5 decisions that have helped the Atlanta Braves have a successful 2023 season
The Atlanta Braves have been atop most baseball pundits power rankings for quite sometime now. We dive into some key choices made that led to a successful regular season for the Braves.
Throughout the grind of a 162 game regular season each MLB team’s front office will face numerous important decisions. Despite their abundance of success in 2023, the Atlanta Braves are no different from every other team.
All statistics and records reflect status at the time of writing on morning of September 27th.
Atlanta currently has the most wins in baseball, and their magic number for home-field advantage through the World Series sits at two. A lot of different things have to happen to put together the season the Braves have. On top of that, many key decisions have to made both before the season and during it for a successful year to follow. Below we take a look at the 5 most impactful decisions that led to the Braves success in 2023.
1. Acquiring Sean Murphy despite having a good catcher already
Not often in an offseason does a team decide to upgrade a position that isn’t considered a need. The Braves talent at other positions granted them this luxury. Atlanta could’ve rolled out the catching tandem of Travis d’Arnaud and William Contreras just as they did in 2022, and the entire fanbase would’ve been estatic.
However, when Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos saw an opportunity to add another talented player, he didn’t let the position he played stop him. On December 12th, 2022 Anthopoulos acquired catcher Sean Murphy in a three-team trade with the A’s and the Brewers. This didn’t come without cost as the Braves sent Freddy Tarnok and Kyle Muller to Oakland, as well as William Contreras to Milwaukee.
AA quickly got Murphy signed to an extension and the Braves now had two of the top 15 catchers in baseball. The recent struggles of Murphy may make this impact a bit murky to some fans, but how quickly we forget how amazing he was in the first half.
In fact, Sean Murphy was leading all of baseball in fWAR at one point this season. The defense was every bit as advertised and when he is hot with the bat, it really lengthens this lineup. Despite his recent struggles, Murphy is still has already set career highs (or is on pace to) in OBP .367, homers 21, RBI 68, and slugging .486.
2. Handing the shortstop keys to Orlando Arcia
One of the major storylines coming into Braves spring training was the competition for the starting shortstop gig. Vaughn Grissom was the early favorite due to his upside and the flashes he showed in 2022. Later in spring Braden Shewmake’s name began to be floated around as another potential option.
However, just a few days before the season began the Braves named Orlando Arcia the starting shortstop and gave him a three year extension. It was shocking to many fans as Grissom was hitting well in spring and Arcia had primarily been the versatile backup infielder since Atlanta acquired him.
We found out quickly that Braves’ brass questioned Grissom’s defense (rightfully so) and the security Arica provided in that area was enough to hand him the keys to the position. All Arica has done is produce since opening day.
In the midst of the best season of his eight-year career, Arcia has been a steady positive at near the bottom of the Braves lineup. He has a career high 17 home runs, 103 wRC+, 2.5 fWAR, and ranks in the 84th percentile in OAA. All of that production on top of providing some of the best vibes and keeping the clubhouse loose is more than the Braves could have ever hoped for.
3. Keeping Marcell Ozuna on the roster
Coming into this season, Marcell Ozuna was already among the most unpopular of Braves players based on his off the field incidents and his lack of on-field production since 2020. Things reached a peak at the end of April when Ozuna had a batting average of .085 and was receiving a chorus of boos nightly from the Atlanta crowd.
It’s been said many times on the broadcast, but Ozuna truly might have been one bad week of baseball from being DFA’d by the Braves. However, during the Braves early May trip to Miami, Ozuna went 6-13 with three homers in that three game series against his former team and took off from there.
If not for Acuña Jr. and Olson’s historic season there would be an argument to be had that Ozuna has been the Braves best hitter since May. Regardless, the return of 2020 Marcell Ozuna has not only helped the Braves, but also possibly saved Ozuna’s career.
On the year Ozuna has a .268/.340/.532 slash line, 132 wRC+, 36 home runs, 91 RBIs, and .369 wOBA. Some really good numbers for a guy who was in danger of being released.
4. Moving Matt Olson to cleanup
By now the entire baseball world knows what kind of season Braves’ slugger, Matt Olson has put together. However, it wasn’t the smoothest of starts for Mr. Olson. The Braves were batting him second in the lineup in the beginning of the year and after another hot spring training he came out the gates hot.
Unfortunately, by the beginning of June Olson had slowed down quite a bit and couldn’t string together consecutive good games. Snit decided it was time for a lineup change and dropped Olson down to fifth for about a week. Olson flashed signs of coming out of his slump, and that prompted Snit to move him to fourth in the lineup, a place he hasn’t left since.
In fact, the numbers Olson has put up since moving to cleanup are otherworldly. Just take a moment to look at these eye-popping statistics since June 23rd from Fangraphs.
- .327/.427/.692 slash line
- 32 home runs
- .458 wOBA
- 191 wRC+
- 14.7 BB% & 17.9 K%
All of these numbers make it easy to see why Olson has solidified himself an at worst fourth place finish in the NL MVP voting. I’m not a huge pound the table guy with lineup construction, but Olson has clearly found comfort in batting cleanup for Atlanta.
5. Adding quality depth at the deadline
The last key decision we have to touch on here is Atlanta’s trade deadline acquisitions. By mid-July the Braves had already established themselves as one of the best teams in baseball. However, that didn’t prevent Anthopoulos from adding more talent to the roster.
The Braves had a desire to add in the same areas most contending teams do at the deadline. That of course being pitching, you can never have enough pitching as they say. So the Braves went out and snagged a couple lottery ticket bullpen arms from Colorado.
Credit to AA and his team for having an eye for a guy like Pierce Johnson, who’s numbers were terrible when they acquired him, but his peripherals foreshadowed a bounce back. Since getting out of Coors, Johnson has a 0.79 ERA. 3.08 FIP, 0.926 WHIP, and 5.8 strikeout to walk ratio in 23 games with Atlanta. Johnson has certainly earned himself important postseason innings.
The other reliever AA brought in from Colorado was veteran lefty Brad Hand. He hasn’t been as effective as Johnson, but Hand could be leaned on as a lefty specialist come October. And thanks to his great slider, he still proves more than formidable at getting LHH out.
Lastly was the trade for backup infielder Nicky Lopez. It’s much harder for Lopez to see game action than the relievers because of how dynamic the Braves regulars are, but when he has been needed he has been stellar. When Ozzie went down with the hamstring tightness, Lopez proved more than capable of handling the job until he returned.
Lopez seems to make a special defensive play every time he is in the field, and this is a trade that will benefit the Braves for years to come. All of these trades brought a positive impact on this already loaded roster, thus why we gave it such a good grade in our review.