<img alt="Atlanta Braves v New York Yankees" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/e13xjm_bHrbKPxgQWtzcOmzErMM=/0x0:2272x1515/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73441892/2159104643.0.jpg">
Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images
Can you expect more than a .500ish record considering what the Braves dealt with in June? Maybe, but that doesn’t mean they met those expectations. May 2024 was a low point for the Braves, their first sub-.500 month since May 2022. By the end of that month, they were down not just Spencer Strider but also Ronald Acuña Jr., Austin Riley had just returned from a two-week non-IL stint and was hitting a very cool .100/.100/.100 to close out the month. Sean Murphy had missed nearly the entire season and had a similarly bad line in his first few games back.
Did things get worse from there? In some ways, not really. For one, the Braves went 14-13 in June after a 13-14 May. The offensive results improved, from an 86 wRC+ to a 94 mark. The pitching stayed about the same relative to the rest of the league, as the pitching staff ranked third in fWAR in both months.
But in viewing others, it’s not clear that May represents a bottoming out and the team is now on an upward trajectory. Somehow, the injury situation got even worse — Michael Harris II was the latest medium-term roster casualty. Brian Anderson was brought in and barely played before getting shelved with a bacterial infection. Ramon Laureano was the next guy up, and he had surprisingly great inputs in a small sample, before also eating an injury and disappearing from the lineup. As a sign of how far the roster has fallen, the Braves started utilityman slash roster barnacle Luke Williams in left field, of all places, not once but twice in the last few days of the month. Forrest Wall, who basically existed in the organization as a pinch-runner, started more than half of the team’s games over the second half of the month.
As the month passed, the situation in the standings got less pleasant. The Braves ended May with 1-in-3 division odds, a 6.5-game deficit in the NL East and a 4.5-game lead over the rest of the moribund NL in the Wild Card standings. At this point, they’ve shed about half their division odds as the NL East gap has grown to eight games; the Wild Card lead shrunk by a game as there are actually six whole teams in the NL above .500 now.
The elephant that took up residence with the Braves in June, though, is hard to ignore. Over the duration of June, only the Tigers underperformed their xwOBA more than the Braves did. From the start of May, the Braves have by far the biggest team offensive xwOBA underperformance. They’ve now slipped into the bottom five for the whole season, as well. This is definitely in part due to the increased drag on the ball and some particularly cruel happenstance — as discussed before, for the season, the Braves are now dead last in both the rate of barrels becoming hits, and the rate of barrels becoming homers. While the Braves were merely bottom five in the former and bottom ten in the latter in June, suggesting some degree of improvement, it clearly wasn’t enough. That, and the issue goes beyond barrels, as the Braves tend to have one of the league’s bigger xwOBA underperformances no matter how you cut the split or time period. It is is what it is, and what it is isn’t particularly fun to watch.
Sadly, you can basically map the story of the month to the xwOBA underperformance, or lack thereof. From June 4 through June 12, the Braves went 2-6. They overperformed their xwOBA in two of eight games, and the collective underperformance was .035, third-largest in baseball in that span. Then, the Braves went 8-2, including winning three series in a row. They overperformed their xwOBA in seven of the ten games, and the collective overperformance was the sixth-biggest in baseball. Then, to close out the month, the Braves went 3-4, underperforming their xwOBA in every single game, by far the biggest underperformance in the league in that span. It’s really banal, so I don’t think it’s interesting to keep harping on, but this isn’t a team that’s losing because they can’t hit; it’s a team that’s losing because their results are just consistently much worse than the league’s results on not-dissimilar inputs. To wit: as mentioned, the Braves have one of the top three pitching staffs in MLB, whether you’re talking about June or in general. If their offensive outputs matched their inputs, they’d be combining that top-three pitching staff with an above-average offense and probably running something like a .570 winning percentage. Instead, given that their offensive outputs are below average, they’re barely over .500. So it goes.
