What the Braves Saw in Starter Davis Daniel
The Atlanta Braves are notorious for grabbing arms from other organizations and finding ways to make them better. Is Davis Daniel next?
(My apologies for how delayed this is from the actual trade - free time is tight around the holidays)
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Alex Anthopoulos, it’s that he sometimes overcorrects when it comes to depth issues.
Take 2021, for instance - the Braves dealt with virtually unprecedented injuries behind the plate, necessitating the team starting seven different catchers that season:
Travis d’Arnaud: 53 starts
William Contreras: 47 starts
Kevan Smith: 27 starts
Stephen Vogt: 22 starts
Alex Jackson: 7 starts
Jeff Mathis: 3 starts
Jonathan Lucroy: 2 starts
AA’s touched on this in the context of Drake Baldwin having an opportunity to contribute in Atlanta, discussing it in the end-of-season press conference after the Braves were eliminated by the San Diego Padres:
After both catchers missed some time in 2023 and Sean Murphy missed significant time early due to an oblique injury, the Braves carried THREE catchers in Gwinnett for a majority of the season between Baldwin, Chadwick Tromp, and veteran Sandy León. Sebastián Rivero functioned as the third catcher while Tromp was in Atlanta, with Ryan Casteel also getting five starts before he voluntarily retired to join the coaching staff over the summer.
The rotation injuries in recent years seem to have inspired a similar focus on depth for Anthopoulos.
In the last four seasons, the Braves have used anywhere between ten and thirteen conventional starting pitchers1, getting suboptimal results from depth options like Allan Winans (1-4, 7.20 career ERA in Atlanta), Dylan Dodd (2-2, 7.68 ERA in Atlanta) and Jared Shuster (4-3, 5.81 ERA in Atlanta).
We’ve seen a bit of a response by Anthopoulos this winter, grabbing depth arms and stashing them in Gwinnett2. Entering this trade, here were Atlanta’s 2025 rotation candidates:
Connor Gillispie
Hurston Waldrep
This list doesn’t count either prospects that are likely to debut in 2025 (like Drue Hackenberg and Lucas Braun) nor does it count Spencer Strider, who is expected to return (in his own words) “soon after the season starts”.
Did the Braves grab Davis Daniel from the Los Angeles Angels as another depth option or as a legitimate rotation candidate for that fifth spot?
What Davis Daniel does well
The on-field results for Daniel aren’t great in his short MLB career - six starts in 2024 with a 1-4 record and 6.23 ERA across his 30.1 innings.
His ‘stuff’ also wasn’t that overwhelming, with an average fastball velocity of just 91.5 mph (on 48% usage), supported by a slider, changeup, and the occasional curveball.
But under the hood, there’s reason to think he’s better than both the conventional numbers and the stuff might suggest.
Daniel didn’t actually get hit that hard last season, with an average exit velocity of 87.2 mph. He also didn’t allow a lot of free passes, putting up a 4.5% walk rate. That great walk rate was partially due to hitters being extremely prone to chasing his stuff out of the zone, with a 32.1% chase rate that would have ranked among the league’s best had he thrown enough innings to qualify on leaderboards.
His first start, in particular, was one of the best by anyone all season: eight innings of scoreless baseball against the Detroit Tigers, allowing four hits and no walks while striking out eight.
Diving into that game is particularly illuminating as to what Daniel needs to do to be effective at the major league level: Staying ahead of hitters.
Daniel’s most common counts in this game (excluding 0-0, of course), were 0-2 (28.2%), 1-2 (27.3%), 2-2 (23.8%), and 0-1 (22.8%). Of the 26 batters he faced, only four got a first-pitch ball. The rest all either took strikes, swung and missed, or put the ball into play, with only one of those four batted balls resulting in a hit (a first-pitch leadoff single to open the game by Matt Vierling).
As a matter of fact, only six hitters even saw a pitch while ahead in the count and all but one picked up a strike that made the at-bat even:
Of those first pitches, a disproportionate amount were on the fastball, with Daniel throwing 15 of 26 first-pitch heaters. (He finished the game with a 46% fastball usage.)
In this game, similar to the entirety of the season, it was primarily a two-pitch mix for Daniel based on handedness: FB and change for lefties, FB and slider for righties, with the curveball being sprinkled in to both. (Of his seven curveballs, three went to rights and four to lefties.)
Daniel wasn’t able to recreate that success the rest of the season, however, making five more starts with a combined ERA of 8.46. Why did he struggle in subsequent starts?
Daniel’s fastball isn’t ideal
Despite the great results with using fastballs early in the count in his initial start, Daniel struggled in subsequent outings with keeping hitters off the heater. On the season, the fastball allowed a .328 batting average and .586 slugging on 45 batted ball events, giving up three homers and nine total extra-base hits.3
Some of the reason for the heater’s struggles may have come back to velocity - in 2023, Daniel was sitting a full two mph harder on the fastball at 93.4. None of the other pitches in the arsenal seem to show a similar decrease, with everything else coming out to within 1 mph of its 2023 velocities except for the heater. Given that 2023’s outings were longer relief stints, including five innings to close a game on September 29th, I’m hesitant to assume this was a relief bump.
The combination of the velo, the arm angle, and the rather ordinary ~16 inches of induced vertical break means that the movement profile of the FB is a bit of a “dead zone” shape. Put simply, it’s exactly where hitters expect it to be.
What changes would I make to Davis Daniel?
Caveat up front on this: I’m not a professional pitching coach, just an aspiring pitching nerd.
But there’s two changes I’d exploring making to Daniel.
The first is dropping the arm slot a bit. Being in a high 3/4 slot and dealing with reduced velocity, the fastball isn’t fooling hitters at all. Dropping the slot a bit should help add a little horizontal movement to both the FB and the changeup, just enough to get them off of opposing barrels (which coincidentally would also help generate a bit more ground balls).
The other change is throwing the curveball more. This is a very Atlanta move to make, right, asking a guy to throw a breaking pitch more than he has been in previous stops? But when the changeup profile is below-average movement (-4.6 inches vertical, -1.5 inches horizontal) and the curveball movement is above-average vertical drop (+2.7 inches vertical), go with the pitch that has the outlier traits over the pitch that moves less than average.
I can’t guarantee that these changes will help make Daniel back into the pitcher that carved up the Tigers, but the upside here is huge. Daniel put up solid peripherals in the inflated offensive environment of the AAA Pacific Coast League last year, walking only 6.5% of batters and featuring a FIP a full run lower than his actual ERA.
Expectations for Davis Daniel in 2025
At the end of the day, this is a typical Atlanta depth signing: Let’s get a guy into a more advantageous situation on a better roster and tweak him a bit in hopes of getting better results. Daniel has one minor league option remaining and less than one year of service time, so the upside is huge if it works out.
I fully expect him to start in the minors OR in the Braves bullpen as a long man, but he’s probably eighth or ninth on the list of starters for the Braves when the season starts. (On the list above, I’d slot Daniel in either above or below Connor Gillispie).
Let’s go with five starts and an ERA of 4.25 if he doesn’t regain the FB velo, and an ERA of 4.05 and seven starts if he does.
Excluding relievers working as openers.
Enough where 2023 1st-round pick Hurston Waldrep had to start the 2024 campaign in Double-A Mississippi just to be ensured a rotation spot to open the year.
It’s worth pointing out that some of this is small sample size bad luck, with the xBA being 60 points better at .268 and the xSLG being 138 points better at .448.