<img alt="MLB: MAY 31 Braves at Angels" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wb2eGjnHUEtULSBQUKzZaU5DlwI=/0x792:2100x2192/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73482026/691012914.0.jpg">
Photo by John Cordes/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Those aren’t the only paths this season can meander towards, but they’re two obvious ones The 2024 Braves are not where they expected to be, nor want to be. At 54-46, they have MLB’s ninth-best record, its eighth-best run differential, and eighth-best BaseRuns record. Those aren’t bad marks, but this team came in with some of the best projections, ever. Well, injuries and massive xwOBA underperformance offensively quickly dispensed with any lofty aspirations, and at this point, the Braves are really just trying to hang on to their playoff spot.
But, it’s not going particularly well. Thanks to those same culprits, plus a continued, lackadaisical approach to pitching management, the Braves have gone 1-4 after the All-Star Break, dropping a series to the Cardinals (the team that was immediately behind them in the Wild Card standings at the time) in the process. Now, they are heading to New York for a four-game series with the Mets (the team currently immediately behind them in the Wild Card standings) that could shake up the standings a fair bit, depending on how it plays out. That series comes at a crucial time, because the Trade Deadline is this coming Tuesday at 6 ET. In other words, the Braves will only have one more game beyond the Mets series to supplement their roster from outside the organization for the remainder of the season,.
To me, the choice of whether to do so isn’t really much of a choice. If you’re playing not to have an entertaining regular season but to give yourself a chance in the playoffs, as the Braves have ostensibly committed to this season, you A) first have to make the playoffs and B) need to have the best roster you can going into the playoffs. The ship has somewhat sailed on B), but A) is very much in play — the Braves’ playoff odds are still about 80 percent at the moment, but they’ve also fallen 14 percent in four days, from a near-lock to something less than that. How the Braves go about their roster in the next few days, and how they fare in this series with the Mets, could matter a ton. But, even that aside, the stage is set for something like an inflection point, and it seems pretty likely that the remainder of the season will look like either 2021 (yay) or 2014 (very not yay).
Will there be a stunning, 2021-esque turnaround?
The 2021 Braves were far more moribund than the 2024 Braves at this point last year. On July 25, that team’s playoff odds were right around 10 percent. Those Braves had a 48-50 record heading into the final game of a four-game set with the Phillies; they hadn’t won consecutive games since Ronald Acuña Jr. suffered his first ACL tear back in mid-July.
That season happened recently enough that you don’t need a rehash of what happened. After treading water for the first four months of the year, the Braves reeled off a four-game winning streak and later a nine-game winning streak en route to an 18-8 August and then capped things with an 18-11 September. They went from a six-game deficit in the NL East on July 25 to a 6.5-game lead in the division by the time the season ended.
The big similarities between the 2024 Braves and the 2021 Braves are really the injuries. Only four of their regulars lasted the whole year; the team lost Acuña, in the midst of an MVP-type season, about halfway through, and had one of the worst catching situations in the league as a result of injuries to pretty much everyone. Other than that, things aren’t that similar. Despite the injuries, the 2021 team was more position player-successful than the 2024 iteration so far. It wasn’t particularly plagued by ball-in-play stuff (sixth in xwOBA, ninth in wOBA through July), though it did have some sequencing struggles. Perhaps amusingly, the team actually had xwOBA underperformance problems after the Trade Deadline (third-worst in August and September).
What actually changed, despite the quartet of outfielders that honestly didn’t actually move the regular season needle that much, was simply a turnaround in the team’s fortunes. The 2021 Braves ranked eighth in position player fWAR before the All-Star Break, and were dragged down by a mediocre pitching staff ranking 16th in fWAR in that span. For the stretch run, despite the new additions and the catchers getting healthy, the position players dropped to tenth, and the pitching improved to 12th. Max Fried and Charlie Morton went absolutely bonkers, basically becoming unhittable, but the difference was really just one of conversion. Before the All-Star Break, the team was fifth in the NL (have to use this because of the lack of a DH in the NL at that point) in wRC+ and fifth in runs; after, it was sixth in wRC+ and first in runs. The 2021 Braves basically sequenced their way to an awesome stretch run that saved their season, piggybacking off a bunch of cheap outfield acquisitions that all hit average or better to do so.
One thing that jumps out at me is that post All-Star Break, the 2021 Braves had seven regulars or semi-regulars with an above-average batting line, and two more with an average one. Aside from Guillermo Heredia, almost no free outs got playing time post-Trade Deadline. The 2024 Braves still have multiple free outs in their lineup, and only two or three guys hitting particularly well. An obvious path forward: plug the win-bleeding roster holes for cheap (1.5 WAR/600 guys don’t cost anything, as 2021 indicated) and see what happens.
If the Braves do this, they’ll still need things to break their way — the 2021 Braves had sequencing and crazy-good pitching from two of their starters. Maybe it’s an end to the xwOBA underperformance, maybe it’s some hitter catching fire instead. But it’s certainly possible. It’s just a matter of whether it’ll happen.
