5 Braves on the 40-man roster who won’t survive the 2023 season
By Eric Treuden
These five Atlanta Braves players are currently on the 40-man roster but won’t make it through the 2023 season on the club.
There’s no doubt about it, the Atlanta Braves are top-to-bottom one of the best organizations in Major League Baseball today. GM Alex Anthopoulos has been the mastermind behind the assembly of this club, bringing aboard young talent and immediately finding crafty ways to sign them to long-term, team-friendly extensions.
For every Ronald Acuña Jr., Austin Riley, Matt Olson and Ozzie Albies, there are players on the current 40-man roster who won’t make it through the full 2023 campaign as a member of the Braves.
Let’s take a look and see if we can pick out five Atlanta Braves players who won’t survive the upcoming season.
Braves who won’t survive the 2023 season: No. 5 Infielder Orlando Arcia
In today’s game, there just seems to be less and less room for someone like Orlando Arcia on a team’s active roster.
Arcia, 28, spent parts of the last six years as a Milwaukee Brewer before coming over to Atlanta where he has continued to be decent on defense but nearly unplayable with the bat. He finished 2021 with an OPS+ of just 65 but was able to turn that around in a part-time role last year, posting a 104 mark, signaling his being four percent above league-average.
While Arcia was previously strictly a shortstop, he has added second base, third base and even some left field into his defensive repertoire to get him into the lineup more often.
However, he continues to strike out too much and FanGraphs will tell you that he swings and misses on pitches outside of the strike zone way too frequently. Last year, he sat at 31.2 percent in O-Swing percentage, which calculates swings and misses on poor pitches.
With a weak bat and servicable defensive abilities, it seems like Arcia does not have a place on this Braves roster. Anthopoulos has assembled a super team and having an eye sore like Arcia on the club doesn’t make much sense, especially when you have two younger versions of him in Eli White and Braden Shewmake in the minor leagues to replace him.