SAN FRANCISCO -- The Braves can talk themselves into improvement on offense. Austin Riley should be better in the second half.
Ronald Acuña Jr. should be on the field more often over the final months. Drake Baldwin, the club believes, just needs time to get his timing back and return to the level that made him one of baseball’s top hitters.
The rotation is a much trickier puzzle.
There is reason to think the Braves will chase at least one frontline starter before the Aug. 3 Trade Deadline, but that kind of help may not arrive for another three or four weeks. In the meantime, the club has to keep piecing things together, and Hurston Waldrep has at least put himself into that conversation.
Waldrep made his season debut against the Giants on Sunday and worked two scoreless innings after Reynaldo López gave up one run over three innings Friday. That outing came in López’s first start since he was shifted to the bullpen near the end of April. Manager Walt Weiss said the two could piggyback again during one of this week’s games against the Cardinals.
López is scheduled to start Wednesday, so Waldrep could follow him in that game.
Waldrep’s first appearance came with plenty of traffic - four walks in two innings - but the raw numbers only tell part of the story. He had walked six batters in 7 2/3 innings for Triple-A Gwinnett before his promotion, though four of those came in a rain-soaked, three-inning outing on June 16. The Braves clearly see upside here, and Waldrep appears to have the higher ceiling of the two right now.
That upside matters because the Braves have already been forced to reshuffle things again. Bryce Elder lasted just four innings on Saturday, and that pushed Grant Holmes into four innings of relief. Now the team has to figure out what comes next for Elder, whose velocity was down about 1 mile per hour on each pitch during his latest rough outing.
Elder has been far better on regular rest, posting a 2.70 ERA in nine starts, compared with a 5.56 ERA in his other eight. The latest dip has been ugly, though.
His ERA has climbed from 1.97 to 4.01 after he allowed 29 earned runs over his last 30 innings, an 8.70 ERA stretch. Even within that skid, there were two decent starts, so the more precise read is that he has given up 19 earned runs in his last 14 innings across three starts.
That makes the last few weeks look especially strange when measured against what came before. Elder had a 2.30 ERA over 18 starts between Aug. 24, 2025 and May 22, and only four qualified big leaguers were better in that span: Cam Schlittler at 1.93, Cristopher Sánchez at 1.99, Paul Skenes at 2.03 and Chris Sale at 2.20.
Because that stretch ended only a month ago, the Braves have reason to believe this could still be a short-term slump. Elder also was hardly crushed by bad luck on Saturday; he allowed five hits, and two of them were Rafael Devers homers. Devers’ three-run blast in the third initially looked like a foul ball before the Bay winds pushed it back to bang off the right-field foul pole.
For now, the Braves need innings, and Martín Pérez has at least been giving them a steady stream of them. He has finished five or more innings in 11 of his 12 starts.
Holmes, by contrast, has gone fewer than five innings in four of his past five outings. That uneven mix has helped wear down a bullpen that has already been stretched thin at times in recent weeks.
So the club keeps adjusting. It will keep looking for outside help, keep searching for workable combinations inside the current staff and keep hoping the rotation settles down before long.
There is some longer-term hope, too. Spencer Schwellenbach, who is working back from an elbow fracture and bone spurs, could return in September.
AJ Smith-Shawver, who had Tommy John surgery, might become an option in August. Spencer Strider, dealing with elbow inflammation, cannot be counted on to return this season.
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His third start at the level offered a much better answer. McKenzie settled in with eight strikeouts in 4.2 innings and finished by retiring six of his final 10 batters via punchouts, a sharp rebound that dropped his season ERA to 2.08 over 26 innings. The stuff still points to more growth ahead, too, with a curveball that misses plenty of bats, a fastball sitting in the 90-95 mph range and a low-80s changeup giving Atlanta plenty to work with as his rise keeps testing the limits of how quickly he can move. [Read more 🡒]