Atlanta’s slow start in 2025 hasn’t harmed the front office’s reputation across baseball — at least, not too much.
Today’s an off-day for the Atlanta Braves and it’s also one of those rare days where nothing seems to be going on. No moves have been made, nobody’s gotten injured (or suspended) and nobody’s said or done anything that made the team’s superstar hop on Twitter, post a tweet and then delete it later on. In short, it’s been a simple and boring day so far and you won’t be hearing me complain about that, at all!
With that being said, it’s time to talk about something that fell through the cracks not all that long ago. Back on April 16, Tyler Kepner of The Athletic posted an article that ranked the front offices across baseball based on the opinions of 40 MLB executives and coaches. It’s something that they’ve done on a regular basis across all of sports and if you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend that you do.
As you can imagine, Alex Anthopoulos and Atlanta’s front office has ranked extremely highly over the years — successfully building a core for the long-term and wining a World Series in the process will tend to do that for you. However, the sheen might be starting to wear off just a tiny bit, as the Braves front office ended up taking a slight slide in this year’s rankings compared to where they were in 2024.
The Braves slid from being ranked at No. 3 in last season’s poll to being tied for sixth in this year’s poll. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
…They’re clearly still among the majors’ most envied front offices, led by the decisive and opportunistic Alex Anthopoulos.
“They’ve done a great job after the first round in getting guys like Spencer Strider and Michael Harris and they’ve done an unbelievable job of keeping guys with long-term extensions,” said one baseball operations president. “They’ve also accessed high-end players in trades, like (Matt) Olson and (Sean) Murphy, and extended them, too. And they’ve built such a good situation there that they’re now able to exist near the top of the payroll mountain.”
While the Braves may have actually slashed payroll a little bit when compared to what they were spending last year (despite the fact that Alex Anthopoulos told the media in the early stages of the offseason that payroll would be going up), they’re still solidly in the top 10 of all of baseball when it comes to spending money on their team, so it’s not as if they’ve gone into full penny-pinching mode like some teams have done. Plus it’s hard to argue with the fact that whenever this team has its full compliment of players at its disposal, they’re pretty daggone good.
Still, I’d imagine that a lot of us would’ve liked to have seen the starting rotation shored up instead of relying on internal options while also looking for a shortstop solution that is better than “Just hope that Orlando Arcia or Nick Allen happen to have it on their days to start.” You can’t really blame them for the rough outfield situation, though it’s easy to imagine that that’ll certainly look better once Jurickson Profar returns from suspension and Ronald Acuña Jr. returns from injury. For now, the Braves are making do with what they’ve got and they’re hanging right on in there as they’ve at least started to make some progress on getting out of that seven-game hole to start the season.
Also, Alex Anthopoulos has done a pretty solid job of patching things up on the fly, despite the fact that they clearly no longer have a lot of prospect capital to deal with. In terms of handling the cards he’s been dealt, things could certainly have ended up worse and it appears that both AA’s reputation and Atlanta’s rep as a front office is still intact with the organization still being highly regarded — even with this slow start to the season.
For what it’s worth, the Braves were tied at sixth place with the Phillies and both organizations received an equal amount of first place votes. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, the Dodgers were voted as having the best front office in baseball right now and the margin between them and second place (the Rays) wasn’t particularly close, either.
So, what do y’all think of these rankings? Do you think the Braves are rated too highly in this regard? Do you think they’re still a bit underrated as a front office? Or do you think they were properly rated. I’m sure there are some strong opinions out there on this one, so let us know what you think.