Reason for optimism: Bullpen woes are the easiest to correct from one year to the next.
Reason for pessimism: They're not even trying this year.
Across each division in the National League, the race for last place is at least as competitive as the race for first. For the purposes of anything other than draft order, it's a largely meaningless race for the baseball industry. But the money for nailing an over or under on the dregs of the league is just as green as cashing an over ticket on a division winner. In the NL East, oddsmakers have essentially said "pick your poison" when it comes to evaluating the outlook for the Atlanta Braves and Philadelphia Phillies.
Unlike most of the teams that are getting worse, the Braves have an obvious area of improvement, which would almost be impossible not to employ: Atlanta pulled off the fairly uncommon distinction in 2015 of having a bullpen with a substantially higher ERA than its rotation. The knee-jerk reaction is that transferring closing duties from Craig Kimbrel to Jason Grilli and Jim Johnson is the perfect formula to pull off that trick. Logically, that is airtight, but Johnson and Grilli actually had a 2.53 ERA over 81.7 innings -- an ERA lower than Kimbrel had in San Diego. Take that, logic! It was the rest of the bullpen that produced a result so astounding it needs to lead off a paragraph.
