How the Braves manifested another All-Star shortstop

One way to explain the entertainment value of baseball’s rich regular season is to envision a very limited form of time travel.

Let’s say you — a person who knows the results of the baseball season so far and which players were chosen to start the 2023 MLB All-Star Game — return to January and inform Atlanta Braves fans that they will employ the National League’s top shortstop, despite Dansby Swanson’s departure in free agency. Then you watch as they formulate the most likely scenarios by which that will occur.

Guess No. 1 is probably “Vaughn Grissom, the 22-year-old who hit well in limited playing time in 2022, is the latest young Braves player to explode onto the scene.” This is the same franchise that employed the winner and runner-up in the 2022 NL Rookie of the Year race, after all.

Guess No. 2? “General manager Alex Anthopoulos swings a trade for a well-known major-league shortstop who immediately has a career year.” So the Sean Murphy story, just on repeat.

Guess No. 3 is Guess No. 1 but with “Braden Shewmake” subbed in for Grissom.

I’m fairly sure fans would’ve gone with “Carlos Correa has enough contracts foiled by physicals that the Braves eventually swoop in and sign him to a one-year deal” or denounced you, the time traveler, as a huckster before they came up with the real answer.

Present-day Braves fans know that Orlando Arcia, the 28-year-old who joined the franchise in what looked like a minor 2021 trade, has turned his first starting gig since 2020 into his first All-Star nod. Their enthusiasm for the ebullient Arcia — and the 53-27 Braves — made it happen. Now, fan voting leaves something to be desired in talking about All-Star selections as pure merit badges, but Arcia was not a bad choice. Swanson, in his first season with the Chicago Cubs, actually leads NL shortstops in WAR, but Arcia has the better offensive numbers. His 113 OPS+ is second among NL shortstops with at least 200 plate appearances, behind only Arizona’s Geraldo Perdomo.

“Orlando Arcia has been extremely important to our success so far this year,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said. “I mean, he’s had a great year. He’s stabilized that position.”

Arcia isn’t the best or most valuable player on the Braves, a team firing on all cylinders behind Ronald Acuña Jr.’s rollicking MVP campaign and a half-dozen other foreseeable stars. Rather, his underdog-made-good story could be viewed as a cherry on top — until you realize that he’s also emblematic of the whole production of playing winning baseball.

Arcia’s transformation is one representation of why the Braves can attain and sustain greatness. But the how, in 2020s baseball, takes place just offstage.

The one man not surprised by Orlando Arcia

Snitker, for his part, said this month that Arcia was never the remote option to start at shortstop that the wider baseball world assumed in the wake of Swanson’s departure. In Arcia, Snitker saw a guy who played most days for several Milwaukee Brewers teams that made the postseason. He perhaps saw the 2017 version — when Arcia was only slightly below average as a hitter, plenty good enough for a strong defensive shortstop — and not the version that batted .231/.282/.344 from 2018 to 2021 and lost his hold on a full-time role.

“Quite honestly, I kind of felt like them other guys were gonna have to prove themselves over him,” Snitker said of Arcia’s place in the spring training competition, once presumed to be Grissom’s to lose. “Because I knew he could do it.”

You can understand why Snitker, the Braves skipper since 2016 and a longtime minor-league manager in the organization before that, evinces unyielding confidence in every new face that shows up in the Atlanta clubhouse. For one, it has to make his players feel good. Secondly, he hasn’t been given many reasons to doubt them.

The Braves during Snitker’s tenure have sprouted young players like a garden on Miracle-Gro. Swanson, Acuña, Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley and Max Fried were summoned as top prospects. When Acuña went down in 2021, Anthopoulos traded for three outfielders having objectively bad seasons, and all three turned it around to help lift the Braves to a World Series title. Last season, Spencer Strider completed an in-season transition from the bullpen to the starting rotation and has been one of MLB’s most dominant pitchers ever since. The Braves called up center fielder Michael Harris II a full year-and-a-half before most prospect analysts thought he’d reach the big leagues, and he won Rookie of the Year. This season, Bryce Elder — a pitcher who never ranked among the Braves’ top 10 prospects — stepped into an injury-riddled rotation and now leads the NL in ERA. Plus, you know, there’s Arcia.

