Spencer Strider’s Return to the IL Complicates Atlanta’s Season

The Braves entered 2024 with high hopes for the coming season, but their campaign ended in disappointing fashion. After making the playoffs by the slimmest of margins, they were unceremoniously eliminated by the Padres. It’s now been more than seven months since Atlanta’s early exit, and the calendar has flipped to a new season. The same cannot be said for the team’s fortunes.

Indeed, the Braves have started off this year in a funk, and not of the good Sly and the Family Stone variety. A season-opening series against the Padres, followed by a trip to Chavez Ravine for a matchup with the defending-champion Dodgers, left Atlanta with seven losses to start the season and Reynaldo López on the IL for most, if not all, of 2025. A sweep of the similarly underwhelming Minnesota Twins staunched the bleeding somewhat, but another wound opened up soon after, as Spencer Strider strained his hamstring playing catch on Monday and returned to the IL just one start after coming back from major elbow surgery.

A 9-14 start, even when coupled with the loss of López and Strider, doesn’t make 2025 a lost cause, but it does complicate matters considerably. Let’s first look back at the ZiPS preseason projections for the NL East standings.

The ZiPS projection system saw Atlanta as the favorite, but only by a hair, with the Mets and Phillies projected to be essentially as dangerous as the Braves. There was significant daylight between ZiPS and the FanGraphs Depth Charts projections, which pegged Atlanta with a six-win margin over Philadelphia and a seven-win cushion over New York. A large part of this difference likely comes down to methodology. In the FanGraphs projections, for ease of calculation, innings pitched and plate appearances are static, meaning that Chris Sale would always be projected to throw 182 innings, Ronald Acuña Jr. would always be expected to take 525 plate appearances, and so on. ZiPS uses a Monte Carlo approach, meaning that in some projections, Sale would throw those 182 innings, but sometimes he would reach 190, or only get to 150, or 100, or sometimes even 0. Telling ZiPS to match the FanGraphs playing time exactly would have given the Braves a 91-win projection and nearly the same margin of victory over their NL East rivals.

So, what’s the difference? Simply put, ZiPS liked the Braves best if things worked out, but due to their lack of depth at most positions, saw them as less resilient than the Phillies or Mets should things go wrong. Losing López for a long stretch of the season is something going very wrong. The extent of Strider’s hamstring injury is still unknown, at least publicly, but my personal belief is that the team is unlikely to be aggressive with his return, considering he just missed an entire year after undergoing an internal brace procedure to reconstruct his UCL.

Coming into 2025, ZiPS saw the Braves with a .550 roster. Before the start of play Tuesday, which is when I ran the projections for this piece, that had declined by 11 points of winning percentage (the same decline as on our Depth Charts) to a .539 projection. Again, not fatal, but if you think of the rest of the season as a footrace beginning now, the Braves are starting off behind the other contenders, rather than even with them.

A lot of teams would be happy with a 44% chance of making the playoffs, but for Atlanta, it represents the evaporation of more than a third of its playoff odds in just three weeks. With the Mets and Phillies both faring well in April, the Braves have seen an even more significant slashing to their odds to win the NL East, which is down nearly two-thirds since Opening Day.

How much could a major addition help the Braves? How much could another injury hinder them? To answer this question, I reprojected Atlanta’s playoff odds, changing the projected roster strengths in intervals of five percentage points.

The bottom of this chart highlights one of the problems with a scenario in which the Braves make a massive acquisition: The combination of the current standings and the strength of their opponents limits the utility of a big trade when it comes to winning the division. And that’s important given that winning the division is necessary to have a chance at skipping a coin-flippy first round of the playoffs. If you add 40 points of roster strength to the Braves, basically the equivalent of acquiring Bobby Witt Jr. or Aaron Judge, which would not happen without breaking many state and federal laws, Atlanta still wouldn’t get all the way back to its preseason outlook. The gain of 16 percentage points of divisional probability is less than you’d get from repeating the same exercise with other disappointing April contenders, such as the Orioles (19 points, 20% to 39%), the Twins (23 points, 13% to 36%), the Cardinals (25 points, 7% to 32%), or the Astros (29 points, 39% to 68%).

Strangely enough, considering a midseason acquisition isn’t likely to have that much of an impact, the most logical approach for the Braves might simply be to try and get everyone healthy, stay the course, and cross as many fingers as are available.

However, regardless of whether or not the Braves swing a significant swap, if they are going to make a comeback, they’d better get started soon — without Strider and Acuña, who is still at least a few weeks away from returning from his ACL surgery. Even with another matchup with the Dodgers set for the first weekend of May, ZiPS projects these next few weeks to be the softest remaining stretch of Atlanta’s schedule, with series against the Rockies, Reds, Pirates, and Nationals. To illustrate this, I projected the NL East standings on May 23 if each NL East team plays up to its projected preseason record for the next month.

In other words, if over the next month the Braves they simply win as often as they were expected to back in March, they would see their October chances deteriorate further. They could still limp into the playoffs as a wild card like they did last year, but that would be extremely unsatisfying given their optimism entering the season. Nobody ever wins a division in April, but you can lose a division in April, and unless a turnaround comes soon, that may just be what has happened in Atlanta.