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After Orlando Arcia’s 2024 season, shortstop remains a question moving forward for the Braves. The shortstop plan for the 2024 Atlanta Braves was pretty simple. Orlando Arcia was going to be their defensive-first shortstop, who could bat at the bottom of the lineup while the remaining eight hitters in the deepest lineup in baseball did what they do and covered him up. On paper, it all worked. Unfortunately, when things went from on paper to on the field, things didn’t go quite to plan.
How acquired
The Braves acquired Arcia in April of 2021, in a rare early-season trade with the Brewers. Milwaukee was looking for bullpen depth and were interested in Patrick Weigel and Chad Sobotka; the Braves wanted a little more infield depth with Arcia, who had fallen out of favor with the team that had developed him, despite a 2020 season where he started doing stuff more akin to how the Braves treat batting as a team. The Braves, of course, didn’t need a starting shortstop with Dansby Swanson firmly in place in an everyday role but Arcia provided positional depth and and immediate help on the bench, and based on his changing approach from 2020, the Braves executed the trade.
Once Swanson left after the 2022 season, the conventional wisdom was the Braves would look at acquire a starting-caliber shortstop and leave Arcia in a bench/back-up role. Media and fans both were surprised, however, when come the end of Spring Training 2023, Arcia was named the starting shortstop, where he’s been ever since.
What were the expectations?
The problem for Arcia in his time with the Brewers was he just couldn’t hit. Over his first 2,000 career major league plate appearances, Arcia posted a .242/.293/.363 batting line, good for a 70 wRC+. He was, at times (not 2019, though!) an unreal defender at shortstop, great glove, strong arm, but he couldn’t hit a lick. It’s why he was available in trade to begin with, it’s why he was deemed a bench piece, and it’s why it was so surprising the Braves made him their starting shortstop in 2023. And because of that, expectations back then couldn’t have been lower.
And then something very strange happened. The 2023 season. Not only did Orlando Arcia hit, he hit pretty well. In 533 plate appearances in 2023, Arcia posted a 100 wRC+ with 17 homers, which when added to solid defense at shortstop, makes for a nice player to have. So good in fact, Arcia made the All-Star team in 2023. He was hitting the ball harder, added real power to his game, his expected numbers had real juice behind them, and it began to look like the Braves had a first-class player development success case on their hands. Some swing adjustments and a new approach had unlocked some of the potential that had once made Arcia a top-25 prospect in baseball.
Though he seriously faded down the stretch due to some approach issues, it was much less surprising come 2024 that Arcia was penciled in as the starting shortstop. ZiPS had him as maybe a hair below average coming into the 2024 season, which made sense given that he was a bit above average in 2023 but outhit his xwOBA by a fair bit.
2024 Results
For all of the progress that came with the 2023 season, 2024 went the opposite way. Arcia spent a large portion of the season being the worst hitter in all of Major League Baseball, posting a 56 wRC+ in the first half of the season, stacking one awful at-bat after another, and giving back all the gains of the prior season. Arcia finished with a 72 wRC+ for the year, basically dead-on what he had done all those seasons in Milwaukee, and questions about the Braves long-term answers at shortstop have arisen once again.
The fall back down to earth was specifically costly for the team, which was dealing with a tremendous amount of injuries and underperformances all over the lineup, and really could’ve used a rock-solid year from Arcia. Instead they got near-replacement-level production, 0.8 fWAR in 157 games started, from one of the game’s most important positions. Questions about whether Arcia needs to return to a bench role as he was originally acquired to do got louder and louder.
Arcia once again played pretty good shorstop defense, but the fact is that his 72 wRC+ came with him outhitting his xwOBA again (while most of his teammates didn’t), which is kind of scary.
What went right?
Not much. Arcia did catch the ball at shortstop, posting a +4 OAA (outs above average) for the second year in a row, though his defense does get a little overrated at times. He had his share of misplays in 2024 and while his defense is certainly well above average, it’s a full couple of levels below the game’s very best and certainly wasn’t enough to cover up his severe offensive deficiencies.
