Braves Starter Spencer Strider to Start on Injured List with Oblique Injury | Atlanta Braves Podcast

You can't help but laugh. Spencer Strider's going on the injured list with an oblique issue that apparently he's had for a little while. Let's talk about it. Yes, welcome on in to a special emergency edition of Braves Today. Uh, I'm your host, Lindseay Crosby. You can find all my written work, braves.com. Uh, we're proudly part of the Believe Podcast Network presented to you by FanDuel. Download the FanDuel app or go to fanduel.com to get started. Um, my goodness, Spencer Strider is going on the injured list with an oblique injury. Let's go through what we know about this. Let's talk about are there any real options here and then let's look at um let's discuss the whole off seasonason and how this went because I have a theory about injury creep and kind of how these things I'm not going to say can sneak up on you but how they can snowball faster than you're ready for. So starting off we got the news this morning Strider was scratched from his start against the Pirates in Bradenton which is happening right now and also is not televised anywhere. kind of frustrating. Um, but the the way that this happened, the timing and everything here is supposedly Strider felt oblique tightness in his most recent start and then he felt it again in a bullpin session. So, when they got to today, he was still having it this morning. So, they scratched him. Um the quote from Walt Weiss and this is coming from um the AJC's Chad Bishop who is in Northport with the team right now. Quote, "It's mild. He got out in front of it, but we're going to be cautious. We feel like we've gotten out in front of this thing to a degree, so we're hoping it's not going to be a big deal." Not a thing you kind of love to hear, right? You don't love to hear that uh that they're hoping it's not going to be a kind of severe thing. And Walt Weiss kind of acknowledged that part of the reason that there they sound so uncertain here is obliques are really kind of tough, right? Um more from Weiss on this quote. We don't know. We've all dealt with obliques in this game. You just don't know. I do feel better that when you put him through the tests and that type of thing, it's hard for him to feel it, but it is there when he throws. There's a chance if he would have went out and made a start. Talking about throwing today in spring training, it would have set him back further. That's the silver lining in this thing. So, um the short term of this obviously kind of sucks. Spencer Strider was supposed to be the game three uh starter for um for the opening series against the Royals. So, we got a little bit of updates there when it comes to um what they plan to do, right? They're going to throw Grant Holmes in game three. And um after that, you kind of got to figure out what the plan is here, right? Um not quite sure. you know, Grant Holmes, Bryce Elder, I assume, is your four. And so, who was your fifth? Um, Mark Bowman indicated that Walt Weiss said the plan was for Diego Fuentes to stay as a long reliever. Martin Pere, I'm sorry, uh, Jose Suarez will likely be the fifth starter and that they're evaluating what are their options to replace Strider in the rotation. And I do think there are a couple Let's talk about the options real quick before we get into who to blame for this and all that kind of stuff. Um, really your only options for a starting pitcher at this point in the schedule is Carlos Carrasco, Martin Perez, J.R. Richie, Dior Fuentes. That's it. Uh, you do have other prospects, right? Garrett Bowman looked really good in the um in the spring breakout on Saturday. He's been in the lower miners. I mean, there's not a lot of options here. and and there's pros and cons of each one of those guys. Carrasco and Perez are veterans that are clearly on the back side of their careers. I was very not impressed with Carlos Carrasco in spring training. Wasn't really impressed with Martin Perez, but I think he was okay. J.R. Richie is the ceiling option, but he's also the one that doesn't really have a floor here. He's the um he is the PPI option as well. If you want somebody who could win rookie of the year and get a draft pick, the only option you have is J.R. Richie. As a reminder of how that works, you have to be on at least two of the three accepted um accepted prospect lists. And I believe it's ESPN, Baseball America, and MLB pipeline. You have to be on at least two of those three. Fuentes is only on one. Uh, you have to be rookie eligible now. Like Waldrip is not by a couple days. You have to be rookie eligible now and you have to spend you have to get one year of service time. Correcting some other reporting I've seen, you do not have to be on the roster on opening day. You have to spend 172 days on the roster. It's a 186 day season. So, you pretty much have like two you have to be up within the first two weeks. if you want to um qualify for PPI and win rook and if you win rookie of the year. So that is the option with J.R. Richie. The pros and cons of Richie. That is the pro, right? That is the pro for Richie. The con for Richie is he's not on the 40man roster, which you can make plenty of spots. That's not a problem. The other con for J.R. Richie is because he's not on the 40man roster, you haven't had to start using his options. If you call J.R. Richie up and he's not ready or you decide you'd rather keep somebody else once everybody is back and you know if that happens right if you get everybody back healthy then you're in a situation where you have to option Richie down and use one of his three options. And we've not been great at the option stuff with some of the young pitchers. AJ Smith Shaver is very young. He's