Not too much to say about ye olde Game 1 of Pointless Doubleheader lineup — Ronald Acuña Jr. is in at DH while the Braves shuffle the bottom of the order a bit by giving Eli White and Vidal Brujan starts. Brujan was the shiny new toy for a little while but has barely been recently. I get the Braves wanting to give Nacho Alvarez Jr. as much run as possible because, well, why not? But Alvarez has been absolutely horrendous — he’s nearing 200 PAs of 0.0 fWAR, and that’s with outhitting his xwOBA a fair
bit. He’s not even playing good defense, per Statcast/OAA. It’s easy to root for Alvarez, but he just isn’t doing anything, and while this isn’t the place for it, his batting profile is about as horrendous as I’ve seen from anyone ever.
So, hey, that’s probably why Brujan is starting at least one of these games today.
Only six guys in this lineup have faced Jake Irvin before — Drake Baldwin, Jurickson Profar, and Ha-Seong Kim have not. Collectively, they have 48 PAs, a .297 wOBA, and .276 xwOBA against him, which speaks to how Irvin bedeviled the Braves in 2024.
The Nationals lineup is a bit of a mix between old and new:
Andres Chaparro, Jorge Alfaro, and Brady House are somewhat new faces to the Nationals-versus-Braves arena; all of them are having pretty horrendous seasons, albeit the former two have very small samples.
The sum total history of this lineup against Jose Suarez is two PAs by CJ Abrams back in April 2023. Abrams had a bouncer RBI single and a flyout.