The only other part of Arcia’s game that you could say went well in 2024 was he did hit 17 HRs, tying his career high from 2023. But even that comes with an asterisk, as his overall slugging percentage dropped by almost 70 points from .420 in 2023 to .356 in 2024. If you’re looking for more of a positive, Arcia did for the most part maintain his batted ball profile from 2023. After an average exit velocity of 88.2 mph in 2023, Arcia posted the exact same number in 2024, 88.2 mph. His hard hit rate did drop from 41 percent to 38 percent and all of his expected numbers tanked completely but that’s hardly a surprise.
Still, the season is long, and most dogs have their day. Arcia’s was April 17, in which he did the semi-rare feat of both tying and ultimately winning the game in the late innings. He doubled in the second, reached on a dropped third strike in the fourth, flew out in the sixth, tied the game with a sac fly in the eighth, and with two outs in the tenth, drove in the go-ahead run that ultimately stood up as the Braves won 5-4.
What went wrong?
A funny thing about that clip above — it sort of defined Arcia’s season. That game-winning bouncer was Arcia’s 68th PA of the year, and through those 68 PAs, he had a 165 wRC+, with a very high grounder rate and a very high pull rate. Through those 68 PAs, Arcia had a hilarious .503 wOBA on a .195 xwOBA on pulled grounders. After that point, he had a .191 wOBA on a .227 xwOBA on pulled grounders, in part because it’s fairly easy to position a defense to where he’s going to bounce a pitch he rolls over; his wRC+ after April 17 was 60.
From purely a results point of view, the first thing that jumps off the page is the 50-point drop in BABIP in 2024 (.301 to .249). Arcia did hit the ball in the air more in ‘24, which does typically produce a lower BABIP profile but he hits the ball on the ground so much anyway, there was probably some bad luck in there, especially with identical exit velocities.
Some of Arcia’s issues were really just a carryover from 2023. That year, he started out sitting on non-fastballs, essentially tricking pitchers who saw him swing out of his shoes, thinking that he was sitting dead red. He ran into some mechanical issues trying to eventually switch back to hitting fastballs that he could only fix intermittently; his attempt to hunt fastballs after, in theory, pitchers realized what he was doing earlier was stymied by the fact that once he switched to looking for fastballs, he went back to struggling against everything else. Freddie Freeman, he is not.
In 2024, Arcia basically started out how he ended 2023, still hunting fastballs, rather than the rope-a-dope that helped him get off to a great start in 2023. However, the same mechanical issues continued to mess him up, and by the time he tried to wheel back around to what worked in 2023, it was too little and too late — plus, pitchers had little reason to not just blaze fastballs by him given that he wasn’t hitting them well even when trying to sit on them.
Situationally, Arcia was a disaster. Constantly coming up in massive spots and games and constantly failing became a cruel running joke for most of the season for Braves fans. Arcia finished the season with a WPA (Win Probability Added) of -3.51, which ranked dead last in all of baseball among qualified players literally all batters. The rest of the lineup falling apart and Brian Snitker batting him fifth or sixth didn’t help, but Arcia could not for the life him come up with high leverage production.
Perhaps nothing exemplified this more than the game on September 1. Arcia was 0-for-3 with three strikeouts through eight innings, and in the ninth, Phillies reliever Matt Strahm essentially pitched around both Whit Merrifield and Ramon Laureano to load the bases with one out in a tie game. He did this because the two guys up next were Arcia and Luke Williams, and as it turns out, walking multiple guys to get to Arcia and Williams is a pretty legitimate strategy. Arcia got three fastballs in pretty much the same location (up and away), missed the first two, and then popped out on the third. Yeah.
So, yeah, there was a plate discipline problem. Only walking 41 times in 602 plate appearances is a fantastic way to exacerbate an already extensive problem and Arcia just absolutely refused to take free bases, given his predilection for swinging. He’s certainly not the only hitter in the Braves lineup struggling with this, but the number of times he would swing at a bad pitch in a three-ball count was enough to drive a fanbase insane.
