Braves Lose Charlie Morton to Orioles, But Have Depth to Presevere

The Atlanta Braves have seen two tenured members of their rotation depart for the AL East this winter, but there's a obvious blueprint to replace both starters.

It’s been a quiet winter for the Atlanta Braves, with one prominent tweet this weekend pointing out that there’s been more “Thank You” tweets coming from @Braves than “Welcome to Atlanta” messages.

The most recent “Thank You” message came late on Friday, as 41-year-old starter Charlie Morton agreed to a one-year, $15M deal with the Baltimore Orioles for the 2025 season.

Morton’s departure is another in a line of veterans to leave Atlanta this winter, including fellow starter Max Fried (8/$218M with Yankees) and catcher Travis d’Arnaud (2/$12M with Angels).

But the Braves are in the unfamiliar position of having additional rotation depth as they close in on pitchers and catchers reporting in just under six weeks and there’s an obvious plan to replace both starters and still being able to potentially maintain 2024’s rotation excellence.

Let’s break it down.

What production are you losing in Fried & Morton?

Together, Fried and Morton combined to make 59 starts across 339.2 innings, picking up 19 wins with a combined 3.71 ERA.

But just looking for that many innings and starts with an ERA that comes out to that doesn’t adequately fill their roles - Morton as a back-end innings eater and Fried as a frontline postseason-caliber starter.¹

Luckily, there’s avenues to fill their roles next season.

Let’s look at what the rotation ended up being at the start and end of the season in 2024:

To start the season, Spencer Strider and Max Fried were the stalwarts of the staff:
SP1: Spencer Strider - Staff Ace
SP2: Max Fried - Co-Ace
SP3: Chris Sale - Wily Veteran
SP4: Reynaldo López - Speculative Quality Starter
SP5: Charlie Morton - Veteran Backend

But at the end of the season, owing to injuries, debuts, and unexpected dominance, the rotation arguably looked significantly different:

SP1: Chris Sale - Staff Ace, 18-3 w/ 2.38 ERA
SP2: Max Fried - Co-Ace, 11-10 w/ 3.25 ERA
SP3: Reynaldo López - Surprising All-Star, 8-5 w/ 1.99 ERA
SP4: Spencer Schwellenbach - Rising Star, 8-7 w/ 3.35 ERA
SP5: Charlie Morton - Veteran Backend, 8-10 w/ 4.19 ERA

Combined: 776.2 innings, an average of roughly 155 per starter. Let’s just round this to make them qualified starters, so 162 innings.

When examining next year’s possible rotation, it’s easy to see how the current roster can adequately fill each role from its existing depth:

SP1: Chris Sale - Staff Ace
SP2: Spencer Schwellenbach - Potential Co-Ace
SP3: Reynaldo López - Quality Veteran #2/3
SP4: Ian Anderson - Speculative Quality Starter
SP5: Grant Holmes - Quality Backend

This doesn’t even count in the anticipated return of Spencer Strider, who could slot in anywhere from #2 to #4, depending on how his stuff looks when he gets back on the mound.

Now, is it true that you’re counting on growth from several of these players to adequately fill these roles? Of course.

Schwellenbach has to maintain his stuff in a longer sample - as we discussed yesterday, he pitched 168.2 combined minors and majors innings and finished his big league time with a 3.35 ERA. Both numbers are within spitting distance of Fried’s 3.25 ERA and 174.1 innings.

But also worth pointing out is the quality that came from Schwellenbach - after a surprisingly short six-game acclimation period in the majors, Schwelly put up a 7-3 record and 2.54 ERA across the rest of the season with nine quality starts among his 15 outings. Asking him to take Fried’s role as a trusted #2 isn’t an absurd ask and the path to surpassing Fried’s statistical performance is clear.

Similarly, replacing Morton isn’t as severe of an ask as you might think. López pitched just 135.2 innings, a surprising total given that he hadn’t been a full-time starter in a standard-length season since 2019 and combined for just 131.1 in the last two seasons working in relief.

With another offseason to prepare and a better idea of how to handle that workload, López covering Morton’s 165.1 innings and 30 starts is absolutely on the table for 2025. The likelihood is that López would have better stats, as well - even if the regression to his 1.99 ERA that we’re expecting comes for him, last season’s FIP (2.92) and xERA (3.94) were both better than Morton’s actual 4.19 ERA.

The wild cards here are Strider and Anderson.

Both players are returning from major elbow surgery - Anderson from Tommy John in April of 2023 and Strider from internal brace surgery in April of 2024.