entering his final option year. Um Peter Fuentes is turning 21 this year and he's already he already when he gets optioned down this year. If he does, he will be into his second of three option years, right? Like we've not been the best about popping we popping these options very early before the players are ready. And so like that's the downside of Richie. But at this point, that downside doesn't feel like it's nearly as bad as the downside of counting on Martin Perez or counting on Carlos Carrasco to be actual major league caliber starting pitchers. I would ra if you're going to lose this guy's game, I would rather let prospect J.R. Richie lose and learn and get better than an aging veteran who Carrasco is almost 40. Than an aging veteran to lose and we not necessarily understand if he can get better. There's no real pathway to improving. You're just throwing a guy out there to get beat. I'd rather let the kid lose and learn something versus letting the veteran lose and the kid's ina. So, the Braves haven't officially clarified what they want to do. I do think if you keep Dior Fuentes as the long man in the pen, it's a little bit frustrating. I do think this is a situation where if you are going to put Martine Perez on the roster, which I don't think you should do, you need to uh put him in the bullpen and let Fuentes make the start versus letting Martine Perez make a start and putting Fuentes in the bullpen. Neither here or there. In just a minute, let's talk about this overall off seasonason. Let's talk about what AA did, the choices he made, and how avoidable this could have been. We'll do that next right here on Braves Today. Welcome back to Braves Today, Lindsey Crosby. Shout out to the 90s something of y'all who are in here live with us right now. Uh, this was kind of last minute, unprompted. I didn't put a tweet out letting everybody know I was going to do this and all that. So, thank you for being here. If you have questions on this, throw them in the chat. I'll try to get to them towards the end of the year or towards the end of the show here. A lot has been made about the Braves not signing a starter this off seasonason. And it's, let's be clear, it's not just this offseason. The Braves have not signed an established major league starter to be a major league starter in multiple years. They have brought in pitchers, but it's been either as an emergency thing like when you brought in, you know, Eric Fetty or Carlos Kasco, whatever last year, or it's been grabbing a reliever with the intent of converting them into starting like Ronaldo Lopez. They planned to do the same thing with um uh with Jeff Hoffman had they signed him. Instead, what they ended up doing is they just they have not gone and signed a starter. And I'm the frustrating thing about this is in retrospect, in hindsight, you you knew injuries were coming. And I would I would argue a little bit of nuance to this that AA said entering the off season that the starting the starting rotation was a front burner priority and then they got positive health reports on everybody. Let's like let's be clear entering spring training everybody was healthy. It was the very end of his bullpin session before he reported that Schwoinbach reported an issue. It was at camp that Wger reported an issue or in a game that Wentz got hurt or apparently in a game and then a bullpen that um that Strider got hurt. Entering camp they had a lot of options. And so I think you can and just hear me out before you get mad. I think you can defend the idea in January of we're not going to sign a number five starter just to sign a starter. We want somebody who is quality who would bump guys out of the rotation, right? I think that's a defensible stance to take in December and in January when they had positive health reports on everybody, everybody looked like they were good to go. But as you got through camp, the injuries kept happening. And I think the issue here is every time it happened, there were less and less options. and the options that were left were a little bit less desirable. I think, and this sounds dumb, if you had lost all four of these pitchers in the first week of spring training, I think yeah, you signed Chris Basset. They probably signed Chris Basset and go out and get a Zack Latell or something like that. But when they lost just Schwelenbach or when they lost Schwenbach and just Waldrip, they said, "Hey, we have enough pieces to get through this. we don't need to bring in a back-end guy. And then they lost Wentz, but there were less guys available. And now they've lost Strider and there's even less guys available. So I'm I'm kind of calling this injury creep. Like every time somebody went down, the situation got a little bit worse and a little bit worse. But the available options to you outside the organization were a little bit worse and a little bit worse. And you're at the point here where it really didn't make sense to pay market prices for very many of the guys in the free agent market this winter simply because you would have lost like one the contracts two but two the exact same um the the draft pick you would have lost was also would have been the highest ever pick given up for a qualifying offer player. I don't necessarily I I would have been fine with Dylan CE anyway, but I do understand, hey, giving up the contract you had to pay and a top 30 pick for a guy like definitely not a Ranger Suarez or a Fred Valdez or whatever was not appealing to me. But again, every time somebody got hurt, some of the other options had come off the table. It's kind of like the same situation. Um, it's it's the same situation you have when ProFar went down. By the time Proofar went down, so many of the options you had to add