The Braves will hit this offseason at a reasonably-sized crossroads. I think that’s pretty clear, clear enough that I will almost certainly have a post early in the offseason where the title is some variation of, “The Braves are now at a crossroads.” There is the potential to say a lot about where the Braves go from here, what they do next, and how they enter their next franchise phase — provided that they actually do so, rather than kicking the can down the road a bit, and I know a lot of that will be
said by me, and by others.
But, since this is a daily questions post, I want to wheel away from the very broad topic of “what comes next, and how” and towards something more specific. Perhaps a crosswalk within the crossroads, or really, to be more accurate, this is like a fork in the road ahead of the metaphorical crossroads we’re talking about, and each fork takes you to a different crossroads. Or something.
Fundamentally, the Braves have two choices of thinking about what’s happened. In reality, the real “choice” is some mixture of the two, but these are the extremes.
- The issue is the roster. Either players that were good got worse, or they got a loss less healthy, or departures weren’t adequately compensated for. But, there’s nothing wrong with how we do things, not even in 2025, and changing the composition of the 26ish guys that are going to play for us next year, and the 15ish that we’ll shuffle around to help them, will be enough to get the team back into the playoffs — even if the way we go about changing that composition is the same as we’ve done for the past seven years or so.
- The roster is fine, and by all accounts, pretty good. The issue is specifically how we do things that support (or fail to support) that roster. What we need is a change about how we think about using players, getting information to players, helping players make decisions (or, more critically, taking decisions out of their hands with a different cadence than previously), and maybe even which players we think are or aren’t good to have on the roster to support the ones we think are pretty good. We don’t think the issue in 2025 was the guys signed to stick around for a while, or the other young guys we have that we control for a while, either. To that end, we can have what others would call another “quiet” offseason and handily return to the playoffs while addressing a bunch of other, notably cheaper, under the hood issues.
Again, I’ve framed these as somewhat at odds on purpose, though there’s always going to be a mix of the two in reality. As Alex Anthopoulos constantly refers to, his main goal is “to get better,” and both of these represent an avenue towards doing so.
So my question is definitely unfair, but I’m still interested in the answer: if you had to pick just one, would you rather the team address the roster for 2026, or the way they do things writ large, with minimal roster turnover or additions?
