Chadwick Tromp (who?) has been big part of Braves’ early-season success

ATLANTA — Chadwick Tromp is from Aruba, a Caribbean island that is a self-governing country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He speaks four languages fluently, has a warm smile and subtle sense of humor, is one of the top two chess players in the Atlanta Braves clubhouse (Max Fried is the other) and has a knack for making friends and earning respect from peers wherever he goes.

How else to explain how a player with just 46 games played in parts of five major-league seasons, including 13 games with the Braves over three seasons, could be so popular among teammates and Braves coaches and draw such praise from other catchers and pitchers, young and old, including some he’s known only a few months?

“Tremendous catcher and tremendous game caller,” Braves pitcher Reynaldo López said of Tromp, who has caught two of his three starts in López’s first season as a Brave and first as a starter since 2021, which has surpassed all reasonable expectations for the right-hander with the 0.50 ERA.

“Oh, my God, I’m in love with this kid,” said Eddie Perez, a former Braves defense-first catcher who’s now a coach, working closely with Braves catching coach Sal Fasano and the team’s veteran catching duo of Travis d’Arnaud and Sean Murphy, and with Tromp when he’s with the team at spring training and serves as a fill-in for those two.

That’s what Tromp has done since Murphy, a 2023 All-Star, went on the 10-day injured list with a strained oblique sustained in the second game of the season. Murphy is still probably at least two to three weeks from returning.

Tromp was recalled from Triple A and quickly made his way to Philadelphia after Murphy got hurt. The next day, Tromp caught veteran Chris Sale’s Braves debut, an impressive 5 1/3-inning outing in which Sale worked out of a couple of jams and limited the Phillies to five hits, two runs and two walks with seven strikeouts.

Afterward, Sale offered unsolicited praise for Tromp, whom he met at spring training but threw to for only a couple of innings in one Grapefruit League game. Sale is six years older than the 29-year-old Tromp, 10 inches taller than the 5-foot-8 catcher and has about 12 more years of MLB service time.

Despite those differences and Tromp’s relative lack of experience, there was Tromp in Philadelphia, just up from Triple A, guiding one of the best pitchers of the past decade through Sale’s first game with a new team in a new league. He helped Sale get locked in with his vaunted slider on a day when the pitch didn’t feel right initially.

Braves pitching coach Rick Kranitz speaks with Chadwick Tromp and Chris Sale in the fifth inning against the Phillies on March 31. (Rick Kranitz / USA Today)

“I threw the first couple in the bullpen, and I was kind of yanking it,” Sale said. “And then I just kind of got my direction a little bit better. That was all on Trompy. He saw it kind of evolving throughout the game and saw the swings and the…