Spring training draws closer by the day, but the Atlanta Braves appear no closer to finding the starting pitcher that Alex Anthopoulos is looking for. Chris Sale, Reynaldo Lopez and Spencer Schwellenbach are a heck of a place to start, but there’s a ton of uncertainty behind them, especially with Spencer Strider not due back from elbow surgery by the Opening Day. The team was priced out of the biggest names of free agency, and while Atlanta has kicked the tires on some lower-tier options, they’ve repeatedly found themselves on the outside looking in.

The latest near-miss came on Thursday, when future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer — whose workout the Braves attended last week — agreed to a one-year, $15.5 million deal with the Toronto Blue Jays. (Yes, that is nearly the same contract that the Baltimore Orioles signed Charlie Morton to earlier this offseason.) With Scherzer off the board, the free-agent market has gotten perilously thin, meaning that Atlanta might have to turn to trades to fill out their pitching staff.

Of course, there’s a problem there, too. The most obvious trade candidate is Dylan Cease, a Georgia native whom the team has coveted going back to his days with the Chicago White Sox — and whom the cash-strapped San Diego Padres have considered moving in his final year before free agency. But while the Padres are desperate to shed salary, they’re not so desperate that they’re willing to move Cease for pennies on the dollar, and their asking price — combined with the realities of the Braves farm system — make a deal very difficult to imagine.

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We’re still not exactly sure just what San Diego is looking for in return for Cease, or just how motivated they are to actually deal him. But we got a hint earlier on Thursday, when it was reported that the Padres had asked the Chicago Cubs for top third-base prospect Matt Shaw plus at least one other piece. Given that Shaw is one of the better prospects in all of baseball, that’s a pretty high asking price, one that the Braves would have a hard time meeting under any circumstances.

With San Diego, however, the job gets even tougher. Atlanta doesn’t have a whole lot of top-end talent to deal from in its system right now, and the best prospect they do have is catcher Drake Baldwin. It just so happens that catcher is a position that the Padres already have spoken for by one of their top prospects, 18-year-old phenom Ethan Salas. Even if Anthopoulos were motivated enough to put a godfather offer on the table for Cease, it’s hard to see how he’d do it without Baldwin, and it’s hard to see why the Padres would want a guy who’s position is currently blocked by a better prospect.

Maybe the Braves can take another route to landing Cease. Maybe the Padres really love Cam Caminiti or Hurston Waldrep or another of the Braves’ young pitchers, or maybe Anthopoulos can wait AJ Preller out until he gets desperate enough to lower his ask. Right now, though, it’s hard to see how this gets done, and that leaves a major question mark for Atlanta with the season around the corner.