Atlanta Braves Rotation Depth Chart

It’s been a long, strange off season for the Atlanta Braves, and there aren’t too many positions around the diamond where fans will see familiar faces when the season starts in 2015. Despite a flurry of moving parts, the Braves rotation still seems to have plenty of stability and certainly enough relevance among the fantasy faithful as we’re now just days away from Spring Training.

Lost are Gavin Floyd, Aaron Harang, and Ervin Santana to free agency. The Braves faced some tough calls on major contributors from prior seasons in Kris Medlen and Brandon Beachy but ultimately they lost both of them to free agency as well. They traded Jason Heyward and Jordan Walden for Shelby Miller and Tyrell Jenkins. They traded Chasen Shreve and David Carpenter for Manny Banuelos. They got Michael Foltynewicz in the Evan Gattis trade. They signed Chien-Ming Wang and Wandy Rodriguez to a minor league contract. Most recently, they picked up Eric Stults on a minor league deal with an invite to camp. Phew.

The anchor of this rotation is Julio Teheran, and if you believe Steamer that’s a bad thing for Braves fans. Steamer thinks Teheran will just barely miss a 4.00 ERA mark with an FIP of 4.11, and barely reaching double digits in wins. And maybe they’re right. But in 2014, Teheran was nothing if not a steady producer. His first half FIP was 3.49 and his second half FIP was 3.49. His strikeouts were consistent as was his control. A couple knocks on Teheran’s 2014 season were that his ERA of 2.89 isn’t sustainable due to his low BABIP and proclivity for fly balls — that latter of which is a concern now that Jason Heyward has departed with Nick Markakis filling those shoes. And that’s valid. But he’s a 24 year old kid who had a nice rookie campaign and not only dodged the sophomore slump, but built upon his success. He might not be the guy you want as your fantasy ace, but if Teheran is your #3 starter in most standard formats, you’re doing pretty well.

Two familiar faces to Braves fans could actually prove to be the staff aces for this rotation in Alex Wood and Mike Minor. Wood is just as young as Teheran (24) and his herky-jerky oddball delivery managed to produce a 2.78 ERA (3.25 FIP), 1.14 WHIP, and a solid 24.5% strikeout rate. Wood shot up the Braves minor league system and because of his youth, was limited to 170 innings in 2014, ultimately moving to the bullpen to keep his workload down. Those restraints ought to be lifted in 2015 and Wood can likely be relied on to net owners close to 200 strikeouts if given 32 starts throughout the course of the season. It’s worth noting that Wood was actually far more effective as a starter last year than he was in his limited role as reliever — which is kind of counter-intuitive. But the larger point is, his stats weren’t buoyed by a specialty LOOGY role. Wood appears to be getting selected about 100 as far as ADP is concerned, and for my money, I’d probably take him over Teheran given the strikeout upside.

Mike Minor had a very Alex-Wood like season in 2013, posting a 3.21 ERA (3.37 FIP) with solid strikeout rates and pretty stingy walk rates and seemed poised to be a force in the Braves rotation for years to come. In the offseason, Minor needed some kind of procedure on his, ahem, manhood — and then appeared to rush through his preparation and wound up hurting his shoulder. He wasn’t ready until May and his results were all over the place for the duration of the season — showing flashes of his potential one start, and failing to get through the fifth inning the next. There was no perceptible change in his fastball velocity — and in fact he was throwing marginally harder in 2014. But the effectiveness of his fastball just wasn’t there, and while it used to be a plus pitch for him in the past, it was getting torched. But objectively, you look at 2015 and he’s had the entirety of an offseason to prepare normally, and for that reason alone, I’m certainly interested in how Minor comes out of the gate. His talent is considerable, and right now he’s being drafted as a flier in most mixed leagues, with an ADP near 300. He could easily perform as a #2 or #3 on a good fantasy rotation practically for free.

The Braves took a considerable risk in trading for Shelby Miller. 2014 was a major step back for Miller, seeing a significant decline in his strikeouts (23.4% K rate to 16.6%) an increase in walks (7.9% to 9.6%) and about a run increase in FIP from 3.67 to 4.54. On the surface, his hits per innings pitched really didn’t change much — it was his walks that drove his WHIP from 1.21 to 1.27. Couple that with a regression in strand rate from what was likely an unsustainable 80% down to 76.9% and the spike in ERA seems pretty understandable. Miller is essentially a fastball-curve pitcher and he throws pretty hard, with an average fastball near 94 mph, and it hasn’t seen much in the way of decline as far as zip.

His issue in 2014 seems to surround command of his curve. And it’s not that it isn’t moving — it’s actually moving more, and perhaps that’s part of the problem, if that’s possible. Miller got much more vertical movement on his curve in 2014 than he did in 2013 and that seems to have led to an issue with location. In 2013, he threw the curve for a strike roughly 30% of the time, a ball 38% of the time, generating an eight percent whiff rate. Here’s the difference in 2014:

	Strike	Ball	Whiff
2013	30%	38%	8%
2014	27%	41%	5%

Now this isn’t damning, and it’s worth noting that Miller had a far more successful second half to his 2014 season — almost halving his walk rate and increasing his strikeout rate, seeing his xFIP go from 4.81 to 3.98. Some of that is attributable to better location on his curve to be sure. Miller is kind of hard to peg in 2015 — he’s either a sneaky buy low if he can replicate that second half and get back to what made him such an exciting prospect in 2013. Or, he’s a middling back-end starter who won’t light up your strikeout rates and could potentially hurt your WHIP. Miller’s ADP appears to be languishing in the mid 200’s, which could make him worth the risk.

Chances are, Eric Stults will win the fifth slot in the rotation, although Foltynewicz, Rodriguez, Wang, and Banuelos will get plenty of innings in the Spring to see if anyone acts like a sticky noodle. Stults was a sneaky late addition for the Braves — won’t be a world beater, but you could do worse than an inning-eating control artist. Stults was fantasy relevant when pitching for the Padres over 2012 and 2013, but his home run rate and strand rate seemed to normalize in 2014, exposing him as a replacement-level pitcher, which is probably what the Braves can expect in 2015. For fantasy purposes, you ought to aim higher as there’s no real upside in the way of strikeouts even if he catches lightning in a bottle.