BS Report: What to Expect in the Second Half of the Season

Now that the All-Star game is over, we can look forward to the second part of the season for the Atlanta Braves, which will start on Friday against the Texas Rangers at Truist Park. Now, this is, of course, going to be fun to see how the Braves come out of the gate in the second part of the season. Can Austin Riley get on track?

Will Ronald Acuna be ready to go? Can the pitching staff stay healthy and get some players back? But it’s also going to be fun to see what happens with the front office. Alex Anthopoulos, the general manager the Braves has a lot of work to do to try to help this team before the trade deadline on August the 3rd.

Take me back to five years ago, when the Braves were struggling at the All-Star break. They had just lost Ronald Acuna to a torn ACL in Miami, and there was a lot of conversation about whether or not the Braves should buy or sell, should they go forward, or should they back off and see what happens, and then kind of take it from there to see if they could be contenders for the rest of the year?

Well, Alex in Tampa believed in his team. They had a really good run differential, which he kept on saying was kind of a tipping point to make him know they could compete. And he made six trades in two weeks before the trade deadline. Between the end of the All-Star break and the trade deadline, six trades, including Joc Pederson, Eddie Rosario, Adam Duvall and Horace Silver.

Well, those four guys who helped replace Ronald Acuna. Really the reason why the Braves won the World Series? Let’s be honest. And you have to wonder, well, can Alex Anthopoulos do that again? The Braves almost need six trades because the issues that they have with the line up, with the problems at shortstop or the problems of Riley at third base, the outfield, of course, not knowing if Acuna can come back and if he can stay healthy.

And of course, the pitching staff is one starting pitcher enough, or do they have to get two starting pitchers? Well, that’s a lot to go get two starting pitchers, because everybody in their brother’s going to want a starting pitcher of their own. They may need another reliever. Robert Suarez is out. Could they actually go after another relief pitcher as well?

So there are a lot of decisions for this team to make. I think there will be some activity. How much? It’s hard. It’s hard to make a trade and of course you also have the pending lockout for the owners. It’s going to happen after this season. That may impact some of these teams. Plus a lot of the teams that maybe a week or two ago, you may have thought would be sellers like the Boston Red Sox, for example, who have now won nine in a row.

Well, they’re not going to sell. And Sonny Gray is a pitcher who many people believed could be on the market. But now that the Red Sox have won nine in a row, they’re probably not going to get rid of him unless they really collapse after the All-Star break. So it’s going to be fun to watch, to see what the Braves do.

They do need help and they only have a two game lead. So this is going to be tough to hold off the Phillies and the Marlins. So they may need some help from the outside from other teams in trades to make that happen before August. The third trade deadline.