NORTH PORT, Fla. — As he sat on the dugout bench at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa on Wednesday afternoon, Braves manager Brian Snitker perfectly summed up Spencer Schwellenbach’s quick emergence.
“I say, a year ago right now, I didn’t even know what he looked like,” Snitker said.
This is because a year ago, Schwellenbach was in minor-league camp. Maybe the Braves were excited about him, but no one had him contributing the way he did.
This spring, Schwellenbach is a lock for the starting rotation — a testament to his rapid rise. This is no fluke, either. He’s the real deal.
Just ask those who play with him.
“I think his demeanor,” catcher Chadwick Tromp said. “He’s very calm, collected. When he goes out there, he knows what he’s doing. It’s a different animal when a guy knows that he’s good and he knows what he needs to do to get better every day, and he’s one of those cats. He’s gonna put in the work every day to get one percent better, and we saw that for the whole year last year, and he got better as the season went on, and that has continued to go that direction this spring training. … He’s gonna be special.”
“I just think that as a hitter, you gotta cover both sides of the plate, and it’s tough,” Jarred Kelenic said when asked to give the hitter’s perspective. “You can’t take away one side and sacrifice another. You kind of gotta be prepared for the whole entire plate, and it makes it a lot more difficult, pitches going in different directions and it’s tough.”
Schwellenbach has a quiet confidence. When you talk to him, you can feel it. But if you didn’t know him or hadn’t spoken with him, he might seem shy.
He’s not loud. He’s not boastful. But make no mistake: This dude is confident. It’s how he made it here after beginning his college career as a shortstop.
“Hey man, everybody’s different,” Tromp said. “Everybody shows confidence in a different way. That’s his way of showing confidence. He believes in himself more than anyone, and once you have that locked down, you kind of know that nobody can mess with you.”
Tromp first saw Schwellenbach on a back field in a previous spring training. Tromp thought Schwellenbach was interesting. Then he followed how Schwellenbach developed certain pitches in the middle of the season.
“You gotta be really good to do that,” said Tromp, who added it reminded him of Spencer Strider doing something similar.
Schwellenbach burst onto the scene last season. He debuted in May, then stayed up in the majors the rest of the year.
What impressed Snitker most: The fact Schwellenbach made it through the entire year.
“My goal was for him to make his next start once our season was over, and he could,” Snitker said. “And I think it was big for him. I think it was big for him to have Charlie and Chris Sale and Max and guys like that to kind of lean on — even now, he’d never been to a big-league camp until this year. It’s going to be a lot of firsts for him again, even this year. But it’s been awesome. I mean, my God, it’s really cool to see where he’s at. I say, a year ago right now, I didn’t even know what he looked like.”
The Braves have Chris Sale and Strider. They had Max Fried.
Schwellenbach, like these guys, is another elite pitcher.
“No doubt,” Kelenic said. “You know when he gets the ball, he’s gonna give it everything he’s got. Any time you’re playing behind a guy like that, it’s usually an exciting game.”
The starter shuffle
Initially, AJ Smith-Shawver was scheduled to start Thursday. He was pushed to Friday, so now he’ll follow Chris Sale, who’ll start against the Rays in Port Charlotte.
This lines up Sale to start opening day on one day of extra rest. Smith-Shawver would be lined up to start the fifth game of the season — a series opener at Dodger Stadium.
Is this reshuffling a clue? Perhaps, though Snitker said he’s not looking that far ahead.
The Braves must look out that far when planning, though. So it’s possible they want Smith-Shawver to start one of the first seven games of the season, maybe even the fifth. But Ian Anderson is the other person competing for that rotation spot.
Regardless, it seems the Braves will go with six starters on the opening-day roster to help them cover their season-opening trip, which is a string of seven games without an off-day.
Jurickson Profar returns
Jurickson Profar (left wrist bone bruise) was back in the lineup Thursday. He hit leadoff and played left field.
Hours before the game, Profar said he hadn’t experienced discomfort when swinging for the past two or three days. He took a lot of at-bats on the back fields Wednesday.
Profar feels fortunate the injury wasn’t worse.
“I was very happy. Very happy,” he said. “When it happened, I thought it was going to be worse.”
Profar went 2-for-4 with a double and a single on Thursday.
Snitker said Profar will start at left field in all seven of the games on the season-opening trip to San Diego and Los Angeles.
Snitker defends Orlando Arcia
Orlando Arcia, slated to begin the season as the starting shortstop, worked a lot on his offense over the offseason. Thus far, he hasn’t seen results.
He entered Thursday batting .071 (2-for-28) this spring. Snitker knows what Arcia can do — he was an All-Star after a great half of a season in 2023 and has helped the Braves at other points in his tenure — so how does he weight the spring results?
“I don’t look at spring training (stats),” Snitker said. “I don’t care about spring training. We’ll just start judging a week from (today). I know I looked, he’s been our starting shortstop and we’ve won 193 games, I think, the last two years, so that’s pretty good.”
Arcia went 1-for-3 in Thursday’s game.
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