Braves Designate Hunter Stratton For Assignment

The Braves have designated right-hander Hunter Stratton for assignment and transferred righty Spencer Strider to the 60-day injured list, according to the club’s transactions tracker at MLB.com. Those moves open two 40-man spots to select righty Carlos Carrasco and catcher Jair Camargo, moves which were reported earlier today.

Stratton, 29, was acquired from the Pirates last summer after Pittsburgh designated him for assignment. Atlanta sent minor league outfielder Titus Dumitru and cash the other way and have been using Stratton as an up-and-down reliever since then.

He has tossed 17 1/3 big league innings since that trade with a 2.08 earned run average. That’s obviously a nice number but there’s some luck in there. He has benefited from a .261 batting average on balls in play and 87.9% strand rate. Though his 22.5% strikeout rate and 7% walk rate in that span are decent, his 4.00 FIP and 3.73 SIERA suggest he has been more serviceable than dominant. In the minors this year, he has thrown 24 2/3 innings with a 4.38 ERA, 21.2% strikeout rate and 47.1% ground ball rate, with a bloated 14.2% walk rate.

He now heads into DFA limbo, which can last as long as a week. The waiver process takes 48 hours, so Atlanta could spend as long as five days exploring trade possibilities. It seems likely that Stratton will garner interest somewhere. He still has options, which is always appealing for clubs. He also has intriguing stuff, averaging about 96 miles per hour with his four-seamer and sinker. He has also thrown a cutter and a slider this year. He also had some decent results with the Bucs earlier in his career and now has a 3.75 ERA in 69 2/3 big league innings.

As for Strider, he landed on the 15-day IL a few days ago due to elbow inflammation. The club subsequently announced that he would be shut down for four weeks before undergoing a follow-up MRI. If that imaging is clean, he can begin ramping back up.

Even if everything goes to plan, the ramp-up period will probably take as long as the shutdown period, so he is probably looking at an absence of a couple of months even in a best-case scenario. That means this transaction shouldn’t really alter expectations about his return but it does concretely rule him out until the middle of August.