a bat were already off the market. Michael Conforto had signed the week before. Randall Grick had signed the week before. So many guys had just gone off the market. There wasn't any great option to replace him. And so because of that, you ended up having to um having to just kind of stick with Dom Smith and um and Kyle Farmer as your DH platoon. And what's frustrating here is Spencer Strider is owed 20 million bucks this year and then 22 million next year and 22 the million the the year after that. And even if you exclude the elbow issue and the surgery that he had, the internal brace that he had, this is now the second injured list stint since he came back from that. He missed a month with the hamstring last year. We don't know how long he'll miss with this oblique. It could be two weeks. It could be a month. We don't know. And we saw he was not the same version of himself after the hamstring strain last year that he was before. I talked about this like last week. The hamstring strain really kind of sapped his power. He had a start in the minors, a rehab start in the minors where he was putting up like 19 inches of IBB and a fast ball at like 97 and then after the hamstring strain, he never got back to that point the rest of the season. My concern is the oblique injury does the same thing for Strider this year. And again, we don't know if it's going to or not. We don't know how long they're going to keep him on the injured list. We don't know how long they're going to keep him um on the on the uh rehabbing and all of that. We don't know what it's going to take here, but it's not great. And I've seen a couple questions come up in the chat here. I want to address it real quick. Um here's one from our buddy Emanuel. uh is it time to evaluate how much responsibility for this injuries we attribute to players training on their own and away from the team and then I've seen a variation of this about is it time to address the training staff. I think there's two things at play here. Thing number one is for the most part the worst thing a pitcher can do for their body is to pitch. like it is terrible for your body to actually pitch. And I remember talking to Spencer Strider in spring training one year, maybe it was 24, and he said like after you've thrown at full intensity one time in spring training, you're never 100% the rest of the year. Like you're always sore. You're always trying to fight through what is what is normal soreness versus what is outside soreness. I think that this is something about the way that modern pitching as a whole, and not the Braves specifically, but modern pitching as a whole is so focused on max effort for as as long as possible, chasing velocity and all of that stuff. And I don't know if there's a simple fix. Now, at the same time, it is frustrating that it feels like the Braves have been hit by this a lot harder than almost anybody else. I don't think there's another team in baseball right now that from the start of camp to today is down four starting pitchers that they came into camp with. Like, there's been teams that lost a guy or two guys or whatever. I don't think there's a team that's lost four. Just like last year, there wasn't a team that had all five opening day starters on the 60-day at the same time. We lost the top six starters last year when you count Strider missing a month for Tommy John. I'm sorry for for the hamstring strain. Um, to Emanuel's point, I do think that um, I do think that maybe training methods as a whole need to be discussed, but I also think this is part of the reason why you saw these starters trying not pushing velocity that much in spring. Think back to Strider's 24 season, right? He came into spring training ready for the season. He was pumping gas from day one and he had an issue right there. Like he was like he he went down in the second start of the year, right? Ronaldo Lopez was throwing much harder in 25 than he was this year and he went down pretty quickly. They have to take time to ramp up. I do want to address something and this is not I'm not calling anybody out with this. I've seen a lot of people say a variation of the comment that all of this was predictable in December. And I want to push back a little bit because I think it was predictable that the Braves would have some someone go down, right? I heard AA say that. I heard Walt Weiss say that. Like they they knew they would lose a starter or maybe even two in spring training. Happens every year. And if you go back and you look at the years, you lost Max Freed on the 60-day IIL one year, then you lost Strider, then you lost Lope, like it happens every year, you lose one or two guys. I don't think anybody saw four. And I'm beginning to think, I made the joke when I did a short earlier after the start news came out. I'm beginning to think the organization's cursed somehow that whatever deal we made for 2021, we're still paying for that. and the schedule does you no benefits because you have a 13 games and 13-day stretch to open the year and you've got to figure out what to do here. Um, I asked a a back late I want to say maybe it was the postseason press conference like a six-man rotation and he said essentially that's not anything they can do all season because it stretches your bullpen and we have a like we don't have very many guys who have flexibility out of the pen and so it's it's really hard to to leave your bullpen short-handed the first time you have a starter that gets blown up or has to has to miss time, you end up in a situation where your bullpin's then shot and you don't have any flexibility. You have to send down a starter to get somebody else for the pen. And so a six-man rotation's not feasible, but what they did in 2024 was the