It’s entirely possible that you loved the movie Clue, which hit theaters in 1985, as you walked out of the showing on opening weekend. But your friends who saw different screenings of the same movie you saw may have thought it was a frustrating ending that didn’t make sense.
That’s because there wasn’t one solitary version of the movie, but rather three. Paramount distributed three different versions of the film, with each screening playing one of three possible endings. Everything was the same through most of the movie - the same lies, schemes, and scattered clues throughout the mansion from the same characters - but the final result pinned the actual murder on one of three characters, depending on the specific theater you sat in to see the movie.
It radically changed the story, with the importance of those clues and the audience’s judgment of everything that preceded them changing with each theater location.
The offseason for the Atlanta Braves has officially started, but they’re hunting clues throughout the mansion without knowing which ending they’re building towards.
We know the team’s needs: a front-line starter, more on-base and walks in a lineup that’s pretty one-note right now (whiff-prone slug), and enough quality depth to survive injuries that just won’t stop chipping away at the team’s ceiling.
What we don’t know is the economics of the game when next season finally starts. The current CBA negotiation could radically alter baseball’s economic structure if the owners get their salary cap, or it could amount to mere tweaks of the existing system if the players successfully prevent the imposition of a cap.
The immediate problem for us is that we don’t know how much Alex Anthopoulos will actually be allowed to spend. Is the third CBT tier still the limit for the Braves, and what will that amount actually be on Opening Day? There’s a significant difference in adding $50 million in salary commitments and $35 million or $75 million.
That impacts how we’d evaluate the moves, as a move that appears aggressive under one budget could be considered inadequate or irresponsible under budgets that are actually larger or smaller.
Is signing two market-rate starters the perfect use of Atlanta’s money, or is it a disturbingly large concentration of limited resources in one area, resulting in several other needs that don’t get any sort of meaningful investment? And if they pass on adding two starters in free agency, is that smart discipline of limited funds, or another frustrating example of the front office failing to reinforce the rotation even though the money’s there?
Same offseason, same roster, potentially very different endings.
Any rational attempt at building an offseason plan for the Braves must admit that we can properly identify the decisions in front of Atlanta, but it’s hard to know if the moves themselves were right without knowing the CBT rules and the budget Anthopoulos has to work with.
Let’s talk about it.
Pitching or offense?
This was prompted by a really thorough mailbag email from premium subscriber Tom Lamoureux (one of the OGs), who asked some business analysis-style questions that I’m going to be diving into over the winter.
(Reminder: if you have a question for the mailbag, contact@bravestoday.com. We drop a new one every Friday.)
The two competing demands this winter for Atlanta are adding enough quality innings while keeping enough money for an offensive addition (or two), and so we’re going to split the difference here.
This week, I’m going to suggest three different $50M AAV offseason plans. Why $50M? Because when you look at money coming off the books ($64.35M) against the contractual increases for 2027 ($25M, mostly taken up by Profar’s $15M guarantee), you get roughly $40M freed up plus some natural payroll expansion if the new CBA preserves the current CBT structure (with natural growth of the thresholds year-over-year).
(We’ll also include a section each day of “what changes at $35M or $75M?”, to illustrate what happens under different scenarios without getting too in the weeds.)
The goal will be, for each addition, to look at as many factors as we can: expected pitching quality, realistic workload, injury exposure, roster flexibility, etc.
But to do that, we need to inventory what the team currently has.
We did this a bit last week when discussing Ray Kerr, but here’s the list again, complete with newly released Steamer projections for both ERA and workload as a starter:
Potential starting options:
Chris Sale: 3.00 ERA, 179.2 IP
Bryce Elder: 4.59 ERA, 149.1 IP
Grant Holmes: 4.66 ERA, 144.2 IP
Spencer Strider: 4.17 ERA, 116.2 IP
Reynaldo López: 4.63 ERA, 113.1 IP
JR Ritchie: 4.53 ERA, 81 IP
AJ Smith-Shawver: 4.70 ERA, 79.2 IP
Spencer Schwellenbach: 3.59 ERA, 28.1 IP
Owen Murphy: 4.93 ERA, 18.1 IP
They also list Joey Wentz as starting two games as part of a 42-appearance, 49-inning season, assigning his nine rotation innings a 4.86 ERA.
Ten starters, covering 911 innings between them, with Wentz’s spot starts making it 920. That’s more than the 839.1 rotation innings the Braves actually got last year. Atlanta had the fewest intentional bullpen games of anyone in the league, officially going with an opener only once (and that was after they clinched) as a test for the postseason. I can’t imagine them needing more than 839.1, especially if a delayed start to the season means we get some seven-inning doubleheaders like we did in 2021.
911 innings is a mirage
But if we’re being honest, don’t most of those innings totals feel a bit optimistic? Banking on 900+ innings from the current group of options feels like it’s one of those decisions the Braves were hoping to avoid when Anthopoulos admitted they’re “creating too much risk” with their roster construction by relying on injured players.
Sale barely qualified on ERA leaderboards (one inning pitched per team game), hitting 162 innings on the season in his final start of the year. He’ll almost always be getting extra rest in Atlanta, and even then, the day will come when he’s less efficient in his outings and that innings total drops.
Spencer Strider’s elbow holding up for 100 innings isn’t a bet I’d feel comfortable making, and neither is Reynaldo López’s shoulder surviving 21 starts and another 28 relief appearances.
Spencer Schwellenbach is projected for almost no work here, which is the correct position to take. The Braves need to assume he’s not available next year, based on how uncommon the surgical repair he underwent to his right elbow is for high-level pitchers.
Ritchie, Murphy, and a post-TJ Smith-Shawver are correctly assumed as developmental bets, but I sure wouldn’t hate finding a way to not count on them for 179 combined innings next season.
As we’ve been saying ad nauseam at this point: The Braves don’t lack names. But there’s no certainty there.
The responsible number is much lower
I think the Braves should conservatively estimate 700 innings from the rotation options listed above, and look at supplementing that total to get to the ~900 innings that they’ll need to have at their disposal for 2027.
Let’s re-project Steamer’s workload numbers, hedging to the conservative side:
Chris Sale: 179.2 —> 150 innings
Elder & Holmes: 294 —> 250 innings
Strider & López: 230 —> 150 innings
Ritchie, AJSS, Murphy, and Schwellenbach: 207.1 —> 150 innings
The Atlanta Braves need roughly 900 starting innings next year. Steamer says they have 911 already, but I’m not buying 900. I’d buy the idea of 700, though, and that means Anthopoulos has to find 200-ish innings.
New goal: Add approximately 200 dependable innings while preserving enough money to improve the offense.
That’s our best guess at defining the problem facing Alex Anthopoulos this winter. It isn’t finding five pitchers that can fill out the back end of a rotation next season, because they already have plenty of those. We saw what that could look like this last season, as 2026’s rotation could be charitably described as one ace (Sale) and “the boys” prior to Mahle’s addition at the trade deadline.
It’s finding approximately 200-ish high-quality innings that the organization can reasonably expect to receive without exhausting the money needed to reinforce the lineup.
And there are three broad ways to accomplish that: concentrate the money in a frontline starter, divide it between two more dependable arms, or make a smaller pitching addition and trust the internal options to reinforce the offensive spending.
Over the next three newsletters, we’ll build each version under the same $50M budget. We still won’t have a Clue which ending the Braves are working towards…but we’ll know the tradeoff each one will require, and what Atlanta would be risking by doing it.
I can’t wait to read the upcoming editions! I’m sure they’ll be oustanding.