This year’s Winter Meetings have come and gone and the Atlanta Braves ended up staying quiet for the most part. The biggest move they made was adding Anderson Pilar and Christian Cairo to their active roster via the Rule 5 Draft, which was something relatively new since they hadn’t participated in the MLB portion of that particular draft since 2017. Other than that, the Braves didn’t take part in the flurry of action that took place while everybody was in Dallas.
It was widely assumed that Max Fried would be signing with another team in free agency and tat ended up being the case after he signed a massive deal with the Yankees. The AL’s New York representatives were perhaps feeling the need to make up for the NL’s New York representatives beating them to the punch when it came to signing Juan Soto — either way, that was confirmation that the Braves would have to find a replacement for their former World Series-winning hurler.
They’ll also likely be moving on from another one of those World Series heroes, as Charlie Morton’s name came up earlier this week as well. According to Jayson Stark of The Athletic, Morton still hasn’t decided as to whether or not he’ll return for another season 2025. What’s more is that David O’Brien of The Athletic is reporting that the Braves haven’t had contract talks with Morton yet. Here’s an excerpt from his article (subscription is highly recommended):
After saying late in the season and again after the Braves’ wild-card playoff series loss that he wasn’t sure if he would retire, Morton soon after the postseason made it known to the Braves and other interested teams that he intended to keep pitching.
There were at least preliminary discussions with the Braves, who have holes to fill in their rotation and would prefer not to do that entirely with in-house options, most of whom are either unproven (prospects Hurston Waldrep, AJ Smith-Shawver) or are returning from Tommy John surgery rehab (Ian Anderson).
Braves president of baseball operations and GM Alex Anthopoulos said this week Grant Holmes will get a chance to win a rotation spot in the spring, after impressing both as a reliever and starter as a 28-year-old rookie in 2024 — following a decade of toiling in the minors without a call-up.
With Fried on the way out and Morton seemingly on the way out, I’d have to imagine that the Braves are eventually going to find another option from outside of the organization. While Alex Anthopoulos did say that he’s willing to go with internal options to replace them, I’m pretty skeptical that that’s their “Plan A.” We’ve seen it multiple times in the past — AA says something about how he’s willing to do one thing but the opportunity strikes to do another thing and the next thing we know, someone’s donating one percent of their salary to the Atlanta Braves Foundation. So while the Braves very well could end up having to place their faith in one or two of their internal options to take a leap in order to keep Atlanta’s rotation among one of the best in baseball, I’m doubtful that they’re going to spend the entire offseason without addressing that issue in particular.
With that being said, it sure would be nice if they figured it out some point soon instead of having to scramble for a solution in mid-February or even March. There are still a handful of very intriguing starting pitching options available via free agency — the Braves were linked to Walker Buehler earlier on in free agency and it’ll definitely be intriguing to see who or if they’ll end up making a signing. The market appears to be a lucrative one for the players — Max Fried just got signing the largest contract for a left-hander in history and Luis Severino was offered and accepted what could potentially be $67 million over three years by the A’s in order to pitch in a minor league ballpark. If the Braves are going to go down the free agency route in order to shore up their rotation, they’ll more-than-likely have to pony up.
The same would go for any outfield options that the Braves would pursue in free agency. Jurickson Profar seems like a pretty natural fit all things considered. With that being said, based on what we’ve seen already with left field deals, there’s a pretty large difference between what it’ll take to sign someone of Profar’s caliber and what it would take to sign, say, Travis Jankowski or David Peralta or someone of that caliber. Either way, if the Braves want to make an impact addition, they can’t afford to search for bargains.
That shouldn’t be an issue since we heard from AA himself that the Luxury Tax wouldn’t hinder the Braves from spending but we’ll see. That’s also not to mention any potential trades that the Braves could pull off as well. Even though Atlanta doesn’t have the loaded farm system that they’ve had in past seasons, they still have trade chips to utilize if they choose to once again deal from their pool of prospects in order to make improvements.
Either way, the Braves have options here. They have yet to utilize those options and have remained largely quiet so far this offseason. With that being said, improvements have to come since the NL East figures to be even tougher than it was last season. The Mets probably aren’t done improving their squad even though they just dropped over a quarter of a billion on securing Juan Soto’s services. The Phillies will be returning most of a roster that just got done ending Atlanta’s streak of divisional dominance. The Nationals aren’t going to be a pushover by any means and even the Marlins won’t be a joke. The Braves definitely need to improve but they’re still not out of time. With that being said, it sure would be lovely to see some sort of tangible improvements to the squad in the near future. We’ll see, though!
