An early-season 'to-do' list for Jarred Kelenic and Bryan De La Cruz

Don't want to get optioned down to the minors when Ronald Acuña Jr. returns? Here's what you need to do.

The Braves are going to have some decisions to make early this season.

Brand new addition Jose Suarez is one - out of options, he’s taking the final bullpen spot for Opening Day but will need to prove his worth before Spencer Strider returns, because someone will lose a job to add Spencer to the roster.

(We broke down the different scenarios in yesterday’s newsletter)

But another inflection point will be when Ronald Acuña Jr. returns to the everyday lineup from his left knee surgery, expected to come in early May. The current right field duo of Jarred Kelenic and Bryan De La Cruz will need to be broken up, with one of those players going to Triple-A Gwinnett to make a roster spot for Acuña.

Here’s what each player needs to do this season to avoid being the one sent down.

For Kelenic, it’s all about the bat

The Braves took on about $17M in dead money via a dizzying series of trades to get Jarred Kelenic last offseason from the Seattle Mariners.

Immediate returns were, charitably, mixed.

Kelenic started the season hot, going 12-26 with four runs scored and three RBI across the season’s first ten games. He had another hot streak in mid-June after taking over for the injured Michael Harris II in both centerfield and the top of the lineup, hitting .323 with five homers over a two-week span.

Outside of those heaters, he was disappointing. Kelenic followed up the season-opening hot streak with a month and a half of .184 batting average, .530 OPS baseball. He followed the June hot streak by hitting just .175 with a .559 OPS across the rest of the year, leading to him being essentially benched for the season’s final month.

We went into detail about what happened back in January, but suffice to say that Kelenic was caught in between fastballs and breaking/offspeed pitches, not performing against either pitch type.

Is This the Last Chance for Jarred Kelenic?

He reportedly spent time this offseason working with new hitting coach Tim Hyers, with Hyers and one of his assistants coming to Kelenic’s Wisconsin home to meet and work with him.

We haven’t really seen that work pay off yet - Kelenic went just 9-46 in spring, although he did hit two homers and four of those nine hits were for extra bases.

More consistency out of Kelenic in the season’s first four to six weeks would go a long way to make the case that he deserves to stick as the fourth outfielder when Ronald’s back. He doesn’t need to bat .300, but he needs to hit probably .240 (?) to show the team that Hyers’ work has stuck.

For De La Cruz, it’s the glove, not the bat

Don’t get me wrong, his bat has to improve - after the trade deadline, when he went from the Marlins to the Pirates, he was one of the worst hitters in all of baseball. Already not excelling with the Marlins (.245 average and a 26% strikeout rate), BDLC cratered to a .200 average and struck out an alarming 31% of the time in Pittsburgh.¹

But BDLC has a specific offensive role on this team - small side of a platoon in right field with Kelenic. In his career, BDLC has hit .270 against lefties, conveniently an area where Kelenic’s struggled so far in the majors (.206 last year, .192 for his career).

Here’s the thing, though - Kelenic has another skill set that De La Cruz doesn’t, and that’s his defense. Alex Anthopoulos told us that the team views Kelenic essentially as another centerfielder, being both speedy and having a strong arm.

De La Cruz is…not that.

He’s never been good in the outfield in his career, with his career-best OAA mark being exactly zero in his 58-game major league debut in 2021. He’s also gotten worse every season, going from 0 to -2 to -7, -8, and finally -17 last season.

He has a strong arm, but that’s it - his speed is average, but his poor reads and reactions mean that his range was only 4th percentile in the entire sport.

And there’s the rub. As long as Kelenic can hit even slightly okay for the Ronald-less stretch of the schedule, he has the defensive advantage over De La Cruz. The team can get by defensively without Kelenic if they choose to keep De La Cruz - Eli White’s also Gold Glove-caliber, per Anthopoulos - but the roster flexibility is a lot better with the speedy Kelenic on the bench versus Diet Jorge Soler.

1. Want to know truly how bad his bat was for the Pirates? BDLC was worth -1.2 WAR in just FORTY-FOUR GAMES.