The Braves out-wOBAed their opponents in 14 games in June, and won all but one of them. They similarly lost all but one where they were out-wOBAed. So there’s nothing weird there. But they went just 10-6 when out-xwOBAing their opponents. While they did “benefit” by going 4-7 when getting out-xwOBAed, the reality is that an environment where net xwOBA correlates less to winning disproportionately hurts teams that tend to out-xwOBA their opponents. Can the Braves do anything about this? Not really. It’s not like hitting the ball worse is that helpful, either — the Braves went 3-9 in games in June with an xwOBA under .300. The issue is just one the Braves can’t really do anything about — never better exemplified than in their June 24 loss to the Cardinals, where they out-xwOBAed the Redbirds by over .130, but still lost a one-run game because two balls that are probably homers in most other circumstances were just long outs in 2024 with increased drag on the ball used.
So, put all that together, and you get the below:
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kjz5RRptV_J4fQFjtDDjIhoetrQ=/400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25515422/Screenshot_2024_07_02_125912.png">
Unsurprisingly, the two huge upset losses (both Chris Sale starts, against the Athletics and White Sox) were ones where the Braves out-xwOBAed their opponents. The times the Braves were able to return the favor, like the 3-1 win over the Yankees despite terrible inputs, were just too few to compensate.
Totally Meaningless Ivan Award for June 2024 Performance - Position Players
It seems like pretty much every year, amid a not-so-great stretch, there are oddball game thread comments asking if Austin Riley can be optioned to Triple-A for some ridiculous reason. Naturally, Riley then proceeds to respond by going thermonuclear at the plate and propping up his line for the rest of the year. June 2024 was pretty similar — Riley came into the month with an 84 wRC+, and leaves it at 111, thanks to a June where he had a 155 wRC+ to go with six homers and six doubles, and a team-leading 1.2 fWAR.
Unsurprisingly, Riley underperformed his team-leading .410 xwOBA for the month by more than twice the league-average rate (.396 wOBA). Even so, he still outhit all of his teammates (few of whom outhit their xwOBAs, anyway).
In less happy, but more par-for-the-course factoids, though, Riley is now tied for sixth in the majors with 12 barreled outs, four of which he collected in June.
Totally Meaningless Ivan Award for June 2024 Performance - Starting Pitchers
Among the Braves’ incredibly strong frontline trio, Reynaldo Lopez didn’t have a better June than either Max Fried or Chris Sale, in part because he only made four starts while Fried and Sale made five each. But, his 40/76/87 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) was still superb and was at least somewhat comparable to that of Fried (67/78/85) and Sale (102/70/61). More importantly, Lopez did it while crossing his innings total from last year: he now sits at 79 1⁄3 innings after completing between 57 and 66 frames in each of the last three seasons. (Interestingly, he’s yet to exceed 2023’s pitch total, as he is currently at 1,205 pitches thrown and finished last year with 1,211 pitches.)
In part because of his HR/FB fortune, and maybe because of his ability to reach back for a little bit more when he’s in a jam, Lopez delivered positive win expectancy while he was on the mound in all four of his starts, and the Braves won all four of those outings. He also hasn’t shown much in the way of wearing down so far, unless you want to assume that his four-walk outing against the Cardinals last time out is a sign of things to come. We’ll find out soon enough on that front.
Totally Meaningless Ivan Award for June 2024 Performance - Relief Pitchers
It was a month without too many standout bullpen performances — the bullpen itself was generically solid but not exactly scintillating or anything because of how infrequently they were called upon (tenth in MLB in fWAR; sixth in FIP-, second in xFIP-, fourth in ERA-, but 28th in innings pitched and dead last in batters faced). As a result, it’s hard to really highlight anyone, but Joe Jimenez’ circumstances amused me more than anyone else’s.
For the month, Jimenez wasn’t actually all that effective, with a 101 FIP- and 110 xFIP-; only Jimmy Herget and Ray Kerr had worse relief months. But, despite that, he managed a 6/1 shutdown/meltdown ratio, in part by taking all the ball-in-play shenanigans that have plagued the Braves this year and benefiting from them where things went wrong for a bunch of his teammates. His sole meltdown, in which he gave up a game-winning homer in a tie game in Baltimore, was lame, but the only guys to avoid a meltdown this month were Jesse Chavez and Daysbel Hernandez, who were used in much lower-leverage relief, as well as Ray Kerr, who was really just used to sop innings despite his stuff, and ended up going down with injury anyway.
