right-handed college starters named Spencer than the Orioles have had with their own pitching prospects of any size, name, and origin over the past 30 years.

But as Atlanta tries to bounce back from its first losing season since 2017, that sense of inevitability is fading. Spencer Schwellenbach is out until midseason with bone spurs in his elbow, and as of Monday, Spencer Strider has a strained oblique muscle and will start the season on the IL. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about speedster Braiden Ward’s record spring, whether there’s a baseball equivalent of Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game, and Paradise being a baseball show, then preview the 2026 Atlanta Braves (38:00) with From the Diamond’s Grant McAuley, and the 2026 Chicago White Sox (1:29:45) with Sox Machine’s James Fegan.

Audio intro: Dave Armstrong and Mike Murray, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Harold Walker, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Alex Ferrin, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ward article 1
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Link to Minor’s 200th K article
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Link to team payrolls page
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Link to spring standings
Link to Strider velo article
Link to 2025 team SS WAR
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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Atlanta Braves. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2024, 11 years after he was the consensus no. 1 prospect in the game, Jurickson Profar finally broke out, setting career highs in home runs (24), wRC+ (139) and WAR (4.3), making his first All-Star team, and helping the Padres to an NL Wild Card berth. He cashed in that winter; after never making more than $7.75 million in a season, Profar signed a three-year, $42 million deal with the Braves. Four games into his tenure with his new team, however, he drew an 80-game suspension for violating the Joint Drug Agreement. While he was productive upon returning and figured prominently in the plans of a team expected to contend for the NL East title this season, on Tuesday, the 33-year-old outfielder drew a second PED suspension, this one for the entire 2026 season.

Profar wasn’t the only player reported to be facing a PED suspension on Tuesday, or even the only NL East outfielder who had run afoul of the game’s drug policy. According to multiple sources, the Phillies’ Johan Rojas has an 80-game suspension looming for a first-time offense. While MLB officially announced Profar’s suspension in a press release sent at 6:47 p.m. ET on Tuesday — over six hours after ESPN’s Jeff Passan first broke the news — Rojas’ is not yet official.

Both players are reportedly appealing their suspensions. An hour after Passan’s tweet, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that the Major League Baseball Players Association is filing a grievance on Profar’s behalf. It’s not clear yet on what grounds the union is challenging the suspension, but such a case would be heard by MLB’s independent arbitrator, Martin F. Scheinman. Later that afternoon, The Athletic’s Charlotte Varnes and Matt Gelb reported that Rojas is appealing his suspension, as well. He is starting in center field and batting seventh in Philadelphia’s exhibition game on Wednesday against Team Canada. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, Chris Sale no longer has to do what he does under the cloud of a one-year contract. On Tuesday, the Braves announced they’d signed their soon-to-be 37-year-old ace to a one-year contract extension with a team option for 2028. The deal represents a huge raise. Sale is making $18 million this year – the team option year at the end of the two-year extension he signed back in 2024 – and the new extension will pay him $27 million in 2027. If the Braves pick up the 2028 option, they’ll pay him $30 million. No word of a buyout for that final year has been reported, and the announcement included no mention of a 1% donation to the Atlanta Braves Foundation.

Even though the Braves are not getting the kind of discount you associate with a contract extension, this seems like a no-brainer for them. Yes, they’re paying ace prices for the age-37 (and possibly age-38) season of a pitcher whose injury history includes a Tommy John surgery and five variations on the word “fracture.” But Sale really is an ace, and his performance has showed no signs of dropping off. Since he arrived in Atlanta in 2024 (and for the sake of Red Sox fans, I won’t mention how he got there), Sale has a 25-8 record with a 2.46 ERA and 2.33 FIP. He’s struck out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced, and he won the Cy Young award in his first season with the team. In 2025, his four-seamer averaged 94.8 mph. That’s above average, especially for a left-handed starter, and especially for someone with a funky sidearm delivery, and especially when you factor in the bump in effective velocity due to the above-average extension from his 6-foot-6 frame. That’s a lot of especiallys making Sale’s velocity play up, and it’s reassuring to know that it has looked pretty stable in recent years.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves opened spring training with the hopes of getting a healthier season out of their starting rotation this year. While it took a lot of things going wrong to drop the Braves to a 76-86 record in 2025, their worst record since 2017, the myriad injuries suffered by the starting pitching played an outsized role in their misfortune. Unfortunately, the Braves didn’t even get to the first exhibition game before the news broke that two of their starting pitchers, Spencer Schwellenbach and Hurston Waldrep, would have to undergo elbow surgery, with no estimated timeline for their returns.

If there’s a silver lining to manager Walt Weiss’s uncertainty about whether either Schwellenbach or Waldrep would pitch this year, it’s that neither surgery is of the Tommy John flavor, which would pretty much guarantee that both would miss the entire season. Instead, both surgeries are to remove loose bodies from their throwing elbows; Schwellenbach had his procedure on Wednesday, while Waldrep’s is scheduled for Monday. Yes, removing loose bodies sounds like the job description of a bouncer at a hot nightclub, but in this case it refers to the removal of small fragments of bone and cartilage present in the joint.

