Braves Regular: A Potential Hidden Gem for the 2024 MLB Season

Some of baseball’s best talents, including Austin Riley, Matt Olson, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Spencer Strider, drive the Atlanta Braves.

One of the team’s advantages, though, is its depth; every lineup slot is occupied by above-average regulars, and one player in particular, who is enjoying a great spring, might surprise in 2024.

Orlando Arcia, a shortstop, had an unexpectedly successful 2023 season, hitting.264/.321/.420 with 17 home runs. Additionally, he’s having a good time in the Grapefruit League, as he enters Thursday’s play at.281/.361/.475 with three home runs.

Arcia now has four home runs this spring after hitting another one off Yankees starter Nestor Cortes on Thursday.

Arcia received a contract extension last spring that will pay him a total of $7.3 million over three years, so it’s all a tremendous deal for Atlanta. For the 2024 season, his pay will be a mere $2 million.

President of Baseball Operations Alex Anthopoulos pulled off a major coup by obtaining an above-average shortstop for a substantial discount to what the market would normally command.

Arica scored 4.4 WAR in the previous season, and since a Win Above Replacement is worth about $8 million in the open market, he produced $35.2 million and added over $33 million in value.

On the other hand, most projection models predict that Arcia will regress from his 2023 output; FanGraphs, for example, projects him to bat between.245 and.252 with 13 to 18 home runs in 130 games of action.

Despite only playing in 139 games last season due to a microfracture in his wrist sustained after being hit by a pitch and a few late-season rest days, Arcia hit seventeen home runs. It is reported that he desires to play every day, much like the other Braves infield players.

Assuming that, unlike what appeared to be the case last season, when he batted.294 in the first half but just.235 in the second, Arcia doesn’t physically tire out from the exertion.

The Braves should be able to rely on Arcia surpassing those predictions in a number of ways when he plays in September—200 in particular.

With his second-highest hard-hit rate (41.5%) and ISO (.156), he posted the second-lowest strikeout rate (19.1%) of his career. According to most estimates, he will likely lose most of the power gains and return to his lifetime strikeout percentage of 20.1%.

Even if raw spring training statistics don’t actually tell us anything, they can nevertheless tell us some fascinating tales.

Arcia’s groundball rate increased slightly from over 50% in the previous season, but this spring he has focused on improving his launch angle, as evidenced by his groundball rate of just 36% (down 17.7% from the previous season) and flyball rate of 44% (+10.4%).

That should significantly raise his batting average and power output, even if only half of that increase translates to the regular season.

Nonetheless, even a rerun of the previous season would be more than adequate at this cost ($2 million for 2024).