ATLANTA — In 2016, between Ted Turner’s enthusiastic reign over the Atlanta Braves and the team’s resurrected fortunes on the field, the franchise’s owner told this city the truth.
The Braves were a baseball team, certainly, but they were also, as Liberty Media’s chairman, John Malone, said as a new stadium neared its opening, “a fairly major real estate business.” Now, a real estate mind-set appears to have boomeranged to the team’s front office, which looks to be building less a roster for any one season than a long-term portfolio of young players, potentially deeply discounted. Some starters are under contract into the 2030s.
The approach, in the making for several years, did not keep Atlanta from needing a masterstroke of improvisation — a trading deadline rebuild that has already gone down as a marvel — to win the 2021 World Series. But Atlanta has spent this year, and even this week, fortifying its roster in ways that could make it less dependent on midseason personnel heroics and a sustained hazard to the rest of the big leagues.
“I feel like there’s such a bigger vision for this place in mind,” said Dansby Swanson, the All-Star shortstop whose looming free agency is perhaps Atlanta’s biggest known headache. “And they’ve obviously done a good job of being able to piece together players from different backgrounds, from different ages that all have basically come together and bought into what we have created here.”
All but two of the position players who started for Atlanta in Game 2 of a National League division series against Philadelphia arrived at the ballpark under the club’s control through at least the 2024 season. Atlanta’s victory, 3-0, on Wednesday evened the best-of-five series, with Game 3 scheduled for Friday afternoon in Philadelphia. The Atlanta lineup is expected to look much the same then, and, barring injuries, for a while to come.
Ronald Acuña Jr., a 24-year-old outfielder who is already a three-time All-Star, has an Atlanta contract through 2026, with club options for two more seasons. And, at only $7 million a year, Ozzie Albies, a switch-hitting infielder and two-time winner of the Silver Slugger Award, has club options that could keep him in Atlanta through 2027.
The slugging first baseman Matt Olson, who had 78 extra-base hits in the regular season — tied for third in the majors — signed an eight-year deal in March after arriving in a trade from Oakland. In August, around when Atlanta signed the rookie outfield phenom Michael Harris II for eight years, the team reached a deal with third baseman Austin Riley, who had even more extra-base hits than Olson, that could keep him in its clubhouse until 2033.
Just on Monday, Atlanta said it had signed Spencer Strider, a rookie right-hander who started 20 games this year and recorded a 2.67 E.R.A., to a six-year contract. If Atlanta cuts at least a four-year deal with Swanson, it will not have to worry much over its infield until 2027.
The roster is the handiwork of Alex Anthopoulos, who honed his craft with Montreal, Toronto and the Los Angeles Dodgers before he took over a beleaguered Atlanta in November 2017, when his new team had just finished its fourth consecutive losing season. The team’s worst regular-season campaign since, an 88-73 mark, still ended with players raising Atlanta’s first World Series trophy since 1995.
Some stars of that team are now scattered across baseball. Freddie Freeman, the team’s former cornerstone, is now a Dodger. Joc Pederson went to the Giants, and Jorge Soler, the most valuable player of the World Series, headed to the Marlins. The closer Will Smith now pitches for Houston.
But this year’s stampede toward a static roster reflects Atlanta’s desires for a “nucleus,” as Manager Brian Snitker put it this week, and potential top-shelf stars signed for relative bargains, before the allures of free agency.
“Alex is a really, really brilliant guy who does his work well,” John Schuerholz, who was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame after a 17-year stint as Atlanta’s general manager, said of Anthopoulos in an interview by the dugout before Game 1. “If you do that and you have those kinds of people, you can keep this thing going, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is kept going for many, many years.”
Although the Albies deal, announced in 2019, was widely regarded as a steal for Atlanta, some players regard early contracts as financial security measures that let them quickly earn well above the $700,000 major-league minimum and guard their potential fortunes against injury. The advantage for teams comes in if they ultimately save tens of millions of dollars if a young player blossoms, or simply stays, a star.
“My goal is always to outperform any expectations,” said Strider, whose deal will add up to $92 million if Atlanta exercises a club option for 2029. “There’s nobody that has higher aspirations or expectations for performance than myself, and so in that way I don’t feel any pressure. The expectation is that I outperform any contract I ever sign.”
He added, “I’m just excited that there’s some security in knowing I’ll be here with these guys in this clubhouse and go out and keep doing what we’ve been doing.”
Schuerholz, who engineered Kansas City’s 1985 championship team before he assembled Atlanta’s 1995 roster, had a similar forecast about how the long deals could sweeten clubhouse dynamics.
“They all probably feel pretty darn good about that,” he said. “They have a camaraderie that’s already created. They don’t have to try to go out every day and work at that.”
Atlanta, though, is deeply familiar with how roster fixtures can come up relatively short. Although the Hall of Famers Bobby Cox, Tom Glavine, Chipper Jones, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz combined to play or manage 92 seasons in Atlanta, the franchise won a lone World Series, the 1995 title, during their stints.
Atlanta skidded in Game 1 on Tuesday, when a late rally still left it short a run. But on Wednesday, before some exceptional starting pitching powered a Braves recovery, Riley said that he had sensed during his minor league days that the franchise was cultivating a strong group of crucial players.
The burst of contracts, he suggested later, has only added to that.
“The core group, we have the same mind-sets. To have that for four, five, six years down the road, I think it just builds to what we’re doing right now,” he said.
“When us infielders play every day, you build that relationship with the guy next to you,” he added. “Now it’s Strider, Harris, those guys, you build those relationships and know what to expect from each other and you can build on that to hopefully be here year in, year out.”