Sean Murphy is back from a broken finger, Brent Suter joins the bullpen, and Atlanta opens a Marlins series with its deadline work finished.
For the first time since the second week of May, Sean Murphy is back on the active roster.
The Braves activated their catcher from the 60-day injured list on Monday night, hours after the trade deadline passed at 6 p.m. ET, and he will be in uniform when Miami visits Truist Park on Tuesday night.
Atlanta was off on deadline day, so the front office spent it trading Joey Bart to the White Sox and Eli White to the Red Sox to open roster spots for Murphy and Lane Thomas.
The Finishing Touches
The rest of the day was about depth, with Ha-Seong Kim coming off the 10-day injured list in a reserve role behind Jim Jarvis, Jorge Mateo designated for assignment, and left-hander Brent Suter arriving from the Angels for shortstop Nacho Alvarez Jr.
Those moves followed Sunday's trades that landed Thomas and Bailey Falter from Kansas City and Tyler Mahle from San Francisco.
Suter has posted a 4.12 ERA over 63.1 innings this season, and per MLB.com's Mark Bowman, his ability to pitch multiple innings and to work on consecutive days will take strain off a bullpen that already had one of the best late-inning duos in the game.
Both of those trades returned minor league pitchers, housekeeping moves made to hand the catching job back to Murphy and an outfield spot to Thomas.
The Deal He Would Not Make
Anthopoulos framed the weekend as improvement rather than a shopping list.
"We didn't go into the deadline with the thought that we have to get this or we have to get that," he said. "We were just trying to make the team better."
He also said the Braves could have landed one of the elite starters in the game a few years ago if they had been willing to send out Drake Baldwin, and he would not do it.
Mahle ended up as the only rotation addition, so Atlanta is betting that a deep lineup and a strong bullpen can cover for a staff without a true ace in October.
That is a real gamble, because this same rotation watched Bryce Elder get roughed up by Boston in May, and the questions never fully went away.
A Healthier Team for the Race
The team around that rotation keeps getting better.
Atlanta sits at 67-45 and leads the NL East by 7.5 games over Philadelphia with five straight wins after finishing a four-game sweep of Washington on Sunday.
Murphy brings real power back behind the plate, since he hit 16 home runs in 94 games last season even while batting .199, and manager Walt Weiss now runs a lineup where Michael Harris II is one of several hitters capable of deciding a game.
A fractured left middle finger had kept Murphy out since May 10, so a home series against a Miami club sitting two games out of a wild card spot is a sensible place to get him going again.
After that the Braves head to New York, where Bowman reports Mahle will make his first Atlanta start against the Yankees this weekend.
The division race looks close to settled, but the next two months are about proving this finished roster can win more than a division.