Best Offensive Play - Riley Wins the Battle
Again, I don’t know why so many of these happen in losses, but here we go. On June 16, the Braves were seeking a sweep of the Rays, but were trailing 6-4 with time running out, and only five outs to go. After a Matt Olson double, Austin Riley came to the plate and engaged in a crazy 11-pitch battle against Jason Adam. Only on the 11th pitch did Riley put it in play, and tied the game, no less:
Something crazy about this plate appearance was that Riley fouled off three straight different pitches two different times. The third, fourth, and fifth pitches of the PA were a sweeper, a four-seamer, and then a slider; the eight, ninth, and tenth were a slider, four-seamer, and changeup. In the whole PA, he only swung at strikes and took all three balls.
The part of me that’s entirely annoyed about the whole season can only think of the fact that Riley hit the ball with 31 degrees of launch angle, and that this would’ve probably been another barreled out if not for the fact that the Braves-Rays series appeared to use a non-draggy baseball.
Oh, and the Braves ended up losing this game when Jose Siri hit a two-run homer off Raisel Iglesias in the ninth.
Best Run-Stopping Play - Whatever this was
It took a replay review, but this thing happened and really helped the Braves win this “modern 2024 baseball showcase” via walkoff in the following half-inning:
I considered making Daysbel Hernandez the relief pitcher of the month due to participating in this alone, but it felt kind of orthogonal to pitching.
Most Dominant Single Game Offensive Performance
Did you know that Matt Olson had an absolutely terrible month? No, I’m not kidding. In his career, Olson has had exactly two calendar months in which he got more than three PAs with an xwOBA below .300. In July 2022, he had a .296 xwOBA for the month. In June 2024, it was... .264. Ew. No one really noticed, because he massively outhit it to the tune of a .327 wOBA, and the Braves have bigger problems. But while it was a June to forget for lots of reasons for lots of Braves players, Olson going back to mashing, or at least his .360ish xwOBA for the first two months of the year, is probably pretty important for the team going forward.
Still, this didn’t quite apply on June 1 for Olson, facing his former team (and of course, in a Braves loss). After a couple of outs in his first two plate appearances, he connected for a game-tying two-run homer in the fifth, and then reached base to start both the seventh and the ninth, with the Braves behind again. Unfortunately, the Braves couldn’t bring him home in either instance late, and lost the game, but it was a nice hurrah for the first baseman before, well, the rest of the month happened.
Most Dominant Single Game Starting Pitching Performance
Okay, this wasn’t dominant at all. It was just funny. And it happened in a 1-0 game, so it was even funnier.
On June 2, Charlie Morton started against the Athletics. After a 1-2-3 first, the Braves handed him a 1-0 lead. He then also had a 1-2-3 inning. And then, the insanity began. Morton hit a guy in the third, but stranded two in the inning. He had two walks in the fourth, but thanks to a double play, nothing happened. There was another walk in the fifth, but it was erased via pickoff. And then, in the sixth, Morton issued back-to-back two-out walks, stayed in the game, and got out of it anyway.
What made all of this even funnier was that despite Morton somehow weaving a 6/5 K/BB ratio with a hit-by-pitch into six scoreless frames while nursing a 1-0 lead, Dylan Lee entered in the seventh and immediately gave up a homer on the second non-Morton Braves pitch of the game to temporarily tie things up. (The Braves came back to win.) I laugh just thinking about the ridiculousness of this outing, especially after the Athletics somehow thrashed Chris Sale the day before.
Most Dominant Relief Pitching Performance
Okay, any extra-inning pitching performance where you get your team to survive Manfredball by throwing a wild pitch that bounces back to your catcher, who flips it to you to retire the go-ahead run at the plate probably warrants this. Even if it’s not pitching-related. Sorry for the fact that you had options resulting in you getting sent back to Triple-A, Daysbel Hernandez. We’ll see you soon.
Most Crushed Dinger
Hunter Harvey is having a good season, but this was a very bad pitch to Marcell Ozuna.
Not even hitting it above 30 degrees launch angle-wise could prevent this monster shot from clearing the stands, though if you had told me it landed for an out in the middle of the warning track, I’d have believed you, too.
