The Braves Stripped Down the 40-Man Roster on Thursday

Atlanta is clearly going a different direction with their bullpen under new pitching coach Jeremy Hefner

The Atlanta Braves had an eventful day on Thursday.

Just hours before free agency officially opened, the Braves made all of their option decisions and moved several players off the 40-man roster, with some surprising subtractions on both sides.

Let’s talk about what it means and where they go from here.

Two surprising option decisions

As both expected and previously reported, the Braves officially picked up their club options on starter Chris Sale ($18M) and second baseman Ozzie Albies ($7M), who remains the longest tenured member of the big league club.

But in a surprising twist, the Braves declined their club options on relievers Pierce Johnson ($7M) and Tyler Kinley ($5.5M), paying a combined $1M in buyouts to the two righties.

And I say it’s surprising because both pitchers were quality performers last season. Johnson finished 3-3 with a 3.05 ERA last year, and even that’s a bit misleading: 20% of all of his earned runs allowed on the season came in his final appearance. He carried a 2.15 ERA heading into the month of September and a 2.48 heading into the final series of the year, where Pittsburgh ambushed him for four runs on four hits in the 9th inning of a 9-3 Pirates win.

Kinley, meanwhile, was absurdly dominant after being acquired at the trade deadline from the Colorado Rockies. He pitched 25 innings for the Braves with a 0.72 ERA, allowing just two runs on eleven hits while striking out 22 and picking up five of his six wins on the season. It’s worth pointing out, though, that Kinley’s peripherals show that he was a bit lucky with the Braves. His Fielding Independent Pitching was a 2.74, but he excelled thanks to an absurd outlier .156 BABIP and a strand rate of 96.4%, well above the MLB average of 69.1%.

I’m speculating that there are two main reasons that the Braves did this.

The first, at the micro level, is that these two relievers don’t really fit with what the new pitching coach, Jeremy Hefner, likes to do. He likes to run a six-man rotation, meaning he needs multiple relievers capable of covering more than one inning. For those relievers, he ideally wants them to be able to throw plenty of strikes and have wide arsenals¹, to make them interchangeable, matchup-proof, and “position-less”, as it’s been explained to me.

Neither Johnson nor Kinley makes a lot of sense for Atlanta when you think of it that way. They’re each reliant on extremely high usage of one outlier breaking ball, with Kinley’s slider climbing to 74% usage with the Braves after the deadline and Johnson at his usual low-70% percent usage of his curveball for a second consecutive season.

Johnson recorded more than three outs just seven times in 2025, while Kinley did it just four times with Atlanta in the season’s final two months. Part of the issue was that both men were in the zone only about half the time, reliant on drawing out of zone chase with those breaking balls instead of being able to beat hitters in the strike zone. This led to high pitch counts, preventing them from going deeper into their outings.

When you look at it from that context, it makes sense, right?

From a macro level, the other factor here is money. By declining both club options and paying the combined $1M in buyout money, the Braves erased $11.5M in salary commitments for 2026 off the books. If they manage to move lefty sidearmer Aaron Bummer in a deal this winter, who is getting a raise in his final contractual season to $9.5M, they’ll have freed up $20M in salary space.

What would you rather have, the trio of Johnson, Kinley, and Bummer, or a closer for $16M and a random middle leverage arm for $4M? Whether the closer ends up being former Braves reliever Raisel Iglesias, who is reportedly interested in a two-year deal and is expected to sign quickly, or one of the many backend options out there without a Qualifying Offer like Devin Williams, Pete Fairbanks, Brad Keller, Emilio Pagan, and Kyle Finnegan.

(Yes, Robert Suarez and Edwin Diaz are the jewels of the closer class, but both received Qualifying Offers on Thursday afternoon. That being said, the one time Alex Anthopoulos has signed a Qualifying Offer player, it was closer Will Smith.)

It feels like going for quality over quantity in your bullpen is the correct approach to take after the struggles of the pen last season. We’ll see what the Braves choose to do with those funds, but they clearly need to make at least one addition, if not more, to the pen. With Joe Jiménez being an unknown right now due to suffering a setback with his knee - he’ll be re-evaluated in January to determine if he can pitch in 2026 or not - the depth chart in the pen is short on known quantities.

Closer: VACANT
Setup: Dylan Lee (L)
Setup: Aaron Bummer (L)
Middle: Dylan Dodd (L)
Middle: Daysbel Hernández
Middle/Long: Grant Holmes
Middle/Long: José Suarez (L)
Middle/Long: Joey Wentz (L)

That wasn’t the only change made, however.

Several players outrighted

Several players on the 40-man roster were sent through waivers, with one of them being claimed and the rest being outrighted to Triple-A.

Outfielder Jake Fraley was claimed by the Tampa Bay Rays; I’m sure the Braves weren’t heartbroken about losing the former Cincinnati Red, as his arbitration projection for his final year of team control was $3.6M. As a career .248 hitter without massive power (career .402 slug) that’s limited to a corner, that profile isn’t worth the cost. The Braves replaced Fraley on the roster with a waiver claim of centerfielder Michael Siani from the St. Louis Cardinals, who has a weak bat (career .221 hitter in the majors) but is a defensive whiz. He’s the closest analogue to an outfield version of Nick Allen.

Four others were passed through waivers and outrighted to the minors: outfielder Carlos Rodríguez, catcher Chuckie Robinson, and pitchers Joel Payamps and Austin Cox. Atlanta could lose two of them, potentially. The rule for a major leaguer being able to elect free agency after being outrighted is contingent on either having been outrighted before or having at least five years of major league service. Both Payamps and Robinson have been outrighted before and have the ability to elect free agency, while neither Cox or Rodríguez have a choice and will be in Triple-A with Atlanta next season unless they’re moved in a trade.