Remember the thing about his weak grounders sneaking through that gave him a good start despite poor actual performance? By April 30, those memories were long gone. Here’s Arcia swinging at a pretty horrible pitch (the fourth slider he saw in a row, and the only thing Andres Munoz threw to him) to make a key out on a grounder that didn’t result in a hit:
Stuff like this happened a lot, perhaps way too much — forgivable in the moment if he were doing other things, but whacking a hanging splitter just 93 mph into the ground is... not great.
2025 Outlook
The conventional wisdom when the off-season started was the Braves were finally, and aggressively, going to address this gaping hole at shortstop and Arcia was going to move back to a bench role where he belongs. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that’s the case. Shortstop is an incredibly difficult (and expensive) place to upgrade and the Braves likely have other needs that have jumped up the priority list: starting pitcher, outfield and bullpen. Add on that Willy Adames just signed a massive free agent deal with the Giants and I fear that Arcia is once again slated for 600+ plate appearances with the Braves in 2025.
Projections have him as a 90 wRC+ hitter next year with solid enough defense to be a 1.4 fWAR player. The Braves would gladly take that right this moment if you could guarantee it, but of course, everyone knows with Arcia there’s more downside at play than that. He really needs to figure out whatever issues led to specific inconsistency after his first few months of 2023, and most of 2024, but given that it’s now been 1.5 years of struggling to just pick a pitch to crush and execute on that, it’s not clear when relief is coming, if at all.
The off-season is still young enough that’s it not impossible the Braves make a change and it’s also very possible an in-season upgrade happens, but as we sit here on the verge of the Winter Meetings, my guess is Arcia is the starting shortstop in 2025.
Godspeed to us.
<img alt="New York Mets v Atlanta Braves: Game One" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/v4TvnmzEEpna7ASIkcX2w8L6pEA=/0x0:6000x4000/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73774371/2175962930.0.jpg">
Photo by Edward M. Pio Roda/Getty Images
After Orlando Arcia’s 2024 season, shortstop remains a question moving forward for the Braves. The shortstop plan for the 2024 Atlanta Braves was pretty simple. Orlando Arcia was going to be their defensive-first shortstop, who could bat at the bottom of the lineup while the remaining eight hitters in the deepest lineup in baseball did what they do and covered him up. On paper, it all worked. Unfortunately, when things went from on paper to on the field, things didn’t go quite to plan.
How acquired
The Braves acquired Arcia in April of 2021, in a rare early-season trade with the Brewers. Milwaukee was looking for bullpen depth and were interested in Patrick Weigel and Chad Sobotka; the Braves wanted a little more infield depth with Arcia, who had fallen out of favor with the team that had developed him, despite a 2020 season where he started doing stuff more akin to how the Braves treat batting as a team. The Braves, of course, didn’t need a starting shortstop with Dansby Swanson firmly in place in an everyday role but Arcia provided positional depth and and immediate help on the bench, and based on his changing approach from 2020, the Braves executed the trade.
Once Swanson left after the 2022 season, the conventional wisdom was the Braves would look at acquire a starting-caliber shortstop and leave Arcia in a bench/back-up role. Media and fans both were surprised, however, when come the end of Spring Training 2023, Arcia was named the starting shortstop, where he’s been ever since.
What were the expectations?
The problem for Arcia in his time with the Brewers was he just couldn’t hit. Over his first 2,000 career major league plate appearances, Arcia posted a .242/.293/.363 batting line, good for a 70 wRC+. He was, at times (not 2019, though!) an unreal defender at shortstop, great glove, strong arm, but he couldn’t hit a lick. It’s why he was available in trade to begin with, it’s why he was deemed a bench piece, and it’s why it was so surprising the Braves made him their starting shortstop in 2023. And because of that, expectations back then couldn’t have been lower.
