Saying goodbye to Ian Anderson, playoff ace

Atlanta's 2025 rotation is set after Sunday's trade of Ian Anderson to the Los Angeles Angels. Will José Suarez stick around, or is he not long for the Braves bullpen?

The Atlanta Braves listened to the fans, kinda.

After a spring training slate full of walks from rotation candidate Ian Anderson, the writing was on the wall. Anderson walked 20 batters in his 20 innings in spring, a ratio helped by walking only two batters in his final three-inning outing on Sunday afternoon. After pairing all of those walks against only ten strikeouts, the fanbase was very vocal on social media that installing him as the 5th starter to open the season was not a good idea.

And the Braves listened, trading Ian Anderson to the Los Angeles Angels in return for lefty reliever José Suarez. Both pitchers are out of options and will need to either make their respective rosters or be designated for assignment, likely sending them to free agency.

Why’d Atlanta make this trade and what happens now? Let’s talk about it.

Rebuilding Ian’s value in Atlanta would have been hard

Ian Anderson mostly lived up to his draft pedigree for Atlanta. Taken #3 overall in 2016, Ian finished his Braves career with a 3.97 ERA in 52 starts.

But that’s just the regular season.

In eight career playoff games, Ian Anderson’s 4-0 with a 1.26 ERA, striking out 40 batters in 35.2 innings. He’s also walked seventeen in those 35.2 innings, the quintessential Ian Anderson Experience™. I was lucky enough to be at game three of the 2021 World Series when Ian Anderson had a no-hitter through five, although it never really felt like a no-hitter because he walked three and put another on base through a hit-by-pitch.

That type of postseason performance is valuable, even with a career 11% walk rate.

But getting back to that point wasn’t a guarantee for Ian Anderson, and there’s the problem.

This is sometimes referred to as “runway” - the ability to let a guy work himself back into shape at the major league level.

And when you’re contending for a World Series with a loaded rotation full of studs like Chris Sale, Spencer Schwellenbach, and (eventually) Spencer Strider, there’s just not a lot of runway there.

After Tommy John surgery, one of the last things that commonly comes back for pitchers is their control and command. Anecdotally, walk rates are one of the last things to return to somewhat normal for guys after major elbow surgery…and for a guy that already was rocking a career 10.4% walk rate, there was no guarantee it’d ever get there.

The regular season and postseason results for Ian Anderson represent someone you want to give as much time as possible to ‘figure it out’, but that’s not where the Braves are right now. This roster is built to win now, and running out a 5th starter with a 22.7% walk rate in spring training just isn’t something any contender can do¹, no matter how few hits or runs were actually tallied in that small spring sample.

Good thing the Angels aren’t serious contenders, huh?

Ian Anderson will take the long-man spot in LA’s pen to start the season, with the possibility of moving to the rotation if/when 5th starter Reid Detmers or Kyle “Dr. Emmett Brown” Hendricks² stumble early.

And if he figures it out, great! LA gets four seasons of a potential impact arm, one who would immediately become one of their best pitchers. But if he doesn’t, and that’s an entirely possible scenario, it won’t be the thing that ruins LA’s chances of contending in 2025.³

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Is Suarez fixable?

Truthfully, I’m not sure. He might not be in the time that Atlanta presumably has to get a fix in.

Remember, this is a World Series-contending team. Even hiding him away in the bullpen and using him in only blowouts can only go so far.

It wasn’t always this way. In the two-season span covering 2021 and 2022, Suarez was a useful swingman and back-of-the-rotation starter, putting up a 3.86 ERA in 207.1 innings. That’s broken between 34 starts and 11 relief appearances, most of them coming in 2021. He had a little problem with homers, sure - 25 (1.1 HR/9) - but nothing egregious.

And then the wheels fell off.

Suarez pitched to a 6.91 ERA in the last two seasons, striking out 84 in his 86 innings pitched but also walking 47. And truth be told, I don’t know for sure why. His four-seamer, which has consistently sat around 93, has never really been that good so it’s not degradation there. His pitch mix has changed - whose pitch mix doesn’t in modern MLB? - but not egregiously. There’s deteoriation in the results on his changeup, but I don’t think it explains all of it.

But I have some ideas about how to maybe fix it. I just don’t know if Atlanta has time.

Here’s what I’d do

Atlanta fans are already familiar with a lot of what I’m going to propose here, but let’s back off the heater and ramp up the sweeper usage.

Last season, Suarez held batters to a .167 BAA on his sweeper, but he threw it only 12.3% of the time.

At the same time, he threw the four-seamer over 40% of the time despite the .280 batting average and .480 slug allowed on the pitch.

What’s the Atlanta response when you have an outlier breaking pitch that performs well? Throw it more.

I’m not suggesting this might get to a Pierce Johnson-caliber domination of his pitch mix⁴. What I am suggesting, however, is to throw it more than once every eight pitches.

Is it a perfect plan? No. Sweepers have the highest platoon splits of any pitch in baseball. But it is a plan.

There are other things I’d ask him to do as well - use the cutter more as a bridge between the fastball and sweeper, as it has above-average movement, as well as attempt to tweak the slider to get more drop on it, similar to a gyro - but the sweeper usage is potentially the biggest change here.

Does he have time to implement a fix?

Here’s the problem, though - Suarez is on a limited timeframe. Spencer Strider’s due back sometime in mid-April, tentatively, and someone will be losing a job to make a spot for him.

Here are the likely scenarios when that day comes:

Scenario A: A starter needs to go on the injured list. The cleanest solution, as you replace them with Strider and essentially kick that decision down the road to whenever that starter returns off the IL.

Scenario B: AJ Smith-Shawver stumbles in the rotation. Another clean, albeit disappointing, solution as you simply option him back to Gwinnett and put Strider in his spot.

Scenario C: Someone moves to the bullpen. This is the best scenario for Atlanta because it means that no one is hurt (scenario A) and no one is bad (scenario B). But it does mean that someone like Daysbel Hérnandez needs to get either optioned to Gwinnett or someone without options needs to get DFA’d/waived/traded to make a spot for a Grant Holmes to kick back down to the pen.

That person, as of right now, is extremely likely to be José Suarez. And that’s even if he’s not pitching terribly, which is not a guarantee.

The most likely outcome is José Suarez gets DFA’d in three weeks, but there wouldn’t be the same amount of public outcry then as if Atlanta had DFA’d Ian Anderson now.

In a way, this can be thought of as kicking the can down the road on the decision of who to DFA - by bringing in someone new, you ostensibly buy them a bit of an evaluation period before they’re either kept or DFA’d themselves.

It’s an ignominious end to the Atlanta tenure of Ian Anderson and probably not the start of a very long José Suarez one, either.

But it had to be done. Best wishes and good luck, Ian.

1. Truth be told, an 11.4% walk rate and 22.7% strikeout rate wouldn’t be great but you could live with it. But a 22.7% walk rate and just a 11.4% strikeout rate? Oof.

2. Because his fastball averaged 88 mph last season.

3. That thing would be, uh, everything else about the Angels.

4. After the trade from Colorado to Atlanta in 2023, Johnson ramped up his curveball usage to around 70% and drastically cut both his four-seam and cutter usage.