The Braves Have a Surplus. They Should Start Spending It.

The Red Sox have quietly turned backend starting pitchers into upgrades elsewhere on the roster. Atlanta may soon have the same opportunity.

One of my favorite front-office exercises is figuring out what a team has too much of.

Not because surplus is a bad thing, but because surplus is currency.

The Red Sox have spent the better part of the last year quietly cashing in excess starting pitching for help elsewhere, making another move Saturday night by moving starter Connelly Early for corner infielder Curtis Mead.

I think the Braves should be paying attention.

Let’s talk about it.

What Boston’s doing

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the pitchers Boston has dealt in the last nine months:

Brandon Clarke
Richard Fitts
Patrick Galle
David Sandlin
Hunter Dobbins
Connelly Early
Ben Hansen
Shane Drohan
Blake Aita

They fit into two buckets.

Some of them are true “lottery ticket” type prospects - Brandon Clarke has a 70-grade fastball that sits in the high-90s, although he’s also dealt with several different injuries that have stunted his development. Patrick Galle’s a lottery ticket as a true reliever.

But the rest are all guys who are either in the high minors or have already debuted as starters. They’re also all #4 or #5 starters.

David Sandlin is the closest thing to a true prospect out of the bunch, sporting a “mid-rotation ceiling” but also significant reliever risk. Hunter Dobbins climbed to just outside the top ten of Boston’s prospect lists before graduating, while Richard Fitts sat 14th in the Red Sox as recently as 2025 prior to his own graduation.

They’re mostly back-end starters, at best.

And that’s why Boston moved them.

The Red Sox have been more aggressive than most at treating back-end starters as their preferred trade capital of choice, thanks to their understanding of one crucial market dynamic:

A No. 5 starter has more value to a team that needs a No. 5 starter than he does to a team with six or seven of them.

That’s the inefficiency Boston has been exploiting.

And the Red Sox, with a rotation projected to be helmed by Garrett Crochet, Sonny Gray, Ranger Suarez, Brayan Bello, and Payton Tolle, didn’t need #5 starters as much as their trade partners did.

And surplus is only valuable if you're willing to spend it.

Boston’s deals using these starters have taken two different forms - consolidation or pitching-for-offense.

The Red Sox consolidated Fitts with the lottery ticket Clarke and Patrick Golle to get Sonny Gray and cash. Gray immediately slotted in as the #2 in their rotation behind Garret Crochet.

They also traded pitching for offense, getting first baseman William Contreras (Hunter Dobbins, Blake Alta, Yhoiker Fajardo) and got infielders Caleb Durbin, Andrew Monasterio, and Anthony Seigler for starter Kyle Harrison, Shane Drohan, and surplus infielder David Hamilton.

Coincidentally, the Durbin deal also illustrates the risks of this strategy - Boston horribly botched the eval on both arms here, with the lefty Harrison having a 3.01 ERA/2.2 fWAR and the righty Drohan having a 3.51 ERA and 1.9 fWAR.

While Boston hasn’t always evaluated the arms correctly (and that’s been an issue in several of their past deals when they’ve sold established MLB players like Mookie Betts, Rafael Devers, etc), the concept is sound.

It’s also one I’d like to see the Braves emulate.

Next year’s rotation is packed

This isn’t a prediction that all of these pitchers will be healthy. Frankly, recent history suggests they won’t.

But front offices don’t build rosters around best- or worst-case scenarios. They build them around probabilities, and the probability is that Atlanta is going to have far more starting pitching candidates than rotation spots next spring.

A non-ordered-but-we-all-know-Sale-is-at-the-top list:

SP1: Chris Sale
SP2: Spencer Schwellenbach
SP3: AJ Smith-Shawver
SP4: Spencer Strider

If they’re healthy, those four look to be the starters in spring training.

(And yes, “if they’re healthy” is a hell of a caveat for Braves pitching, but work with me here.)

