I don’t mean, Michael Soroka’s Achilles’ heel. Just, you know, in general.
The set of questions we received for February included, “What weakness will doom the team if nothing changes?” — but I twisted it around a bit. I have an answer to the former, and it’s also the answer to this question, but “doom the team” seems overly deterministic. The idea of an Achilles’ heel is a point of weakness on a totality of strength; teams overcome weaknesses all the time, if only because no team is perfect and many
really good teams have flaws that end up not mattering much.
So, I guess that’s what I’ve twisted this question into: what’s going to be the weakness that drags this team down?
You could say, “Starting pitching” based solely on the Braves not making any rotation additions that required shelling out real resources. Or based on the fact that essentially all of their starters have a lot of injury uncertainty. Hell, “propensity to get everyone injured” could be the proverbial heel in and of itself. It’s up to you.
For me, I don’t know if this is still going to exist, much less be the team’s Achilles’ heel, but I’d go with “sticking with any semblance of the 2025 vis-a-vis 2019-2024 offensive approach” to the extent it transpires. I don’t know if they are going to do it, but Tim Hyers is still there, and adding the guys they added offensively doesn’t help me read a hard “no” into “are they gonna do it again?” Mike Yastrzemski and Ha-Seong Kim are neither prototypical 2019-2024 Braves hitters, nor do they look like guys that can be moved much in that direction. For Kim, you can say that there really weren’t many other choices, but Mauricio Dubon is the polar opposite of the previous offensive approach, and he was also deliberately acquired, like Yastrzemski. The team probably can’t afford another protracted Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies offensive disaster unless it gets a really clean bill of health elsewhere, so we’ll see what happens.