Regardless, both pitchers are bound to be out for an extended period of time, and their absences will surely be felt in Atlanta. Waldrep was solid for the Braves in 2025, putting up a 3.21 FIP in nine starts, and Schwellenbach looked well on target for a 4-WAR season before an elbow fracture ended his season in late June. Read the rest of this entry »

“I will start with the easy answer:” wrote Jeff Zimmerman back in 2014. The next part was bolded: “No, first and second half stats are not as important as the entire season for pitchers and hitters.” Jeff was talking about fantasy baseball, and whether you should consider a particularly strong or weak second half more relevant to a player’s future performance, but the lesson was clear. Overall stats tell you a lot more about a player than half a season of stats.

The same lesson is true over the course of a career. Since 1933, the year of the first All-Star Game, Stathead says that 2,146 players have made at least 900 career plate appearances in both the first half and the second half. Just under 93% of those players have a second half OPS that’s within 10% of their first half OPS. (We’re using percentages here rather than raw points in order to create a level playing field for players of varying skill levels. I calculated them by subtracting each player’s first half OPS from their second half OPS, then dividing the difference by their first half OPS.) Only 15 players – again, that’s 15 players out of a sample of 2,146 – saw their second half OPS differ from their first half OPS by more than 20%.

All of this makes sense. There’s no reason that a batter should be consistently better at the beginning or end of the season. As Eno Sarris once reminded us, seasons themselves are arbitrary endpoints. Most of the 15 outliers I mentioned in the previous paragraph are the results of short, noisy samples, either because they had short careers or they’re still in the early stages of their career right now. The longer your career, the more likely that your true talent level will shine through, regardless of the date on the calendar. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Montgomery helped the Rangers win their first World Series in 2023, but since then, things haven’t gone so well for him. First, he had a rough trip through free agency, then pitched poorly after signing a one-year deal with Arizona, left Scott Boras’ agency, publicly blasted Boras, got blasted by Diamondbacks managing partner Ken Kendrick… and underwent his second Tommy John surgery, which cost him all of the 2025 season. While rehabbing, he was even traded to the Brewers in a salary dump. After all that drama, now he’s a Ranger again.

On Wednesday morning, the day after Rangers pitchers and catchers reported to the team’s spring training facility in Surprise, Arizona, the Dallas Morning News’ Evan Grant reported that the 33-year-old lefty will join Texas on a one-year deal with a $1.25 million base salary and as-yet-unreported incentives. Montgomery had his surgery last April 1, so he won’t be ready until sometime in midseason, but the hope is that he can help the Rangers down the stretch.

With camps opening this week, Montgomery isn’t the only free agent who’s found a new home. On Tuesday, fellow starter Aaron Civale signed a one-year contract with the A’s, while Montgomery’s former Rangers batterymate Jonah Heim inked a one-year deal with the Braves. I’ll round all of these up below. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things that happens when pitchers and catchers report to camp is that managers update everyone on any unreported offseason developments. Unfortunately, few of those updates are about fun new cocktails they tried or animals they saw on vacation. It brings me no pleasure to tell you I have yet to see one single beat reporter file a story about a manager who saw a really cool sea turtle while snorkeling. Most of those developments are injuries, which meant that Tuesday was at once a glorious rite of the coming spring and an unbearably heavy dump of unpleasant injury news. Today we’re going to focus on the depressing dump, so courtesy of Andy Kostka of The Baltimore Banner, here’s a gorgeous picture that captures the eternal hope of spring training as a little pre-casualty report treat to soften the blow.

Wow. That was beautiful. Thank you, Andy. Now we’ll get miserable, but please remember that it could always be worse. We could be back in the 1880s, when the unpleasant health updates weren’t about who broke their hamate bone, but about who died of consumption. (The preceding sentence was originally intended to be a joke, but guess what.) Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, Ha-Seong Kim’s whirlwind offseason took a jarring tumble. After opting out of his contract with the Braves (really his contract with the Rays, which the Braves assumed after they claimed him off waivers), he turned around and signed a one-year, $20 million deal to remain in Atlanta. But disaster struck when he slipped on a sheet of ice and tore a tendon in his right middle finger. That injury required surgery that will sideline Kim for four to five months, including roughly the first two months of the regular season.

This will be the second straight season where Kim misses significant time due to injury. In late 2024, he tore his labrum on a pickoff throw, then injured his hamstring and later his calf while rehabbing, costing him the first half of 2025. He then hit the IL twice with back injuries last year. In all, he managed just 191 plate appearances and looked understandably rusty.

That star-crossed sequence has to raise questions about the future course of Kim’s career. How could it not? It’s not so much that any of these injuries are devastating on their own, but this much missed playing time over two-plus years of his prime is no laughing matter. Last year, he never hit his stride after a late start. This year, it’s fair to expect more of the same. Even without knowing how Kim’s injured finger might affect him upon his return, our projection systems have him down for a below-average offensive line. Read the rest of this entry »