And then something very strange happened. The 2023 season. Not only did Orlando Arcia hit, he hit pretty well. In 533 plate appearances in 2023, Arcia posted a 100 wRC+ with 17 homers, which when added to solid defense at shortstop, makes for a nice player to have. So good in fact, Arcia made the All-Star team in 2023. He was hitting the ball harder, added real power to his game, his expected numbers had real juice behind them, and it began to look like the Braves had a first-class player development success case on their hands. Some swing adjustments and a new approach had unlocked some of the potential that had once made Arcia a top-25 prospect in baseball.
Though he seriously faded down the stretch due to some approach issues, it was much less surprising come 2024 that Arcia was penciled in as the starting shortstop. ZiPS had him as maybe a hair below average coming into the 2024 season, which made sense given that he was a bit above average in 2023 but outhit his xwOBA by a fair bit.
2024 Results
For all of the progress that came with the 2023 season, 2024 went the opposite way. Arcia spent a large portion of the season being the worst hitter in all of Major League Baseball, posting a 56 wRC+ in the first half of the season, stacking one awful at-bat after another, and giving back all the gains of the prior season. Arcia finished with a 72 wRC+ for the year, basically dead-on what he had done all those seasons in Milwaukee, and questions about the Braves long-term answers at shortstop have arisen once again.
The fall back down to earth was specifically costly for the team, which was dealing with a tremendous amount of injuries and underperformances all over the lineup, and really could’ve used a rock-solid year from Arcia. Instead they got near-replacement-level production, 0.8 fWAR in 157 games started, from one of the game’s most important positions. Questions about whether Arcia needs to return to a bench role as he was originally acquired to do got louder and louder.
Arcia once again played pretty good shorstop defense, but the fact is that his 72 wRC+ came with him outhitting his xwOBA again (while most of his teammates didn’t), which is kind of scary.
What went right?
Not much. Arcia did catch the ball at shortstop, posting a +4 OAA (outs above average) for the second year in a row, though his defense does get a little overrated at times. He had his share of misplays in 2024 and while his defense is certainly well above average, it’s a full couple of levels below the game’s very best and certainly wasn’t enough to cover up his severe offensive deficiencies.
The only other part of Arcia’s game that you could say went well in 2024 was he did hit 17 HRs, tying his career high from 2023. But even that comes with an asterisk, as his overall slugging percentage dropped by almost 70 points from .420 in 2023 to .356 in 2024. If you’re looking for more of a positive, Arcia did for the most part maintain his batted ball profile from 2023. After an average exit velocity of 88.2 mph in 2023, Arcia posted the exact same number in 2024, 88.2 mph. His hard hit rate did drop from 41 percent to 38 percent and all of his expected numbers tanked completely but that’s hardly a surprise.
Still, the season is long, and most dogs have their day. Arcia’s was April 17, in which he did the semi-rare feat of both tying and ultimately winning the game in the late innings. He doubled in the second, reached on a dropped third strike in the fourth, flew out in the sixth, tied the game with a sac fly in the eighth, and with two outs in the tenth, drove in the go-ahead run that ultimately stood up as the Braves won 5-4.
What went wrong?
A funny thing about that clip above — it sort of defined Arcia’s season. That game-winning bouncer was Arcia’s 68th PA of the year, and through those 68 PAs, he had a 165 wRC+, with a very high grounder rate and a very high pull rate. Through those 68 PAs, Arcia had a hilarious .503 wOBA on a .195 xwOBA on pulled grounders. After that point, he had a .191 wOBA on a .227 xwOBA on pulled grounders, in part because it’s fairly easy to position a defense to where he’s going to bounce a pitch he rolls over; his wRC+ after April 17 was 60.
From purely a results point of view, the first thing that jumps off the page is the 50-point drop in BABIP in 2024 (.301 to .249). Arcia did hit the ball in the air more in ‘24, which does typically produce a lower BABIP profile but he hits the ball on the ground so much anyway, there was probably some bad luck in there, especially with identical exit velocities.