Worst Offensive Result - Orlando Arcia PAs
Look, the Braves have an Orlando Arcia problem. Among the 145 “qualified” players, he has the worst wRC+ in baseball (60). His xwOBA is second-worst among this group, but is probably the worst when you take park effects on xwOBA into account. He’s in the bottom ten of both measures even if you set the PA threshold to 200. But it goes deeper than that.
Leaving aside the fact that Tim Anderson somehow has -3.35 WPA in 241 PAs (how is this even possible), Arcia has the second-worst WPA in baseball. He’s tied for tenth-highest in double plays hit into, which isn’t that surprising because he combines a top quintile grounder rate with a top decile pull rate but hits the ball with above-average velocity when he connects. He’s simply making too much bad contact, and while his issues seem to be approach-based and not skills-based, they’ve been going for so long that the window for things suddenly clicking is probably shut.
What’s been extra-damaging is that in June, Arcia played in 25 games, and had negative WPA in 20 of them. His clutch score of -0.52 suggests even the timing of when he did have positive events was poor. He had the lowest WPA on the team eight times in 25 games; even if you figure that as one of the worst bats in the majors he should be more likely to have these games than the “expected” rate, you would probably not figure he’d do it at three times the “expected” rate (i.e., 25 divided by nine), especially not when the Braves have some other guys who were not-great for the month outputs-wise, like Adam Duvall (a lower wRC+ for June, 10, than Arcia’s 29) and Travis d’Arnaud (a 31 wRC+ for June).
The issue is that Arcia has been so good defensively that he’s still above-replacement despite more or less the worst hitting of 2024, and also that the Braves’ short-term alternatives, like Zack Short (get it?) are, well, not really meaningful alternatives in any sense. But how long are they going to let Arcia kill the team’s win expectancy, like he did on June 8, with another awfully-timed double play?
Worst Pitching Result - Giving up a homer on a good pitch
It’s hard to be too mad at Raisel Iglesias for what happened here, given that Jose Siri hit a game-winning two-run homer on a good pitch. It still sucks, though, and it stings a bit more because it derailed what could’ve been a pretty cool comeback given that the Braves had scored four unanswered runs to tie it before Siri homered.
Worst Single-Game Hitting Performance
Okay, this one is kind of funny, because (A) it happened in a win, and (B) it happened to Marcell Ozuna, who basically has been the Braves’ offense for much of the year. But, on June 29, get this:
In the first, Ozuna hit into a double play with none out and one on.
In the third, he hit into an inning-ending double play with the bases loaded and one out.
In a tie game with the go-ahead run on second in the fifth, he struck out to end the inning.
Lastly, he struck out to end the eighth.
That’s a pretty horrible day for anyone, and it explains why the Braves managed just one run in regulation in this game. But hey, at least they came out on top, even if Ozuna didn’t help out for once.
Worst Single-Game Starting Pitching Performance
Chris Sale was good in May that somehow, the simulation we’re all living in decided it was time for a kill screen to start June, even though he was facing the Athletics. The game was pretty crazy — Sale allowed two homers and managed just a 4/1 K/BB ratio in four innings of work. He had, to that point, allowed just four homers all year. He hasn’t had a game with fewer than six strikeouts, aside from this one, all year. He’s allowed 13 barrels in five starts, and three of them (his only three-barrel game) came in this game.
But, perhaps worse than any of this, was the fact that he just kept getting hammered. A barreled two-run double in the first? Sure, but the Braves tied it right back up. A barreled three-run homer to cap a four-run second? The Braves were at least clawing back, but then he gave up a two-run homer in the fourth.
It’s hard to hold one hiccup against Sale given how phenomenal he’s been overall, but that’s what made this so unexpectedly horrible.
Worst Single-Game Relief Pitching Performance
Probably Siri hitting the homer off Iglesias, again, not because Iglesias did anything particularly wrong, but because that’s a terrible way for that game to fold. That said, Iglesias does have by far the lowest strikeout rate of his career right now, so that’s not great... though also far down on the list of concerns for the team at the moment.
Most Crushed Dinger Allowed
It’s unlikely anyone tops this for the season, which is what makes it so funny that it came against Chris Sale, of all people. This is one of the most crushed balls of the year, period.
See you next month!