The battle for the final rotation spot would then come down to the following:

Bryce Elder - out of options
Reynaldo López - out of options, has bullpen experience
Grant Holmes - out of options, has bullpen experience
Joey Wentz - out of options, has bullpen experience
Didier Fuentes - optionable, has bullpen experience
Hurston Waldrep - optionable (if granted 4th option year)
JR Ritchie - optionable (2nd option year), has limited bullpen experience
Owen Murphy - optionable (2nd option year)

That list is eight names deep while also making two big assumptions: that none of the AAA starting pitching prospects who haven’t yet debuted get called to the majors /added to the 40-man this winter, and that none of the long relief prospects get stretched out as possible rotation options.

And for the Braves, neither of those assumptions are likely to hold, meaning this picture could get even more crowded:

Possible 40-man addition:
Lucas Braun (Rule 5 year is 2026)
Drue Hackenberg (Rule 5 year is 2026)
Cedric De Grandpre (already Rule 5 eligible)

Relief prospects with starting experience:
Victor Mederos (will be out of options after 2026)
Connor Thomas (optionable)
Elieser Hernández (DFA limbo, but expected to re-sign)
Ray Kerr (out of options)

Even if you assume each grouping above loses one or two players to injury (which is a normal amount of injuries for one season), that’s still resulting in the Braves maybe bringing ten rotation options with them to North Port next spring.

Trade some of them.

It requires nailing the evaluations, but at its core, this concept is a remixed version of Alex Anthopoulos’s “impact starter” comments all offseason. You have so many backend options that adding another one isn’t that valuable to the club, so only a frontline/impact starter will meaningfully move the needle.

But do you know who is not overloaded on starting pitcher options?

The Athletics. Or the Houston Astros, or the Los Angeles Angels, or the teams that made deals with the Boston Red Sox in the last nine months for a starting pitcher.

The latest Boston deal was lefty Connelly Early (3.44 ERA/4.33 xERA/4.61 FIP) to the Washington Nationals for corner infielder Curtis Mead.

Early was set to return off the injured list soon, but didn’t have a rotation spot available thanks to the breakout of lefty Jake Bennett (2.58 ERA/3.15 xERA/3.12 FIP) and the injury-delayed return of Patrick Sandoval.

But Washington’s rotation prior to the trade was, charitably, the duo of Cade Cavalli and Foster Griffin followed by prayers for a Washington “rainout”. Two members of their rotation, Miles Mikolas and Zack Littell, both have ERAs over 5.00 while call-up Andrew Alvarez has pitched like a fifth starter (4.22 ERA, 10.6% walk rate).

The value of adding Early was a lot higher for Washington than it was for Boston. That delta in value represented opportunity for the Red Sox.

What does this look like in practice?

Given Atlanta’s rotation injuries this season (and last season, and even somewhat the season before), it’s hard to envision how this would work right now. While there’s a limited ability to make some of these deals at the deadline - JR Ritchie is an obvious target to get moved at the deadline, but it’s hard to be aggressive while so many pitchers are on the injured list - the upcoming offseason gives Atlanta the ability to clean up the 40-man roster a bit.

We’ve seen the Alex Anthopoulos front office be pretty effective at knowing which prospects to keep and which to trade.

If they believe Owen Murphy can add more velo to the fastball and push his ceiling from #4/#5 to a mid-rotation arm or even more, you keep him.

If they believe that JR Ritchie’s control issues can get ironed out and he can find a way to generate more whiffs to raise his profile from that of a #4/#5, then they could keep him.

That’s the hard part: Not identifying surplus, but identifying which surplus isn’t actually surplus.

But for the most part, there should be a strong inclination towards moving a starting pitching prospect that projects to be in the backend of the rotation, as the marginal utility of adding one more backend starter for Atlanta is a lot lower than for another team that has a lack of rotation options.

Backend starters might not be glamorous, but they're one of the most valuable currencies in baseball. Every organization needs innings, and very few have enough of them. A controllable No. 5 starter making the league minimum has value well beyond his ceiling because he solves a problem that almost every front office eventually faces.

Every organization says you can never have enough pitching. That’s true.

But you can absolutely have too many pitchers competing for the same job. The Braves don’t need to trade Spencer Schwellenbach. They don’t need to trade AJ Smith-Shawver.

But if they believe a starter projects as the eighth- or ninth-best rotation option in the organization over the next two years, another club might see him as their fourth.

That’s exactly the kind of mismatch good front offices exploit.

Boston has spent the last year doing it.

Atlanta should consider doing the same.