Trying to explain that run of success, Snitker first tipped his cap to Anthopoulos, the executive whose penchant for finding and elevating good, young players is surpassed only by his proclivity for rapidly signing them to long-term extensions. Then Snitker tried to detail why Braves players seem to experience fewer bumps in the road than those on other teams and why players who have experienced turbulence find clear air in Atlanta.

“I think guys come in and want to be a part of it,” Snitker said of the team, citing the makeup, the energy, the people. “And, you know, I think it’s an easy place to come in and have success.”

Arcia’s previous stretch of futility at the plate turned him into a replacement player, one of the fungible yet crucial options at the bottom of MLB rosters. Out of a job in Milwaukee, he was sent to Atlanta in 2021 for two pitchers who are no longer in affiliated baseball. The turnaround didn’t come instantly, but in 2022, Arcia notched a 102 OPS+ in a utility role, marking his first above-average hitting season in the majors. By the end of this weekend, he will surpass his plate appearance total from last year, and he’s now running a .303 batting average.

“He’s seeing he got this opportunity. He’s not going to let it go. He’s going to make the most of it,” Snitker said. “I’m sure he felt like, ‘What do I got to lose?’”

Why MLB fans do the most ‘rooting for laundry’

In 1994, as player movement and free agency took off in American sports, Jerry Seinfeld memorably summed up the mental gymnastics of sports fandom as “rooting for laundry.” Why do you like that guy? Because he’s wearing your team’s jersey. If he put on a different one, the connection would fade.

In the years since, I’d say the observation has become less universal while remaining mostly true. There are huge swaths of people who consume sports as LeBron James fans, as Lionel Messi fans, with the name on the front of the jersey a secondary concern. In baseball, though, Seinfeld’s witticism has perhaps become more acutely accurate.

MLB’s player movement cycles at the winter meetings and the trade deadline foster similar (if less viral) frenetic energy to the frenzy set to unfold this weekend in NBA free agency. But where basketball’s competitive landscape is largely understood when the music stops, baseball’s biggest headlines provide more or less zero information about the results to follow. At times, they can even be downright misleading.

What’s more, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that the laundry is not incidental to the performance of the players wearing it. Taking the field in a Braves jersey — or a Tampa Bay Rays or a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey — is tantamount to saying, “Hey, pay attention. I might be different from the last time you saw me.” Certain colors come with the understanding that a lot of smart people are working behind the scenes to maximize the players donning them; others, such as the blue and orange of Seinfeld’s cherished Mets, denote at least the risk that players are walking the high wire of the major leagues with less support than they’re used to.

Not only are baseball fans still rooting for laundry, but also the laundry seems to have powers.

Those powers, of course, emanate from front-office executives and coaches, from the big-league dugout all the way down to complexes in Florida and Arizona and the Dominican Republic. Baseball is dripping with information and technology and ideas about how to utilize all of it to get better. The people who wield those tools exert untold influence on the final standings and leaderboards, even as players themselves absorb the teachings and execute the physical marvels.

Every MLB executive and coach has a line that hints at these complex, highly individualized processes that happen behind the curtain. When I asked Philadelphia Phillies GM Sam Fuld about squeezing the most out of players forced into unexpected action, he used the most common one: The Phillies are “always looking to put them in the best position to succeed.” The most consistent organizations develop reputations for doing just that.

When MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand ran an anonymous poll of baseball people about the current season in April, the Braves and Rays were the only two clubs that got more than one vote in the “best team” category. That seems accurate — they have the two best records right now — but the language used in responses was telling, in a corporate-consultant-speak kind of way. In voting for the Rays, one NL executive bestowed upon them a slightly different superlative: “Best roster management in baseball.”

