Braves Regular Having a Surprisingly Strong Grapefruit League

The Atlanta Braves have an underrated lineup regular that could surprise in 2024

The Atlanta Braves are powered by some of the biggest stars in baseball - Ronald Acuña Jr., Spencer Strider, Matt Olson, and Austin Riley. 

But the depth of the team is one of its strengths, with above-average regulars at every single lineup spot, and one in particular who is having a strong spring could surprise in 2024. 

Shortstop Orlando Arcia is coming off of a surprisingly strong 2023 season, where he batted .264/.321/.420 with 17 homers. And his Grapefruit League is going pretty well, too, as he's sitting at .281/.361/.475 with three homers entering Thursday's action. 

UPDATE: Arcia hit another home run on Thursday off of Yankees starter Nestor Cortes, giving him four for the spring. 

It's all a great value for Atlanta, as Arcia signed a contract extension last spring that paid him a total of $7.3M over three years. He'll make just $2M in salary for the 2024 season. 

It's a coup for president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos, who secured an above-average shortstop at a price significantly below what the market would typically demand. Arica put up 4.4 WAR last season, and with each 1 Win Above Replacement being valued at approximately $8M on the open market, Arcia provided $35.2M of production and over $33M in excess value. 

However, projection systems almost universally expect Arcia to take a step back from his 2023 production, with FanGraphs projections spitting out batting averages ranging from .245 to .252 and home totals of 13 to 18 on 130 games of playtime. 

Arcia hit seventeen homers last season while playing in only 139 games due to a microfracture in his wrist, coming when he was hit by a pitch, and some late-season rest days. But just like the rest of the Braves infield, he reportedly wants to play every day. 

Provided he doesn't physically wear down from the workload like he seemingly did last season - Arcia batted .294 in the first half but only .235 in the 2nd half, including .200 in September - the Braves should be able to count on Arcia outperforming those projections in multiple ways. 

He had the second-lowest strikeout rate (19.1%) of his career, with his second-highest hard-hit rate (41.5%) and his second-highest ISO (.156). Most of the projections have him returning closer to his historic strikeout rate (career 20.1%) and losing a lot of the power gains.

And while raw spring training stats aren't really that descriptive, they can still tell us some interesting stories. Arcia's groundball rate ticked up over 50% last season, but he's made a concentrated effort to work on his launch angle this spring, with a ground ball rate of only 36% (-17.7% from last season) and a flyball rate of 44% (+10.4%). Even if only half of that improvement carries over to the regular season, it should greatly improve both his batting average and power production. 

But at this price - $2M for 2024 - even a repeat of last season would be more than sufficient. 

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