<img alt="Atlanta Braves v New York Yankees" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/e13xjm_bHrbKPxgQWtzcOmzErMM=/0x0:2272x1515/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73441892/2159104643.0.jpg">
Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images
Can you expect more than a .500ish record considering what the Braves dealt with in June? Maybe, but that doesn’t mean they met those expectations. May 2024 was a low point for the Braves, their first sub-.500 month since May 2022. By the end of that month, they were down not just Spencer Strider but also Ronald Acuña Jr., Austin Riley had just returned from a two-week non-IL stint and was hitting a very cool .100/.100/.100 to close out the month. Sean Murphy had missed nearly the entire season and had a similarly bad line in his first few games back.
Did things get worse from there? In some ways, not really. For one, the Braves went 14-13 in June after a 13-14 May. The offensive results improved, from an 86 wRC+ to a 94 mark. The pitching stayed about the same relative to the rest of the league, as the pitching staff ranked third in fWAR in both months.
But in viewing others, it’s not clear that May represents a bottoming out and the team is now on an upward trajectory. Somehow, the injury situation got even worse — Michael Harris II was the latest medium-term roster casualty. Brian Anderson was brought in and barely played before getting shelved with a bacterial infection. Ramon Laureano was the next guy up, and he had surprisingly great inputs in a small sample, before also eating an injury and disappearing from the lineup. As a sign of how far the roster has fallen, the Braves started utilityman slash roster barnacle Luke Williams in left field, of all places, not once but twice in the last few days of the month. Forrest Wall, who basically existed in the organization as a pinch-runner, started more than half of the team’s games over the second half of the month.
As the month passed, the situation in the standings got less pleasant. The Braves ended May with 1-in-3 division odds, a 6.5-game deficit in the NL East and a 4.5-game lead over the rest of the moribund NL in the Wild Card standings. At this point, they’ve shed about half their division odds as the NL East gap has grown to eight games; the Wild Card lead shrunk by a game as there are actually six whole teams in the NL above .500 now.
The elephant that took up residence with the Braves in June, though, is hard to ignore. Over the duration of June, only the Tigers underperformed their xwOBA more than the Braves did. From the start of May, the Braves have by far the biggest team offensive xwOBA underperformance. They’ve now slipped into the bottom five for the whole season, as well. This is definitely in part due to the increased drag on the ball and some particularly cruel happenstance — as discussed before, for the season, the Braves are now dead last in both the rate of barrels becoming hits, and the rate of barrels becoming homers. While the Braves were merely bottom five in the former and bottom ten in the latter in June, suggesting some degree of improvement, it clearly wasn’t enough. That, and the issue goes beyond barrels, as the Braves tend to have one of the league’s bigger xwOBA underperformances no matter how you cut the split or time period. It is is what it is, and what it is isn’t particularly fun to watch.
Sadly, you can basically map the story of the month to the xwOBA underperformance, or lack thereof. From June 4 through June 12, the Braves went 2-6. They overperformed their xwOBA in two of eight games, and the collective underperformance was .035, third-largest in baseball in that span. Then, the Braves went 8-2, including winning three series in a row. They overperformed their xwOBA in seven of the ten games, and the collective overperformance was the sixth-biggest in baseball. Then, to close out the month, the Braves went 3-4, underperforming their xwOBA in every single game, by far the biggest underperformance in the league in that span. It’s really banal, so I don’t think it’s interesting to keep harping on, but this isn’t a team that’s losing because they can’t hit; it’s a team that’s losing because their results are just consistently much worse than the league’s results on not-dissimilar inputs. To wit: as mentioned, the Braves have one of the top three pitching staffs in MLB, whether you’re talking about June or in general. If their offensive outputs matched their inputs, they’d be combining that top-three pitching staff with an above-average offense and probably running something like a .570 winning percentage. Instead, given that their offensive outputs are below average, they’re barely over .500. So it goes.