Chad Mottola, the Rays hitting coach who has helped develop a parade of enviable talent, bristles at just how much credit gets transferred from the players to the nebulous aura of the organization, the fantasy-baseball-brain mode of fandom that glorifies mostly unseen general managers and front offices.

Up until their world-beating start this year, he said, the Rays were viewed as “a quirky team that has a bunch of gimmicks.” But with Wander Franco asserting superstardom, Yandy Diaz starting the All-Star Game at first base and ace Shane McClanahan a candidate to start the game on the mound for the second straight season, Mottola hopes that is changing.

“We put them in good positions,” he said, “but they’re also really good players.”

‘You don’t necessarily know who it’s gonna be’

It’s hard to deny, though, how disconnected a baseball team’s collective Q rating can be from its storylines. Baseball’s narrative arcs get scrambled every year by teams that wave goodbye to established, recognizable stars and backfill seamlessly — and by teams that gobble up superstars only to fall flat.

This leads, mostly, to a dizzying swirl of unproductive takes about how much money players should make. When we begin a season expecting the Mets and San Diego Padres to feature as main characters, it gets confusing when they instead stumble into the background. With the right mindset, though, the unpredictable shuffle of fortunes can be exhilarating — old friend, new place, new groove.

“You don’t necessarily know who it’s gonna be in any given year, and I think that’s the kind of exciting thing,” said Collin McHugh, the veteran Braves reliever who has seen this play out over and over in his big-league years. “Especially when you’re following a team, you’re a fan of a team, it’s trying to figure out, when you’re watching games, you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m seeing somebody I don’t know, but I’m seeing them do things that are really, really cool.’”

For his part, Arcia cheerfully deflects any grand pronouncements about his career half-year. His huge gains against fastballs, his significantly improved hard-hit rate — nothing gets him to reveal a secret sauce or even anything that differentiates him. All he wants to do is keep “recognizing the pitches and making good contact.”

“It’s all about preparation — preparation we do before the games, with the hitting coaches in the cage, in the meetings,” he said earlier in June, before his All-Star nod was official. “All of those preparations sort of just help us to go into the games and be ready.”

Preparation is a big, important thing in the highest levels of baseball, a collaborative process that can have massive ripple effects. Teams want players with physical ability, yes, but they also want players who will embrace a plan that might not be comfortable or glorious at first. The Athletic’s Jeff Schultz reported that Arcia’s introduction to the Atlanta organization involved his being sent to Triple-A and shown a PowerPoint about his flaws.

When Mottola describes the Rays’ process, you can see the general contours of how this works out for winning franchises and the players who come through them. He talks about trial and error, exploration in which players can set limits.

“You have genuine conversations,” Mottola said. “You have an idea of the places you would like to explore, but you also have to make them understand it’s their life, their career. It’s their voice.”

The work that goes into that, the motivation instilled in players who aren’t on the big stage (yet), has to happen continuously, with no regard for the storylines everyone is watching today. Everyone involved has to be moving toward being better tomorrow.

“They should always want more,” Mottola said of players seeking their moments in the spotlight. “They should think they’re not playing enough. And how we keep them constantly wanting to improve but buying into the way we do things.”

All-Star season surfaces a handful of triumphs in this vein every summer. The playoffs usually surface a few more. This season, there’s Yandy Diaz and others with the Rays. There’s Arcia and Elder with the Braves. There’s J.D. Davis, who has morphed into a terrific third-base defender with the San Francisco Giants after struggling in the field with the Mets.

Tracking baseball can sometimes feel like watching a show in which the actor playing the main character has been switched without comment. Detecting surprises and changes and disappointments set in motion beyond your field of vision is, in many ways, an intrinsic part of following the game.

That means paying a lot of attention to laundry. That said, an appreciation for the people trying on new roles will keep you coming back.

“We all think more of him because of the makeup, the guy, the energy, the teammate that he is,” Snitker said of Arcia, frequently a star of the Braves’ festive dugout celebrations. “We’re all way on board with that because we see that part of him.”