Is there a more beloved former Brave than Michael Soroka? (Maybe Freddie Freeman?) Perhaps because the phrase, \u201cWhat could have been?\u201d peals more sharply with regard to Soroka than anyone else, the fondness for the Canadian giraffe-necked right-hander from this corner, at least, is at its max. But, on Saturday night, the Braves will face off against our beloved in search of a fourth win in a row.<\/p>\n
Soroka\u2019s injury travails as a Brave after his 2019 4.0 fWAR campaign have been well-documented and are a bit too depressing to recap at this point, so we\u2019ll focus on what happened afterwards. Sent to Chicago\u2019s South Side in the Aaron Bummer deal after the 2023 season, Soroka was a blah swingman out there for a year, and then had a nice time as a starter for the Nationals in 2025 before a midseason trade sent him to Chicago\u2019s North Side, where he barely pitched and didn\u2019t distinguish himself. His contract with the Nats was for $9 million; this past offseason, he signed with the Diamondbacks for a lower, $7.5 million salary, made some starts in the World Baseball Classic, and made it to Opening Day as a member of Arizona\u2019s beleaguered starting staff.<\/p>\n
But, things went swimmingly for him in his first start of 2026: he absolutely dominated the Tigers for five innings, with an insane 10\/1 K\/BB ratio that included an immaculate inning in his final frame of work. He had a 5-0 lead before departing, and the Diamondbacks added even more in the bottom of the fifth. The only real blemish to that outing was that the Tigers made some hard contact off him when they weren\u2019t striking out (three barrels, though only one went for a hit), but that doesn\u2019t really portend anything for him considering the excellent K\/BB ratio. Whatever happens while Soroka pitches against the Braves today, it\u2019ll be bittersweet in one direction or another, but maybe it\u2019ll be another game like last night, where the thunder in the Braves\u2019 favor comes exclusively late.<\/p>\n
On the Atlanta side of the pitching equation, Bryce Elder will look to keep the good times rolling. After last night\u2019s shutout, the Braves\u2019 pitching staff is in a funny place: they\u2019re seventh in MLB in fWAR, second in ERA-, sixth in FIP-, and 13th in xFIP-. Whereas 2025 was an exercise in \u201cif it can wrong, it will go wrong,\u201d the Braves are putting on a dazzling run prevention display thanks to some elite defensive play (they\u2019re third in MLB in defensive value coming into this game), and a favorable HR\/FB for once (they have the fourth-lowest HR\/FB against their pitchers). Reynaldo Lopez and Grant Holmes have now made four collective starts with a sub-3.00 ERA (Lopez\u2019 is under 2.00) and an xFIP around 5.00, so hooray for baseball god boons rather than banes at this point.<\/p>\n
Speaking of weird starts, that descriptor probably applies to Bryce Elder\u2019s first start of the season, albeit for a different reason than it could be used for Lopez or Holmes thus far. Elder was legitimately good against the Athletics \u2014 nothing we haven\u2019t seen before, albeit inconsistently \u2014 with a 5\/1 K\/BB ratio in six shutout innings. The reason why it was weird was that all the stuff that Elder and the team provided messaging about in the offseason, about his work with a biomechanics expert and the like, well\u2026 that wasn\u2019t really on display. Elder didn\u2019t appear to be throwing harder nor did he let loose more often with an ehanced four-seamer. Rather, he showed up with a much drop-ier (droopier sounds sad) slider with some added horizontal verve, which was enough to stymie the green-and-gold bats. Whether he can do so again against the Diamondbacks, well, that\u2019s always the question, innit?<\/p>\n
This will be Soroka\u2019s second outing against his former team. He had an okay four innings against them in May of last year, with Drake Baldwin hitting a game-tying two-run shot against him in the fourth before Soroka departed. Elder, meanwhile, has made two starts against the Diamondbacks in his career \u2014 one in 2023 and one in 2024 \u2014 and they were both really rough. The one in 2023 was his shortest start of the year and one of his worst (2 2\/3 IP, charged seven runs and gave up a homer despite a 4\/1 K\/BB ratio), and the one in 2024 featured a 1\/2 K\/BB ratio in five innings with three runs charged. Both of those games got absolutely insane late, with the Diamondbacks winning 16-13 in 2023 and the Braves prevailing 5-4 in 2024.<\/p>\n
Game Date\/Time: Saturday, April 4, 7:15 p.m. EDT<\/p>\n
Location: Chase Field, Phoenix, AZ<\/p>\n
Streaming: MLB.tv, probably not blacked out on BravesVision\/etc.<\/p>\n
Radio: 680 AM \/ 93.7 FM The Fan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is there a more beloved former Brave than Michael Soroka? (Maybe Freddie Freeman?) Perhaps because the phrase, \u201cWhat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2394],"tags":[191,46,76532,4166,5,192,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-663755","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-braves","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-braves","10":"tag-atlanta-braves-game-information","11":"tag-atlantabraves","12":"tag-baseball","13":"tag-braves","14":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116349433780543554","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}