Or, are we doomed to witness another 2014?
2021 would be the good outcome, that’s why I started with it. But this season has a ton more parallels with 2014:
The Braves started 2014 going 17-9. They then went one game under .500 for the next four calendar months.
2014, like 2024, was a weird nadir for the run environment. I’m not going to say that MLB juiced the ball because 2014 was such a drag offensively, but if they did, it would make sense because of how pitiful the average game in 2014 was in terms of (a lack of) actual action on the field.
The 2013 Braves were a good (not great, or record-setting) offensive team, but the 2014 Braves had a weak, well below average offense. They stayed afloat on the basis of their good-not-great pitching staff.
The 2014 team was not particularly beset with injuries, but especially to this point, it seems to be eerily similar to how things are playing out in 2024. The team was 19th in wRC+ heading into the All-Star Break, with two good bats, two okay bats, Evan Gattis hitting well as a part-timer, and a whole lot of bleh. Only about half the team’s PAs to that point were taken by guys who weren’t substantially worse than average; about 30 percent were going to free outs. (By comparison, this 2024 Braves team has had only 27 percent of PAs taken by above-average bats, and 24 percent by essentially free outs; the current team has a lot more morass in the middle with less extreme highs and lows.)
The 2014 team was getting great pitching from Julio Teheran and Ervin Santana, and great efforts from Aaron Harang. Craig Kimbrel was dominant in the bullpen and other relievers were solid-to-very good as well.
At the Trade Deadline, the 2014 Braves did essentially nothing. On July 30, the day before the Trade Deadline, they were had a half-game lead on the last NL playoff spot, but were just 1.5 games out of the division lead. Their choice was to do essentially nothing, acquiring Emilio Bonifacio (my enemy) and James Russell, and nothing else. Things blew up spectacularly from there.
August was another month of treading water, but the team collapsed with a 7-18 September that featured two five-game losing streaks and no consecutive wins until the meaningless final games of the season. It was a slow collapse, kind of a frog-in-increasingly-hot-water metaphor, as those Braves were generally only about 1.5 games out of a playoff spot and didn’t fall more than three games out until September 14, which was the final game of a 2-7 road trip that basically sealed the team’s fate.
Performance-wise, the offense basically just died down the stretch, going from 19th to 27th in wRC+. The pitching went from good to meh (14th in fWAR post-All Star Break). Even though the rotation actually improved to some extent thanks to some great work from Alex Wood, the bullpen basically just fell apart. Kimbrel was fine if not as insanely elite as he had been, but basically every other reliever imploded to some extent. Not that it mattered too much, though, because the team just didn’t hit. Scared, yet?
In that fateful stretch run for the 2014 Braves, only three guys hit, at all. Everyone else basically turned into a free out. Emilio Bonifacio somehow had a 57 wRC+ and kept getting playing time, and he wasn’t even the worst batter the Braves kept running out there (Andrelton Simmons).
Sure, this season could evolve in some different way. By broad strokes, though, the 2021 and 2014 blueprints seem fairly likely to cover a lot of the hypothetical territory into what we’ll see over the next nine weeks or so. The Braves could successfully plug their holes with stopgaps and/or benefit from the sort of not-out-of-the-ordinary-but-sorely-missing-so-far usual baseball fortune and start winning games... or they could do the equivalent of acquiring Emilio Bonifacio and have things just go from bad to worse, especially if they’re forced to push their carefully-safeguarded pitchers so far out of desperation, which leads to an injury and/or performance-based backfiring.
At this point, I hope they at least have the lessons from 2014 squarely in the back of their mind somewhere. While I don’t expect even a poor outcome this season to be as disastrous as 2014 was, setting the franchise back years because of how it created a vacuum filled with inanity/insanity following Frank Wren’s firing, it would still be quite awful. So, let’s just hope they don’t trade for any Bonifacios and get the ball-in-play results they’ve been lacking.
<img alt="MLB: MAY 31 Braves at Angels" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wb2eGjnHUEtULSBQUKzZaU5DlwI=/0x792:2100x2192/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73482026/691012914.0.jpg">
Photo by John Cordes/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Those aren’t the only paths this season can meander towards, but they’re two obvious ones The 2024 Braves are not where they expected to be, nor want to be. At 54-46, they have MLB’s ninth-best record, its eighth-best run differential, and eighth-best BaseRuns record. Those aren’t bad marks, but this team came in with some of the best projections, ever. Well, injuries and massive xwOBA underperformance offensively quickly dispensed with any lofty aspirations, and at this point, the Braves are really just trying to hang on to their playoff spot.