goal of what they were going to try to do, right? which it wasn't a formal six-man rotation, but they like to skip guys. They like to buy extra off days for people, reshuffle and things like that. And my personal theory, I've talked about a few times on the show. What I wanted the Braves to do was to take the guys who, knock on wood, have not had injury concerns and who can pitch every fifth day, like Bryce Elder, and just ride those guys. Had you signed Chris Bassid, I was going to say the same thing about him that I was going to say about Bryce Elder. you pitch him every fifth day. If it's not a guy that you anticipate being one of your go-to options for the postseason, they don't get extra time. They don't get time off. They don't get rest days. You pitch them on rotation and you ride them while you give the postseason starters extra rest. You give your Chris Sale extra rest. You give Swellenbach extra rest. You give Strider extra rest and Lopez and all of that. And now that's kind of out the window because you're just trying to find five guys. Again, it should be Fuentes or Richie as the guy that they use. I'm worried. We don't have official thing yet. I'm worried it's going to be Perez or even Suarez. Um, I do imagine as teams start to come start to have bad starts to the season, the Braves are going to and try to engage to find trades. Uh, I saw somebody in the comments earlier say, "Hey, is now the time you go and get Joe Ryan?" I think if Joe Ryan was eligible to get moved, they would have already made a call. Once Pablo Lopez went down, it really felt like if the Twins were going to make a trade, that's when they would have considered it. But I do think you probably call them back today. I do think the cost is going to be high. And that's one of the issues is right now there are so few teams that don't have a shot at the expanded playoffs that the available options aren't very good and the cost is going to be very high. This may be something you have to ride it for a month. And if Richie or Fuentes looks really good and Strider's di prognosis is that maybe he's back to start, you know, um, start May or something, then maybe they say, "Hey, we're okay." But in a couple weeks, if you're having struggles and you're having all of that, I really feel like you're going to have to make a move and you're going to have to overpay because of your decision, because of your belief, and again, defendable, but probably in hindsight, not the right move. But at the time, remember, you can only evaluate a decision by the information you have at the time. And in December or in January, the Braves projected to even if they lost one or two starters to have a lot of starting pitching options. Again, I think it was defendable in December to do something. I don't think it's defendable. It was defendable two weeks ago to not do anything or last week to not do anything. Right. When Wentz went down, it's kind of late in the in the whole ball game, but again, I broke that whole thing down a few minutes ago. Every time somebody went down, there were less and less and less options. Um, at this point, even if you were to sign Lucas Sheilo today, you're not going to see him for three weeks to a month. Typically, when these guys sign at the very end of camp, these starters, they take so much time to build up in the minors that you don't see them, you probably wouldn't see him until May. And they may say, "What's the difference in getting Strider back in May or getting in May?" I do want want to also point out, and I mentioned this when we talked about GLO a week or two ago, there's no guarantee Lucas Gilito is going to be good. Because if there was, somebody would have already signed him. I don't think we can point and say, "Hey, it's an obvious mistake that Golito is still out there because nobody has signed him." Now, I will say the Braves have a bigger need to add a starter than anybody else does. So, if the first team does, it should be the Braves that do it, but the end of the day, I'm just tired of these dudes keep getting hurt. And it's not entirely their fault. I will complain that Strider apparently had a bullpen with an oblique issue that he was feeling in his start. That's frustrating. But there's no good options on the free agent market. Lucas Glo is not going to save this team. Um, at this point, you got to figure out figure it out internally. Is J.R. Richie ready? Can Jose Suarez um do what he did in a very small sample for you? Can he do it better? Is Martine Perez ready to make it back to the majors? We're gonna find out. None of these options are great, but if um once they figure out what they're going to do, I'll let you know. This has been a kind of depressing emergency episode of Braves today for uh Monday, March 23rd. Do me a favor. Listening on audio, five star view be great. You're watching on YouTube, subscribe to the channel, hit the notification bell. Hopefully the next time this pings with a show from me, it's not more bad news about our Atlanta Braves. Until next time, this has been Braves.

The Atlanta Braves confirmed this morning that Spencer Strider would go on the injured list, making it the fourth starting pitcher to go down in the six weeks of spring training. What do the Braves do now? Subscribe to Braves Today on audio wherever you get your podcasts Join our NEW Discord: https://discord.gg/wksQqVNEpX Follow the show on Twitter: @braves_today Follow Lindsay on Twitter: @CrosbyBaseball Read our written work: bravestoday.substack.com Send us questions: contact@bravestoday.com Get 10% off at Chinook Seedery with promo code "Braves" Get 20% off at NCase Cards with promo code "BravesToday" Rocker Chicks by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/