Some of Arcia’s issues were really just a carryover from 2023. That year, he started out sitting on non-fastballs, essentially tricking pitchers who saw him swing out of his shoes, thinking that he was sitting dead red. He ran into some mechanical issues trying to eventually switch back to hitting fastballs that he could only fix intermittently; his attempt to hunt fastballs after, in theory, pitchers realized what he was doing earlier was stymied by the fact that once he switched to looking for fastballs, he went back to struggling against everything else. Freddie Freeman, he is not.
In 2024, Arcia basically started out how he ended 2023, still hunting fastballs, rather than the rope-a-dope that helped him get off to a great start in 2023. However, the same mechanical issues continued to mess him up, and by the time he tried to wheel back around to what worked in 2023, it was too little and too late — plus, pitchers had little reason to not just blaze fastballs by him given that he wasn’t hitting them well even when trying to sit on them.
Situationally, Arcia was a disaster. Constantly coming up in massive spots and games and constantly failing became a cruel running joke for most of the season for Braves fans. Arcia finished the season with a WPA (Win Probability Added) of -3.51, which ranked dead last in all of baseball among qualified players literally all batters. The rest of the lineup falling apart and Brian Snitker batting him fifth or sixth didn’t help, but Arcia could not for the life him come up with high leverage production.
Perhaps nothing exemplified this more than the game on September 1. Arcia was 0-for-3 with three strikeouts through eight innings, and in the ninth, Phillies reliever Matt Strahm essentially pitched around both Whit Merrifield and Ramon Laureano to load the bases with one out in a tie game. He did this because the two guys up next were Arcia and Luke Williams, and as it turns out, walking multiple guys to get to Arcia and Williams is a pretty legitimate strategy. Arcia got three fastballs in pretty much the same location (up and away), missed the first two, and then popped out on the third. Yeah.
So, yeah, there was a plate discipline problem. Only walking 41 times in 602 plate appearances is a fantastic way to exacerbate an already extensive problem and Arcia just absolutely refused to take free bases, given his predilection for swinging. He’s certainly not the only hitter in the Braves lineup struggling with this, but the number of times he would swing at a bad pitch in a three-ball count was enough to drive a fanbase insane.
Remember the thing about his weak grounders sneaking through that gave him a good start despite poor actual performance? By April 30, those memories were long gone. Here’s Arcia swinging at a pretty horrible pitch (the fourth slider he saw in a row, and the only thing Andres Munoz threw to him) to make a key out on a grounder that didn’t result in a hit:
Stuff like this happened a lot, perhaps way too much — forgivable in the moment if he were doing other things, but whacking a hanging splitter just 93 mph into the ground is... not great.
2025 Outlook
The conventional wisdom when the off-season started was the Braves were finally, and aggressively, going to address this gaping hole at shortstop and Arcia was going to move back to a bench role where he belongs. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that’s the case. Shortstop is an incredibly difficult (and expensive) place to upgrade and the Braves likely have other needs that have jumped up the priority list: starting pitcher, outfield and bullpen. Add on that Willy Adames just signed a massive free agent deal with the Giants and I fear that Arcia is once again slated for 600+ plate appearances with the Braves in 2025.
Projections have him as a 90 wRC+ hitter next year with solid enough defense to be a 1.4 fWAR player. The Braves would gladly take that right this moment if you could guarantee it, but of course, everyone knows with Arcia there’s more downside at play than that. He really needs to figure out whatever issues led to specific inconsistency after his first few months of 2023, and most of 2024, but given that it’s now been 1.5 years of struggling to just pick a pitch to crush and execute on that, it’s not clear when relief is coming, if at all.
The off-season is still young enough that’s it not impossible the Braves make a change and it’s also very possible an in-season upgrade happens, but as we sit here on the verge of the Winter Meetings, my guess is Arcia is the starting shortstop in 2025.
Godspeed to us.
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