The Braves out-wOBAed their opponents in 14 games in June, and won all but one of them. They similarly lost all but one where they were out-wOBAed. So there’s nothing weird there. But they went just 10-6 when out-xwOBAing their opponents. While they did “benefit” by going 4-7 when getting out-xwOBAed, the reality is that an environment where net xwOBA correlates less to winning disproportionately hurts teams that tend to out-xwOBA their opponents. Can the Braves do anything about this? Not really. It’s not like hitting the ball worse is that helpful, either — the Braves went 3-9 in games in June with an xwOBA under .300. The issue is just one the Braves can’t really do anything about — never better exemplified than in their June 24 loss to the Cardinals, where they out-xwOBAed the Redbirds by over .130, but still lost a one-run game because two balls that are probably homers in most other circumstances were just long outs in 2024 with increased drag on the ball used.
So, put all that together, and you get the below:
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kjz5RRptV_J4fQFjtDDjIhoetrQ=/400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25515422/Screenshot_2024_07_02_125912.png">
Unsurprisingly, the two huge upset losses (both Chris Sale starts, against the Athletics and White Sox) were ones where the Braves out-xwOBAed their opponents. The times the Braves were able to return the favor, like the 3-1 win over the Yankees despite terrible inputs, were just too few to compensate.
Totally Meaningless Ivan Award for June 2024 Performance - Position Players
It seems like pretty much every year, amid a not-so-great stretch, there are oddball game thread comments asking if Austin Riley can be optioned to Triple-A for some ridiculous reason. Naturally, Riley then proceeds to respond by going thermonuclear at the plate and propping up his line for the rest of the year. June 2024 was pretty similar — Riley came into the month with an 84 wRC+, and leaves it at 111, thanks to a June where he had a 155 wRC+ to go with six homers and six doubles, and a team-leading 1.2 fWAR.
Unsurprisingly, Riley underperformed his team-leading .410 xwOBA for the month by more than twice the league-average rate (.396 wOBA). Even so, he still outhit all of his teammates (few of whom outhit their xwOBAs, anyway).
In less happy, but more par-for-the-course factoids, though, Riley is now tied for sixth in the majors with 12 barreled outs, four of which he collected in June.
Totally Meaningless Ivan Award for June 2024 Performance - Starting Pitchers
Among the Braves’ incredibly strong frontline trio, Reynaldo Lopez didn’t have a better June than either Max Fried or Chris Sale, in part because he only made four starts while Fried and Sale made five each. But, his 40/76/87 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) was still superb and was at least somewhat comparable to that of Fried (67/78/85) and Sale (102/70/61). More importantly, Lopez did it while crossing his innings total from last year: he now sits at 79 1⁄3 innings after completing between 57 and 66 frames in each of the last three seasons. (Interestingly, he’s yet to exceed 2023’s pitch total, as he is currently at 1,205 pitches thrown and finished last year with 1,211 pitches.)
In part because of his HR/FB fortune, and maybe because of his ability to reach back for a little bit more when he’s in a jam, Lopez delivered positive win expectancy while he was on the mound in all four of his starts, and the Braves won all four of those outings. He also hasn’t shown much in the way of wearing down so far, unless you want to assume that his four-walk outing against the Cardinals last time out is a sign of things to come. We’ll find out soon enough on that front.
Totally Meaningless Ivan Award for June 2024 Performance - Relief Pitchers
It was a month without too many standout bullpen performances — the bullpen itself was generically solid but not exactly scintillating or anything because of how infrequently they were called upon (tenth in MLB in fWAR; sixth in FIP-, second in xFIP-, fourth in ERA-, but 28th in innings pitched and dead last in batters faced). As a result, it’s hard to really highlight anyone, but Joe Jimenez’ circumstances amused me more than anyone else’s.
For the month, Jimenez wasn’t actually all that effective, with a 101 FIP- and 110 xFIP-; only Jimmy Herget and Ray Kerr had worse relief months. But, despite that, he managed a 6/1 shutdown/meltdown ratio, in part by taking all the ball-in-play shenanigans that have plagued the Braves this year and benefiting from them where things went wrong for a bunch of his teammates. His sole meltdown, in which he gave up a game-winning homer in a tie game in Baltimore, was lame, but the only guys to avoid a meltdown this month were Jesse Chavez and Daysbel Hernandez, who were used in much lower-leverage relief, as well as Ray Kerr, who was really just used to sop innings despite his stuff, and ended up going down with injury anyway.
