Braves ace Max Fried strained his hamstring during his Opening Day start, and manager Brian Snitker has already indicated the southpaw is likely to land on the 15-day injured list. Atlanta hasn’t made that transaction yet — IL stints can be backdated as many as three days — and the rotation plans for next week remain uncertain. Mark Bowman of MLB.com unsurprisingly tweets that right-handers Ian Anderson and Bryce Elder are under consideration to take the ball next Wednesday against the Cardinals in what would’ve been Fried’s spot.
Anderson and Elder entered Spring Training as the presumptive favorites for the fifth starter job behind Fried, Spencer Strider, Charlie Morton and Kyle Wright. Neither ended up securing the job out of camp, as prospects Jared Shuster and Dylan Dodd jumped them on the depth chart. Both Elder and Anderson were optioned out; Shuster and Dodd each were penciled into the season-opening rotation when Wright started the year on the IL.
With Fried likely to join him, the Atlanta front office could have to choose between Anderson and Elder to fill in. The latter got the Opening Day start for Triple-A Gwinnett today, allowing four runs in six innings. He’d be lined up on standard rest for Wednesday’s outing if the Braves wanted to go in that direction.
Dodd, meanwhile, is listed as the probable starter for Tuesday’s matchup in St. Louis. That’ll be his major league debut, and the Braves will have to make a roster move before then. Atlanta has yet to select the southpaw onto the 40-man roster, preserving some flexibility in that regard until he’s tabbed to take the mound. The Braves’ 40-man is at capacity and the club doesn’t have any obvious candidates for a move to the 60-day injured list, so they could be faced with a DFA decision early next week.
Deeper on the rotation depth chart, Michael Soroka is slated to take the ball for Gwinnett on Tuesday in what’ll be his season debut. The righty was optioned after getting a late start in camp thanks to a hamstring issue. Soroka hasn’t thrown a major league pitch since 2020 because of a pair of Achilles ruptures. His 2022 campaign consisted of 25 innings between High-A and Triple-A.
Soroka tells Gabriel Burns of the Atlanta Journal Constitution he’s likely “to be limited to about three or four innings (per outing) for a little bit.” He’ll work both in the rotation and out of the bullpen with Gwinnett as he and the club explore ways to gradually build his workload. Soroka indicated he’d be open to pitching in relief to get back to the MLB level if the team felt that the best course of action. He noted the club doesn’t currently feel low-leverage bullpen work is the best way to get him back to pre-injury form. Soroka started 37 games between 2018-20, throwing 214 innings of 2.86 ERA ball before his 23rd birthday.
That minor league experimentation isn’t limited to the pitching staff. Atlanta is using Braden Shewmake at second base in Gwinnett, as Burns writes in a separate piece for the Journal Constitution. The former first-round pick has only started nine games at the keystone — all last season — in his minor league career. The rest of his innings have come at shortstop, where he was competing for the MLB job this spring. Both Shewmake and Vaughn Grissom lost out to veteran Orlando Arcia in the camp battle, leading the two younger players to be sent to Gwinnett.
Grissom will get the majority of the shortstop reps there. Shewmake is regarded by evaluators as the superior defender of the two, while Grissom has a higher offensive ceiling. The Braves seem comfortable with Shewmake’s glove at shortstop as is, reasoning that giving the tougher reps to Grissom will hopefully lead to him taking a step forward. Whether the 22-year-old is up to the task defensively was a storyline of the offseason once it became clear the Braves would look internally for Dansby Swanson’s replacement.