UPDATE: I’ve been told by a MLB player development staffer that the rules are different in the postseason and that all four players are eligible for free agency. Right on cue, MLB Trade Rumors has confirmed that all four have elected free agency.

Payamps is clearly a financial decision; per MLBTR, he was projected at $3.4M in arbitration this season and he’ll likely go to free agency instead. Robinson is likely just to get the roster spot; most teams won’t be adding third catchers to their rosters right now and even if Robinson does elect free agency, Atlanta has both Austin Nola and Sandy León in Gwinnett right now.

With all of these moves, the 40-man roster currently sits at 35.

So, what’s the plan here?

The Atlanta Braves have cleaned out the 40-man of some of the extra players, as well as creating some payroll space through declining the options on the two relievers. Here’s a snapshot of the team’s current money situation as of Thursday night:

Active Roster: $176,500,000
Projected Arbitration: $11,800,000
Pre-Arbitration: $6,480,000
Projected Total Payroll: $194,780,000

With 2026’s Competitive Balance Tax figure starting at $244M, the Braves have quite a bit of money to spend. Here are the possible scenarios:

Spending to 2025’s level ($214M) = Roughly $20M to spend
Spending to the base CBT ($244M) = Roughly $55M to spend
Spending to 2024’s level, just shy of the third tier = Roughly $95M to spend

Keep in mind on all of those numbers, President of Baseball Operations Alex Anthopoulos likes to keep about $10M or so in reserve for in-season acquisitions, either earlier in the year or at the trade deadline, so the available capital is slightly lower than those figures I gave above.

The Braves can shop in every aisle.

But can they shop in all of the aisles in the same shopping trip?

As I’ve been saying a lot on the podcast, what corner do you cut? The team needs a shortstop, one starter, at least one (and preferably two) relievers, with one of them being a closer, and another bat for the lineup.

Is the corner you cut at shortstop, sending Nick Allen back out there and hoping the rest of the roster hits like the back of their baseball cards? Is it the rotation, knowing that you technically have seven options already between Chris Sale, Spencer Schwellenbach, Spencer Strider, Reynaldo López, Hurston Waldrep, Grant Holmes, and Bryce Elder? Is it adding to the offense, counting on Drake Baldwin to be the primary DH and maybe some more magic from Eli White as a fourth outfielder?

It arguably can’t be the bullpen again, not after you tried that last offseason and paid the price in 2025. The Braves signed fifteen relievers to minor league deals prior to the 2025 season, and exactly zero of them made it to game 162.

Why this offseason matters so much

Chairman Terry McGuirk said on Wednesday’s earnings call (paraphrased) that they weren’t accustomed to not being in the playoffs, but they intended to spend and add multiple players to get back to October baseball.

It needs to happen. Anthopoulos made a rare misstep last offseason in his end-of-season press conference after the Braves were eliminated by the San Diego Padres in the Wild Card round when he said that payroll would increase last winter. Despite giving a caveat before the call that this was their expectation at the time (the Braves had been eliminated about 36 hours before we met with AA), fans still held that against him when it didn’t happen. There was very little acknowledgement from the fanbase of the fact that, reportedly, the Braves backed out of several deals due to medicals - Jeff Hoffman (who later signed with the Blue Jays after Baltimore also backed out of a deal) is the name we know, but the rumors are that two of the others were pitchers Justin Verlander and Tanner Scott - and that the payroll would have increased had those deals gone through.

The natives are restless. When I relayed a quote about payroll from Wednesday’s earnings call on social media, telling Braves Country that McGuirk’s goal was for the Braves to “be a top-five payroll team” and that he believed they were capable of doing that, the near-universal response was “we’ll believe it when we see it”. And Thursday’s moves, to decline two club options on relievers that most of the fanbase expected to be back in 2026, didn’t help things.

But the runway is clear to take some of that ‘dry powder’, to borrow McGuirk’s favorite phrase, and throw it at the roster. The team reset its Competitive Balance Tax penalties in 2025, so the penalty of signing a Qualifying Offer player is lower than it would normally be. Rather than losing their 2nd and 5th-highest draft picks, plus $1M from their international bonus pool, it’s only the 2nd-highest pick and $500k in bonus pool space.

Here’s the list of players who have received a qualifying offer, plus their expected contracts (from ace predictor Tim Britton of The Athletic):

OF Kyle Tucker, 29: 12/$460M
DH Kyle Schwarber, 33: 5/$145M
SS Bo Bichette, 28: 8/$212M
LHP Framber Valdez, 32: 7/$196M
RHP Dylan Cease, 30: 6/$174M
LHP Ranger Suarez, 30: 6/$153M
RHP Edwin Díaz, 31: 4/$84M
RHP Zac Gallen, 30: 2/$42M
LHP Shota Imanaga, 32: No prediction
RHP Michael King, 31: 3/$75M
OF Trent Grisham, 29: 3/$54M
2B Gleyber Torres, 28: 3/$48M
RHP Brandon Woodruff, 32: 2/$40M

It’s easy to see how the Braves could add one big name out of there, like Diaz for closer or King or Cease for the rotation, and only sacrifice the additional pick they’ll likely get on Monday if/when Drake Baldwin wins Rookie of the Year. You do that, plus bring back shortstop Ha-Seong Kim on a multi-year deal, and a lot of the heavy-lifting is done for the winter.

While we’re still waiting to see which direction the Braves go this offseason, it’s clear they have the money for any aisle they want to shop in. Do they use it?

1. Owing to the preference for wide arsenals, Hefner’s comfortable with converting relievers into starters, which is a favorite pastime of Alex Anthopoulos and something I’m always on the lookout for and irrationally excited about.