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Braves, Gonzalez relying heavily on MLB's youngest staff
ATLANTA -- Manny Banuelos, cramping and dehydrated, left Thursday night's Braves-Nationals rubber match with 17 outs to his name -- 75 pitches spent running from a Cy Young frontrunner's shadow. The 24-year-old southpaw could barely control the ball by the final inning of his MLB debut, muscles in is left calf and both hands seizing up on him, but he walked off the field with a leg up on Nationals superstar Max Scherzer, the $200 million-dollar man enjoying a historic stretch. Another MLB debut in Atlanta's 2015 record books.
In Atlanta's clubhouse following a surprising walk-off win, the newly minted rookie's emotion showed as his cell phone lit up with text messages from friends and family.
"I've been waiting for this moment for years and years," said Banuelos, once the Yankees' top pitching prospect before undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2012. He was acquired in the team's offseason -- and ongoing -- shopping spree for pitching depth in the farm system. Now one of the pitching-rich franchises in baseball, the front office's moves are paying immediate dividends for a club battling for division relevance as the All-Star break nears.
Atlanta boasts the youngest rotation in baseball, by a mile.
Over the past month, manager Fredi Gonzalez has relied on a staff that consists of three highly regarded 24-year-olds and four rookies. In fact, no other team in franchise history has relied on young starting pitching quite like the 2015 model has through the first half of the schedule.
There's been an adjustment period for Gonzalez and his staff, but the fifth-year manager has his rookie debut talk down to a science.
"I tell them, 'Trust the catchers. Trust the game plan. Trust Roger (McDowell)'s approach to getting hitters out. It's still 60 feet, six inches. The plate's still the same size,'" Gonzalez said of the four starting debuts he's prepared for this season. "Sometimes the less information you give them -- let somebody else worry about the information, like the catchers -- I think they're better off."
On one hand, the Braves entered the 2015 season expecting to rely on youth.
The aforementioned 24-year-olds -- Julio Teheran, Alex Wood and Shelby Miller -- composed the top of the rotation. Mike Minor, 27, was the projected No. 4 starter coming off a difficult season, while rookies Banuelos and Mike Foltynewicz, 23, were in the running for the fifth and final spot during spring training. Plans changed. Minor underwent season-ending shoulder surgery and the organization's preseason preference for one or two veteran arms culminated in Eric Stults and Trevor Cahill seeing time on staff.
The Stults-Cahill duo combined to give up 42 earned runs in 62 innings and were quickly jettisoned to the bullpen and Los Angeles, respectively.
President of baseball operations John Hart offered ample foreshadowing down in Lake Buena Vista four months ago: "If you look at it and you're not sure, we would certainly want to err on the side of the young player, to get them involved this year. ... An honest answer is, we would prefer to take a guy that we think has a chance to be a big player in our future, that has a lot of talent, a lot of ability. And at some point you've got to break these guys in."
Over the course of his short tenure, backed by the wheeling-and-dealing nature of assistant GM John Coppolella, Hart has acquired eight top-tier pitching prospects at various minor-league levels. Three have already spent time with the parent club in starting roles: Banuelos, Mike Foltynewicz and 22-year-old Matt Wisler. The final rookie, Williams Perez (24), is off to a 4-0 start with a 2.31 ERA.
In total, when Alex Wood takes the mound on Saturday night against Philadelphia, pitchers under the age of 25 will have started 70 of Atlanta's first 81 games this season -- a mark that nearly laps the next-closest MLB team.
Over the past 50 MLB seasons, only one team, the 1998 Marlins, handed 140 starts to pitchers under the age of 25. The Braves are poised to eclipse that mark as well.
"It definitely shows you how quickly you can go from being a rookie two years ago to being one of the older guys in the rotation," Wood said. "It's kinda crazy."
To stock up and depend on boatloads of young starting pitching is to play a game of parallels in Atlanta. There are inescapable comparisons for a franchise aiming to reinvent the glory years.
The only time the Atlanta Braves have even come close to matching this under-25 workload in the starting rotation was in the buildup to their worst-to-first magic, the three-season stretch from 1988 to 1990. In hindsight, those seasons can be viewed as starting blocks, the beginnings of Hall of Fame careers for John Smoltz and Tom Glavine, the learning curve for a 20-year-old Steve Avery and the early-career promise of Pete Smith. However, it was also one of the lowest points in team history. The Braves lost 300 games over that three-season stretch, finishing at the bottom of the NL West dogpile in back-to-back-to-back years.