Best Offensive Play - Riley Wins the Battle
Again, I don’t know why so many of these happen in losses, but here we go. On June 16, the Braves were seeking a sweep of the Rays, but were trailing 6-4 with time running out, and only five outs to go. After a Matt Olson double, Austin Riley came to the plate and engaged in a crazy 11-pitch battle against Jason Adam. Only on the 11th pitch did Riley put it in play, and tied the game, no less:
Something crazy about this plate appearance was that Riley fouled off three straight different pitches two different times. The third, fourth, and fifth pitches of the PA were a sweeper, a four-seamer, and then a slider; the eight, ninth, and tenth were a slider, four-seamer, and changeup. In the whole PA, he only swung at strikes and took all three balls.
The part of me that’s entirely annoyed about the whole season can only think of the fact that Riley hit the ball with 31 degrees of launch angle, and that this would’ve probably been another barreled out if not for the fact that the Braves-Rays series appeared to use a non-draggy baseball.
Oh, and the Braves ended up losing this game when Jose Siri hit a two-run homer off Raisel Iglesias in the ninth.
Best Run-Stopping Play - Whatever this was
It took a replay review, but this thing happened and really helped the Braves win this “modern 2024 baseball showcase” via walkoff in the following half-inning:
I considered making Daysbel Hernandez the relief pitcher of the month due to participating in this alone, but it felt kind of orthogonal to pitching.
Most Dominant Single Game Offensive Performance
Did you know that Matt Olson had an absolutely terrible month? No, I’m not kidding. In his career, Olson has had exactly two calendar months in which he got more than three PAs with an xwOBA below .300. In July 2022, he had a .296 xwOBA for the month. In June 2024, it was... .264. Ew. No one really noticed, because he massively outhit it to the tune of a .327 wOBA, and the Braves have bigger problems. But while it was a June to forget for lots of reasons for lots of Braves players, Olson going back to mashing, or at least his .360ish xwOBA for the first two months of the year, is probably pretty important for the team going forward.
Still, this didn’t quite apply on June 1 for Olson, facing his former team (and of course, in a Braves loss). After a couple of outs in his first two plate appearances, he connected for a game-tying two-run homer in the fifth, and then reached base to start both the seventh and the ninth, with the Braves behind again. Unfortunately, the Braves couldn’t bring him home in either instance late, and lost the game, but it was a nice hurrah for the first baseman before, well, the rest of the month happened.
Most Dominant Single Game Starting Pitching Performance
Okay, this wasn’t dominant at all. It was just funny. And it happened in a 1-0 game, so it was even funnier.
On June 2, Charlie Morton started against the Athletics. After a 1-2-3 first, the Braves handed him a 1-0 lead. He then also had a 1-2-3 inning. And then, the insanity began. Morton hit a guy in the third, but stranded two in the inning. He had two walks in the fourth, but thanks to a double play, nothing happened. There was another walk in the fifth, but it was erased via pickoff. And then, in the sixth, Morton issued back-to-back two-out walks, stayed in the game, and got out of it anyway.
What made all of this even funnier was that despite Morton somehow weaving a 6/5 K/BB ratio with a hit-by-pitch into six scoreless frames while nursing a 1-0 lead, Dylan Lee entered in the seventh and immediately gave up a homer on the second non-Morton Braves pitch of the game to temporarily tie things up. (The Braves came back to win.) I laugh just thinking about the ridiculousness of this outing, especially after the Athletics somehow thrashed Chris Sale the day before.
Most Dominant Relief Pitching Performance
Okay, any extra-inning pitching performance where you get your team to survive Manfredball by throwing a wild pitch that bounces back to your catcher, who flips it to you to retire the go-ahead run at the plate probably warrants this. Even if it’s not pitching-related. Sorry for the fact that you had options resulting in you getting sent back to Triple-A, Daysbel Hernandez. We’ll see you soon.
Most Crushed Dinger
Hunter Harvey is having a good season, but this was a very bad pitch to Marcell Ozuna.
Not even hitting it above 30 degrees launch angle-wise could prevent this monster shot from clearing the stands, though if you had told me it landed for an out in the middle of the warning track, I’d have believed you, too.
