Alex Wood is rounding into a dominating starting pitcher. (Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports)
Though the season is still young, the Braves rotation is quickly establishing itself as one of the best in the National League, if not all of Major League Baseball.
Coming into their game against the Phillies Thursday, Atlanta’s starters had the best ERA (1.62) and were tied for the best opponents’ batting average (.204) in the majors. The youngest member of the rotation, Alex Wood, did nothing to slow that down, throwing eight innings of one-run ball, though he would take a 1-0 loss due to a complete lack of offensive support.
“Baseball’s a contagious game,” Wood said. “It’s your livelihood, it’s your career, guys are going to try to go out there and one-up what everybody did the day before.”
The day before Wood, it was Julio Teheran (2-1, 1.93 ERA) who was dominant, throwing a complete-game shutout in a 1-0 win in the Braves favor. Friday’s starter is Aaron Harang, who’s 2-1 with a 0.96 ERA through his first three starts. Wood’s 2-2 with a 1.67 ERA, Ervin Santana’s 1-0 with a 0.64 ERA and David Hale is 0-0 with a 2.89 ERA in two starts of his own.
What’s scary is that this is a rotation that could get even better. Gavin Floyd, who underwent Tommy John surgery last May, has already thrown three rehab starts with Triple-A Gwinnett and is scheduled to pitch for Double-A Mississippi on April 18; he could return by the end of the month.
“I look at it this way — sometimes you feel like you’ve got too much, but you never do,” Gonzalez said. “And if we do, then we filter some of those guys into the bullpen, and our bullpen becomes that much better, and we’ve got a nice corps of arms.”
The Braves organization is one that’s used to dominant pitching rotations, though it’s been a few years since Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz made up one of the most fearsome pitching trios of the the 1990s. Gonzalez, who was in the Marlins’ organization as a coach at various levels from 1992-2010, knows what kind of beneficial competition that can create when you have one good arm going out after another.
“You hear about it all the time, you hear about those rotations that you’ve got three or four good starters and they just want to one-up each other,” Gonzalez said. “When the Madduxes, the Smoltzes and the Glavines were here, you’d hear a conversation from Bobby (Cox), saying these guys just want to keep the competition.”