Formative years can be difficult, even for the makings of a transcendent staff.
"The challenge is you just don't know -- there's a trust factor with guys like (veteran Aaron) Harang and even Freddy Garcia when he was here, (Tim) Hudson. You know what they're gonna give you. You trust them," Gonzalez said. "Where as you don't know what's gonna happen from start to start: 'What's Wisler going to do?' ... The expectation of a young pitcher sometimes is challenging."
Consistency concerns are valid -- Wisler's pitched at both ends of the spectrum in three career starts while Teheran's home-road splits are staggering -- but this isn't 300-losses-in-three-years territory. The Braves are on the outside looking in when it comes to the playoff race, but the division deficit is in single digits and a wildcard push is at least mathematically possible. The overall direction of the staff is undeniably positive.
Atlanta's under-25 starters own a 3.37 ERA and an MLB-best 5.3 WAR.
In 2010, Bobby Cox's final season, the rotation leaned on pitchers in their early 20s, notably Tommy Hanson and Jair Jurrjens, but that usage rate is hardly in the same stratosphere as this current crop. Eight-six percent of Atlanta's starts have come from under-25 arms (including Wood's start against Philadelphia on July 4) -- a number set on a constant, historic incline right now.
Unless inning limits affect the rotation's makeup, the franchise's youth movement is locked in high gear: Not a single starter turns 25 until after the regular-season finale.
If the Braves utilize on some combination of the seven youngsters for the rest of the season, it could arguably become the most youth-dependent team of the modern era.
Gonzalez and Wood were both quick to point to McDowell and veteran catchers A.J. Pierzynski and Ryan Lavarnway as vital pieces of the equation. (The preference for seasoned battery mates to serve as game-long tour guides likely factored into the decision to demote top catching prospect Christian Bethancourt back to Triple-A Gwinnett.) And while Wood studied Hudson's routine as a rookie and bounced ideas off Harang last season, a pitcher being on the same page with his catchers and pitching coach is more vital than having that knowledgeable staff veteran to learn from.
Still, there's a sense that Gonzalez isn't exactly anxiety-free in this arrangement.
This is new territory -- it would be for any MLB team -- and with it comes a slightly different set of boundaries.
"The only challenges that you encounter is not abusing the young pitchers," Gonzalez said. "You get an older veteran pitcher, you can go up there and go, 'Hey, guess what? You're going back out there. You've got 89 pitches in the fifth. We've got nobody (in the bullpen), we just finished playing an extra-inning game. You're going back out for 125, 130.' You don't want to necessarily do that to a young pitcher. Subsequently, you end up burning the bullpen to protect that pitcher."
Difficult decisions are on the horizon for Hart & Co., an enviable dilemma of their own making.
Playing the probability game, the front office likely hit on at least a couple of its eight premier pitching acquisitions over the past few months, not to mention holdovers like Teheran, Wood, Perez and prospect Lucas Sims, and there are only so many spots in a major-league rotation. Yes, there's good chance that a few never make the leap and others either reassigned to bullpen duties or traded, but this rotation should have candidates galore in the coming years -- cost-controlled, experienced candidates at that. After all, the team is already running into a smaller-scale "problem" with its four rookies this season.
It makes for a sort of two-way street: The rotation has an opportunity to grow up together, much like that '90s pipe dream of a unit, but there's also individual competition. Everybody wants a seat at the table. With this type of organizational depth, a down season or two could cost a pitcher his rotation spot down the line.
"I think the hardest part about once you get up here is establishing yourself," Wood said. "Obviously the more chances you get and the longer you're up here, and when you're putting up quality starts and quality appearances, whatever it may be, that's the hardest thing. Becoming established. You go from every start out your rookie year and the year after to kinda -- leeway is not the right word, but earning that respect and knowing that you're one of the anchors in the rotation. That's the hardest part."
These are good problems to have, though. All told, halfway through an up-and-down season, the Atlanta Braves' brightest spot is also their youngest.
