AJ Smith-Shawver gets another turn as Atlanta Braves kick off four-game set with Cincinnati Reds

After a three-game losing streak snapped by a salvaged game on Sunday night, the Braves once again find themselves three games under .500, and hoping to go on another run that makes them more of an immediately relevant contender. To do so in the near future, they’ll need to have a good showing against the Reds, who are here through Thursday for a four-game set.

At 18-17, the Reds have been the quintessential generic team thus far, with middling rankings on both sides of the ball. Despite their home ballpark, the Reds have very much been trying to be more of an older-school slap-and-run approach to varying degrees of success, especially since they’ve had some power output nonetheless from Austins Hays and Wynn, as well as Noelvi Marte. Given that, to date, AJ Smith-Shawver’s season has been all about great peripherals and massive damage allowed on contact… I don’t really know where that sets up this matchup.

Smith-Shawver will be looking to build on his prior start against the Rockies where he had a 5/1 K/BB ratio and left after being popped by a comebacker on the arm after 5 1⁄3 innings, but the Reds are much better competition than the Rockies. Still, Smith-Shawver has had good peripherals in three of his four starts so far, and honestly, his line is 102/108/90 right now (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-), so he’s acquitted himself very well. The only thing that’s scary is that his xERA is horrid, and while xERA tends to be an artifact of the batters faced moreso than anything a pitcher is doing himself, a discrepancy this wide makes you scratch your head a bit.

On the batting end, the Braves will contend with Brady Singer, who does not have that level of weirdness in his pitching line so far: 74/86/92, with an xERA mirroring his FIP. Singer was lights out in his first two starts of the year, but has allowed a longball in four straight outings, three of which have been fairly disappointing and featured three walks each. The Braves basically did the same thing to him late last year (5/3 K/BB ratio, a homer allowed); he also had a bizarre start against them in 2023 when he had an 8/0 K/BB ratio but got crushed for four homers.