Has Alex Anthopoulos Waited Too Long To Invest in the Rotation?

Atlanta’s front office has trusted development and trades over free-agent starters since 2020. Was that discipline, or overcaution?

There is growing frustration across Braves Country in the wake of Spencer Schwellenbach’s injury, and it only intenisified when Hurston Waldrep was presumably lost on Sunday to coming elbow surgery. The belief that Atlanta needed additional rotation reinforcements existed before those injuries. After them, that belief hardened.

But this moment did not appear out of nowhere.

For more than five years, Alex Anthopoulos and the Atlanta Braves have largely avoided signing established free-agent starting pitchers at market rates, leaning instead on internal development, short-term trades, and creative conversions. That strategy has produced a Cy Young winner, playoff berths, and sustained contention. It has also created a razor-thin margin for error. The question now is whether that margin has finally become too thin.

Has Atlanta’s front office become too cautious when it comes to investing in starting pitching? Let’s talk about it.

The last starting pitcher he signed

The last free-agent starting pitcher signed specifically to start under Anthopoulos was Charlie Morton on November 24, 2020.

Read that again.

The Atlanta Braves haven’t signed a free agent starting pitcher in over five years.

Some explanation is required, however, as there’s nuance to this.

The Braves have made midseason adds of a veteran starter that was designated for assignment; Morton himself is one of those names, signing in late September last year to make one final start in Atlanta before retiring.¹

All of Atlanta’s offseason rotation additions in recent seasons have come via one of two routes: converting a reliever or making a trade.

The most noteworthy trade acquisition is, clearly, Chris Sale. Atlanta acquired him and his 2024 salary in December of 2023, just days before the start of the new year, for former prospect Vaughn Grissom. It’s a trade that Anthopoulos knew could potentially be unpopular at the time, with the POBO telling chairman Terry McGuirk, “look, it’s gonna get loud,” from the fans when the charismatic young infielder was moved for an oft-injured starting pitcher with a large contract.

But that’s not nearly the only trade for a starter of Anthopoulos’ tenure. Many were short-term emergency depth due to injuries - Carlos Carrasco and Erick Fedde last season, or Ray Kerr in 2023 (who checks both boxes - he was a reliever who they acquired and then converted into a starter) or Kolby Allard in 2022.

The rest of the rotation additions have come via reliever conversions. The aforementioned Kerr didn’t work out due to injury, with Kerr making just two starts in 2024 before going down for Tommy John surgery. Grant Holmes and Reynaldo López were both free agent additions who were working as relievers at the time of the deal, with Atlanta shifting them into the rotation after they were acquired.

The rest of the Braves' rotation has been built thanks to internal development largely, although injuries and free agency have thinned those options somewhat. Michael Soroka, Kyle Wright, and Ian Anderson are all no longer with Atlanta due to injury, while Max Fried departed in free agency after the 2024 season. Spencer Schwellenbach and Spencer Strider represent the biggest prospect wins among pitching prospects of this era of Braves baseball, although AJ Smith-Shawver and Hurston Waldrep both have the tools to join that group once they return from their respective elbow injuries. Atlanta’s farm system has several promising prospect arms, including JR Ritchie, Owen Murphy, Luke Sinnard, and Garrett Baumann, any of whom could debut in 2026 or 2027.

It didn’t used to be this way

Anthopoulos wasn’t always averse to paying free agent prices to starting pitchers. In the first few seasons of his Braves tenure, he added multiple arms in free agency, including Cole Hamels and Dallas Keuchel in 2019 and both Morton and Drew Smyly in 2020.

The difference here, I think, is where the market went and how those signings fared.

It’s hard to call Morton anything but a success. Joining for 2021 on a $15M salary, Morton led all of MLB in starts with 33 that season, pitching to a 3.31 ERA/3.18FIP en route to the team’s first World Series win since the mid-90s. Who can forget Morton throwing 16 pitches on a broken leg after a comebacker from Yuli Gurriel, later striking out Jose Altuve and the fibula fully fracturing nearly 30 minutes after the initial impact?

And then Morton apologized he couldn’t do more. He literally went out to pitch on a broken leg, fueled only by a quick x-ray that didn’t catch the slight break and his will to lead the rotation to the Promised Land, and then apologized that his outing was only two and a third innings.

But outside of Morton, who signed for $20M salaries in the coming years and stayed for five late-career seasons in Atlanta, the rest of the signings were underwhelming. Keuchel, who didn’t sign until midseason to avoid the qualifying offer penalties, debuted for Atlanta in late June and pitched to a solid 3.75 ERA/4.72 FIP before leaving in free agency. Hamels made only one start, pitching 3.1 innings in 2020, before retiring, while Smyly had a 4.48 ERA/5.11 FIP and was moved to the bullpen down the stretch in 2021.

