The Braves have set their first four starters for the four-game Opening Series in San Diego — including AJ Smith-Shawver returning to Petco Park
48 hours from now, the Atlanta Braves and San Diego Padres will be engaging in baseball battle to start their seasons on Opening Day. We already know that Chris Sale will be the Opening Day starter but now we’ve got an idea of how the rest of Atlanta’s overall rotation will look for the first four games of the season.
Mark Bowman of MLB.com shared this bit of news with us on the website formerly known as Twitter:
Braves rotation:
Thurs at SD: Sale
Friday at SD: Lopez
Saturday at SD: Schwellenbach
Sunday at SD: Smith-Shawver
Monday at LAD: Holmes— Mark Bowman (@mlbbowman) March 25, 2025
The first three names weren’t really in doubt, as Chris Sale, Reynaldo López and Spencer Schwellenbach all had healthy and productive springs and figure to have their spot in the rotation on lock as long as that happened. There might be some concerns about López seeing a drop in velocity during spring training but the Braves still feel confident enough throwing him out there on Friday, so hopefully he’ll look more like his old self as the season gets underway.
The bottom portion of the rotation is more of a surprise but still more-or-less what you’d expect to see. AJ Smith-Shawver will be making his first regular season start at Petco Park, months after he was thrust into duty in that same ballpark during the Wild Card Series. Hopefully things go a lot better in this outing than they did during this past October! Once the Braves move from San Diego “up North” to Los Angeles, they’ll be sending out Grant Holmes to start the series opener at Dodger Stadium. With the Braves already setting up their rotation so that Sale continues to get an extra day of rest, I’d imagine that we’ll see another starter added to the rotation. We’ll see what happens though.
For now, the rotation appears to be set and there aren’t a ton of surprises going on. Still, it’s nice to be sure of what’s going on going forward and for now, the Braves have a very good idea of how their pitching staff is going to look here in the extreme infancy of the regular season.