Worst Offensive Result - Orlando Arcia PAs
Look, the Braves have an Orlando Arcia problem. Among the 145 “qualified” players, he has the worst wRC+ in baseball (60). His xwOBA is second-worst among this group, but is probably the worst when you take park effects on xwOBA into account. He’s in the bottom ten of both measures even if you set the PA threshold to 200. But it goes deeper than that.
Leaving aside the fact that Tim Anderson somehow has -3.35 WPA in 241 PAs (how is this even possible), Arcia has the second-worst WPA in baseball. He’s tied for tenth-highest in double plays hit into, which isn’t that surprising because he combines a top quintile grounder rate with a top decile pull rate but hits the ball with above-average velocity when he connects. He’s simply making too much bad contact, and while his issues seem to be approach-based and not skills-based, they’ve been going for so long that the window for things suddenly clicking is probably shut.
What’s been extra-damaging is that in June, Arcia played in 25 games, and had negative WPA in 20 of them. His clutch score of -0.52 suggests even the timing of when he did have positive events was poor. He had the lowest WPA on the team eight times in 25 games; even if you figure that as one of the worst bats in the majors he should be more likely to have these games than the “expected” rate, you would probably not figure he’d do it at three times the “expected” rate (i.e., 25 divided by nine), especially not when the Braves have some other guys who were not-great for the month outputs-wise, like Adam Duvall (a lower wRC+ for June, 10, than Arcia’s 29) and Travis d’Arnaud (a 31 wRC+ for June).
The issue is that Arcia has been so good defensively that he’s still above-replacement despite more or less the worst hitting of 2024, and also that the Braves’ short-term alternatives, like Zack Short (get it?) are, well, not really meaningful alternatives in any sense. But how long are they going to let Arcia kill the team’s win expectancy, like he did on June 8, with another awfully-timed double play?
Worst Pitching Result - Giving up a homer on a good pitch
It’s hard to be too mad at Raisel Iglesias for what happened here, given that Jose Siri hit a game-winning two-run homer on a good pitch. It still sucks, though, and it stings a bit more because it derailed what could’ve been a pretty cool comeback given that the Braves had scored four unanswered runs to tie it before Siri homered.
Worst Single-Game Hitting Performance
Okay, this one is kind of funny, because (A) it happened in a win, and (B) it happened to Marcell Ozuna, who basically has been the Braves’ offense for much of the year. But, on June 29, get this:
In the first, Ozuna hit into a double play with none out and one on.
In the third, he hit into an inning-ending double play with the bases loaded and one out.
In a tie game with the go-ahead run on second in the fifth, he struck out to end the inning.
Lastly, he struck out to end the eighth.
That’s a pretty horrible day for anyone, and it explains why the Braves managed just one run in regulation in this game. But hey, at least they came out on top, even if Ozuna didn’t help out for once.
Worst Single-Game Starting Pitching Performance
Chris Sale was good in May that somehow, the simulation we’re all living in decided it was time for a kill screen to start June, even though he was facing the Athletics. The game was pretty crazy — Sale allowed two homers and managed just a 4/1 K/BB ratio in four innings of work. He had, to that point, allowed just four homers all year. He hasn’t had a game with fewer than six strikeouts, aside from this one, all year. He’s allowed 13 barrels in five starts, and three of them (his only three-barrel game) came in this game.
But, perhaps worse than any of this, was the fact that he just kept getting hammered. A barreled two-run double in the first? Sure, but the Braves tied it right back up. A barreled three-run homer to cap a four-run second? The Braves were at least clawing back, but then he gave up a two-run homer in the fourth.
It’s hard to hold one hiccup against Sale given how phenomenal he’s been overall, but that’s what made this so unexpectedly horrible.
Worst Single-Game Relief Pitching Performance
Probably Siri hitting the homer off Iglesias, again, not because Iglesias did anything particularly wrong, but because that’s a terrible way for that game to fold. That said, Iglesias does have by far the lowest strikeout rate of his career right now, so that’s not great... though also far down on the list of concerns for the team at the moment.
Most Crushed Dinger Allowed
It’s unlikely anyone tops this for the season, which is what makes it so funny that it came against Chris Sale, of all people. This is one of the most crushed balls of the year, period.
See you next month!
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