Those free agent signings were a departure from Anthopoulos’ established pattern with the Toronto Blue Jays, whom he ran from October 2009 through the 2015 season. There, he preferred the trade route, acquiring veteran Mark Buehrle from Miami in a massive twelve-player deal in November 2012 and pairing him with reigning Cy Young winner R.A. Dickey in December, trading away future major leaguers Noah Syndergaard and Travis d’Arnaud to do it. He even targeted front-line starters in-season, with rental David Price being acquired at the 2014 trade deadline.

Acquiring a frontline starter via trade has always been his preferred MO.

Is this a problem?

The easy answer that a lot of fans have at the moment is “yes”, but I think more nuance is needed here.

Did Anthopoulos see the one-in-four success rate of his 2019-2020 free agent pitcher signings with the Braves and decide to pivot back to his original strategy of draft, develop, and supplement with a star via trade? We don’t know for sure, but it’s entirely possible.

There’s no doubt that his trade acquisitions have been better than his free agent signings in production. Sale won the 2024 Cy Young award in the National League and is set to lead Atlanta’s rotation for a third season. Price went 9-1 with a 2.30 ERA down the stretch, all while making a prorated portion of his $19.75M arbitration salary. Toronto got three years of 3.78 ERA baseball out of Buehrle at the end of his career, while Dickey never lived up to his 2012 Cy Young campaign but still twice led baseball in starts during his three years in Toronto and finished with a 4.05 ERA in a Blue Jays uniform.

In the last few seasons, the Braves have reportedly been involved in negotiations for, but unable to land frontline starting options outside of Sale, despite reported interest in Dylan Cease, Garrett Crochet, Justin Verlander, and Freddy Peralta.

The real issue isn’t the inability to make those trades. There are very few frontline starting pitchers in baseball, and teams are loath to part with them at low cost.

Instead, the real problem has been that Anthopoulos has not been willing to add to his rotation at market rates. Some of those reported frontline trade targets eventually made it to free agency, with Cease signing with the Blue Jays (of all teams) just this winter. We’re all familiar with the ‘Atlanta Max’ of $22M at this point, and it’s hard to argue that its existence hasn’t hampered the team in this one specific area.

Here’s a list of pitchers making more than $22M AAV this season, excluding extensions, arbitration awards, and re-signings:

Framber Valdez
Jacob DeGrom
Blake Snell
Gerrit Cole
Corbin Burnes
Dylan Cease
Max Fried
Carlos Rodon
Ranger Suarez
Nathan Eovaldi
Sonny Gray
Michael King
Aaron Nola
Robbie Ray
Luis Severino
Kevin Gausman
Nathan Eovaldi
Zac Gallen

There are very few names on this list that, even if they did not supplant Sale at the top of the rotation, would not bump multiple Braves starters down to a lesser role. While many of these names did receive qualifying offers, and we know that Atlanta does not want to sacrifice a draft pick (having done it exactly once in the entire Anthopoulos tenure)², it’s hard to argue that having any of these arms would make the Braves a worse team, even at some of their inflated contract valuations.

And I think that’s the big takeaway here.

In a vacuum, it’s defensible to not want to extend over the ‘Atlanta Max’ to get a frontline starting pitcher at market free agency rates. But if that is your position, executing the trades and nailing the internal development is critical. It’s a tripod: drafting and developing, acquiring via trade, and mining the free-agency market.. Cutting away any one leg of the stool makes it a balancing act, and the Braves are now in danger of tipping over.

If this iteration of the Atlanta Braves ends up not winning another World Series, it is going to feel like a failure. As much as offensive underperformance and injuries have played a massively outsized role in Atlanta’s last two underwhelming seasons, it’s hard to argue that this inability to supplement the rotation with more established major league talent isn’t right up there with the first two reasons.

Again, this is a defensible stance for a front office to take: not going to market rates for frontline starters in free agency means not concentrating an unusually high percentage of income in a few top performers with significant injury risks. Nobody wants to have $30M in annual salary sidelined after elbow or shoulder surgery. But unfortunately, legacies are defined by the end results, not the measured and calculated way the team was set up to pursue those end results.

And Anthopoulos is in danger of tarnishing the legacy he’s built in Atlanta over the last ten years.

1. I’m told he has not actually submitted retirement paperwork to the league, however, or if he has, it hasn’t yet been processed. So you’re saying there’s a chance?

2. Believe it or not, for signing reliever Will Smith prior to the 2021 season. Hard to argue it didn’t work out in the end, given the whole “not allowing a run in the entire 2021 postseason” thing.