Saturday Seeds: Reinforcements coming, a stolen base binge, and the most unlikely homer you'll see all year
Here's some of the news and notes you might have missed from this week
Our Saturday Seeds news roundup is presented by Chinook Seedery - for bigger and better sunflower seeds in both regular and unique flavors, check out Chinook Seedery and use promo code “Braves” for 10% off your order!
Help is on the way
The Atlanta Braves have reinforcements on the way to join the team.
Starter Spencer Strider, who made his final rehab start in Gwinnett on Thursday, is flying to Tampa to join the team on this road trip. He’ll throw his regularly scheduled side session on Sunday in Tampa and then, presumably, be activated for the Toronto series. My prediction is he starts Wednesday’s series finale.
Read more: How does Atlanta adjust the rotation when Spencer Strider returns?
But Strider’s not the only Brave joining the team in the near-future.
Ronald Acuña Jr. is traveling to Los Angeles early next week to get the final clearance to resume full baseball activites from Dr. Neal El Attrache. He’s been doing everything except cutting and sudden stop/starts, but once that’s permitted he’ll be able to go out on a rehab assignment. Provided everything goes well in Gwinnett, Ronald absolutely still can make his goal of rejoining the team for the series opener against the Los Angeles Dodgers in Truist Park on May 2nd.
Alex Verdugo and James McCann are both in Gwinnett already, playing their way into shape after signing late in camp. While the path for Verdugo is easier than the one for McCann, the Braves could potentially add one or both players as soon as the end of the road trip next week.
Craig Kimbrel’s going to take longer. Per manager Brian Snitker, he’s still in Florida and has yet to face live batters despite signing in mid-March. And honestly, that’s disappointing.
Being part of the organization for three weeks (he signed on March 18th) and still having not yet faced live hitters means that Kimbrel couldn’t have been doing much work over the offseason or spring. By contrast, Héctor Neris signed on March 2nd and appeared in a spring training game just under two weeks later.
(Given how Neris looked before getting DFA’d, the obvious joke is that maybe he needed more time to ramp up before getting into games).
The new timeline for Kimbrel is sometime in May, and it honestly may take just as much (or more) time as Acuña will. And despite Kimbrel arguably running out of gas last season, this is still frustrating.
But hopefully, whenever he finally comes up, he’ll be productive and can stay up for the duration of the season.
Opponents are running wild on Atlanta
The Atlanta Braves have allowed 21 stolen bases in 22 attempts this season.
And as much as fans want to blame prospect Drake Baldwin, who has the bulk of the attempts on his ledger with twelve (and the only caught stealing, for the record), it’s not the fault of the catchers.
We can quantify this.
Statcast grades every catcher’s actual caught stealing versus the expected results, and the results absolve Atlanta’s catchers of mostly any responsibility for the stolen base binge.
No Braves catcher, on any stolen base attempt this season, had more than a 19% chance to successfully make the out. Only three attempts have even been over 10%.
On the flip side, the pitcher running game leaderboard places the blame mostly on the pitching staff - only three Braves pitchers grade out as having prevented any extra bases and only one (José Suarez) has an above zero mark in Pitcher Stealing Runs.1
It’s mostly the leads. Braves pitchers are almost universally allowing incredibly large jumps on the stolen base attempts against them, with the exception of starter Spencer Schwellenbach (8.2 ft) and relievers Daysbel Hernández (8.0 ft) and Enyel De Los Santos (9.5 ft). Everyone else has allowed jumps on stolen bases of more than ten feet, meaning that the throws to second base have virtually no shot of beating the runner.2
I’m wondering if controlling the running game has always been something that pitching coach Rick Kranitz left to catching instructor Sal Fasano to handle. It’s also possible that the offseason departures of Max Fried and Charlie Morton, both of who were Atlanta’s best starters last season at outs created from caught stealing and pickoffs, have given teams more confidence to attempt stolen bases against the Braves.
Either way it’s frustrating, especially when you consider that the Braves have only taken four bases in six attempts themselves this season. They’re both bad at holding runners and bad at even being in position to attempt steals themselves.
A bad break for Elder
Bryce Elder struggled in his start against the Tampa Bay Rays on Friday night, but one of the homers he allowed absolutely was not deserving of the ire.
Righty Christopher Morel went down to hit a homer on a changeup in the 6th inning, sending it to left and over the small seating area of Steinbrenner Field. At 107.0 mph off the bat and 387 feet, it was a 30/30 no-doubter.
It was also incredibly unexpected and came off of an objectively good pitch.
Here’s the pitch plot:
That’s not a bad pitch!
Do you want to know how good of a pitch it was?
I went to Statcast and pulled every single changeup thrown to a right-handed hitter in attack zone 17 in 2024. There were 1,756 of them.
Do you know how many homers were hit off of that pitch?
Exactly one, when Mark Vientos of the New York Mets took David Festa of the Minneosta Twins deep on July 30th (and that pitch was more inside and higher in the zone than the pitch that Morel golfed out here)
Just a good piece of hitting. That’s baseball.
Opening Night next week
Next Tuesday, the Double-A Columbus Clingstones officially open Synovus Park to start a series against the Pensacola Blue Wahoos. Former Auburn pitcher Blake Burkhalter is expected to get the honor of throwing the first official pitch in the newly renovated ballpark.
I’m also hopeful to be in attendance.
There’s a lot to like with this Columbus team: the rotation’s full of impressive young starters like Burkhalter, Drue Hackenberg, Lucas Braun, Jhancarlos Lara, and Ian Mejia. First baseman David McCabe, now finally recovered from Tommy John surgery, is batting .421 with an absurd 1.308 OPS in a small sample size of 19 at-bats that is not statistically significant at all but is quite fun to talk about.
Stay tuned for not only some updates from that game but also an announcement about some more minor league coverage that we have coming your way soon.
Suarez is above zero because he partnered with Matt Olson to pick off Xavier Edwards last Saturday
For context, the average lead is between ten and eleven feet, meaning the Braves staff are almost universally allowing above-average leads and doing a poor job of holding runners.