Expectations shouldn’t be high for Anderson. With Reynaldo López taking on Morton’s workload and producing a better ERA, Anderson’s goal should be Morton’s ERA from last season: 4.19 ERA. Easier said than done, although worth noting that he had a 3.96 ERA in Gwinnett last season despite a 11.8% walk rate.

Atlanta achieved what they did last season largely without Strider (2 starts), so anything he’s able to give you this season is additive to the group’s performance.

And I’d argue that the rotation depth for spot starts is deeper than it’s ever been. Going into last offseason, the competition to López for the final rotation spot was largely Bryce Elder, AJ Smith-Shawver, and Hurston Waldrep.

All of those players return for this season, a year further along in their development, joined by Grant Holmes (my choice for the #5 starter on Opening Day) and new additions Davis Daniel & Connor Gillispie.

One of the issues that the Braves faced last season was poor performances from their fill-in starters, with all but two² having ERAs over 5.00:

Courtesy of Baseball Reference

Another season of development from most of those arms, along with new prospect options Drue Hackenberg and Lucas Braun (plus whoever else surprises out of the system a la Spencer Schwellenbach last season) means that the odds of getting a 7.85 ERA out of your fill-in options shouldn’t be the case next season.³

Injury can mess this whole thing up

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face” - Mike Tyson (the boxer, not the former Cardinals infielder)

Atlanta’s rotation plan for 2024 had a wrench thrown in it when Strider went down after only two starts.

(For his perspective on what happened, we recapped a recent interview of his - with clips - on the Braves Today podcast last week. The below link is set to start at Strider’s comments on the mechanics of the injury itself.)

And this is the area where this plan, to replace Fried and Morton with internal options while still resetting the CBT, can go awry.

I already think that the Braves really should add one more established major league option, giving them the chance to either move Holmes back to the pen or figure out what to do with Ian Anderson if he’s not MLB caliber to open the year.⁴

Because if a severe injury happens, this whole plan could go up in smoke and it’s easy to see how that could happen.

For as great a season as Chris Sale had in 2024, his inning total of 177.2 was more than the previous four put together and his highest innings total since 2017. (Plus, there was that whole “back spasms rendered him unavailable for the Wild Card round” thing to close the year.)

Reynaldo López, while avoiding significant injury last season with the significantly higher workload, did go on the IL twice in the second half for forearm and shoulder inflammation.⁵

Losing one of the top four members, something that feels almost inevitable in modern baseball, means that this entire plan gets scrambled. Adding someone this offseason via either signing (a veteran like Justin Verlander or Max Scherzer) or trade (Jordan Montgomery, perhaps?) still feels like the prudent course of action here.

But let’s not act like the team’s doomed because Morton and Fried signed elsewhere. As of Saturday morning, a to-be-unnamed sportsbook⁶ has THREE different Braves starters at +3500 or better to win the NL Cy Young next season in Chris Sale (+800), Spencer Strider (+2200), and Spencer Schwellenbach (+3500).⁷ FanGraphs currently has the Braves accumulated starters projected as the third-best rotation in MLB this season by WAR at 15.3, (although the caveat here is that the two ahead of them are in the same league with the Phillies at the top spot and the Dodgers coming in at #2 by 1.5 WAR over Atlanta.)

If they stand pat, will it be a strategic mistake? Possibly. I wouldn’t recommend doing that.

But is it a mortal failing by this front office? No, it’s not.

1. It was tempting to do the “Moneyball” thing here - “Guys, you're still trying to replace Fried and Morton. I told you we can't do it, and we can't do it. Now, what we might be able to do is re-create them. Re-create them, in the aggregate.”

2. Darius Vines and AJ Smith-Shawver, who combined for only three starts

3. I removed Grant Holmes out of the ERA calculation for spot starts last season because he’ll be in the rotation this year, but adding his seven starts and 4.01 ERA brings it down to ‘only’ 6.80.

4. Anderson’s out of options and has literally never pitched in relief in his entire professional baseball career, so a trade would be most likely here.)

5. I’m not convinced that at least one of these wasn’t…let’s not call it a phantom IL stint, as the league’s cracked down on that recently, but rather ‘hey you’re sore like every single pitcher is in the second half of the year and we’re concerned about your workload, so why not take some time to rest?” situations.

6. Want this to be your sportsbook? Reach out to us at contact@bravestoday.com

7. Reynaldo López also made the list at +10000, which would return you $10k on a $100 bet.