But, it’s not going particularly well. Thanks to those same culprits, plus a continued, lackadaisical approach to pitching management, the Braves have gone 1-4 after the All-Star Break, dropping a series to the Cardinals (the team that was immediately behind them in the Wild Card standings at the time) in the process. Now, they are heading to New York for a four-game series with the Mets (the team currently immediately behind them in the Wild Card standings) that could shake up the standings a fair bit, depending on how it plays out. That series comes at a crucial time, because the Trade Deadline is this coming Tuesday at 6 ET. In other words, the Braves will only have one more game beyond the Mets series to supplement their roster from outside the organization for the remainder of the season,.
To me, the choice of whether to do so isn’t really much of a choice. If you’re playing not to have an entertaining regular season but to give yourself a chance in the playoffs, as the Braves have ostensibly committed to this season, you A) first have to make the playoffs and B) need to have the best roster you can going into the playoffs. The ship has somewhat sailed on B), but A) is very much in play — the Braves’ playoff odds are still about 80 percent at the moment, but they’ve also fallen 14 percent in four days, from a near-lock to something less than that. How the Braves go about their roster in the next few days, and how they fare in this series with the Mets, could matter a ton. But, even that aside, the stage is set for something like an inflection point, and it seems pretty likely that the remainder of the season will look like either 2021 (yay) or 2014 (very not yay).
Will there be a stunning, 2021-esque turnaround?
The 2021 Braves were far more moribund than the 2024 Braves at this point last year. On July 25, that team’s playoff odds were right around 10 percent. Those Braves had a 48-50 record heading into the final game of a four-game set with the Phillies; they hadn’t won consecutive games since Ronald Acuña Jr. suffered his first ACL tear back in mid-July.
That season happened recently enough that you don’t need a rehash of what happened. After treading water for the first four months of the year, the Braves reeled off a four-game winning streak and later a nine-game winning streak en route to an 18-8 August and then capped things with an 18-11 September. They went from a six-game deficit in the NL East on July 25 to a 6.5-game lead in the division by the time the season ended.
The big similarities between the 2024 Braves and the 2021 Braves are really the injuries. Only four of their regulars lasted the whole year; the team lost Acuña, in the midst of an MVP-type season, about halfway through, and had one of the worst catching situations in the league as a result of injuries to pretty much everyone. Other than that, things aren’t that similar. Despite the injuries, the 2021 team was more position player-successful than the 2024 iteration so far. It wasn’t particularly plagued by ball-in-play stuff (sixth in xwOBA, ninth in wOBA through July), though it did have some sequencing struggles. Perhaps amusingly, the team actually had xwOBA underperformance problems after the Trade Deadline (third-worst in August and September).
What actually changed, despite the quartet of outfielders that honestly didn’t actually move the regular season needle that much, was simply a turnaround in the team’s fortunes. The 2021 Braves ranked eighth in position player fWAR before the All-Star Break, and were dragged down by a mediocre pitching staff ranking 16th in fWAR in that span. For the stretch run, despite the new additions and the catchers getting healthy, the position players dropped to tenth, and the pitching improved to 12th. Max Fried and Charlie Morton went absolutely bonkers, basically becoming unhittable, but the difference was really just one of conversion. Before the All-Star Break, the team was fifth in the NL (have to use this because of the lack of a DH in the NL at that point) in wRC+ and fifth in runs; after, it was sixth in wRC+ and first in runs. The 2021 Braves basically sequenced their way to an awesome stretch run that saved their season, piggybacking off a bunch of cheap outfield acquisitions that all hit average or better to do so.
One thing that jumps out at me is that post All-Star Break, the 2021 Braves had seven regulars or semi-regulars with an above-average batting line, and two more with an average one. Aside from Guillermo Heredia, almost no free outs got playing time post-Trade Deadline. The 2024 Braves still have multiple free outs in their lineup, and only two or three guys hitting particularly well. An obvious path forward: plug the win-bleeding roster holes for cheap (1.5 WAR/600 guys don’t cost anything, as 2021 indicated) and see what happens.
If the Braves do this, they’ll still need things to break their way — the 2021 Braves had sequencing and crazy-good pitching from two of their starters. Maybe it’s an end to the xwOBA underperformance, maybe it’s some hitter catching fire instead. But it’s certainly possible. It’s just a matter of whether it’ll happen.
Or, are we doomed to witness another 2014?
2021 would be the good outcome, that’s why I started with it. But this season has a ton more parallels with 2014:
The Braves started 2014 going 17-9. They then went one game under .500 for the next four calendar months.
2014, like 2024, was a weird nadir for the run environment. I’m not going to say that MLB juiced the ball because 2014 was such a drag offensively, but if they did, it would make sense because of how pitiful the average game in 2014 was in terms of (a lack of) actual action on the field.
The 2013 Braves were a good (not great, or record-setting) offensive team, but the 2014 Braves had a weak, well below average offense. They stayed afloat on the basis of their good-not-great pitching staff.
The 2014 team was not particularly beset with injuries, but especially to this point, it seems to be eerily similar to how things are playing out in 2024. The team was 19th in wRC+ heading into the All-Star Break, with two good bats, two okay bats, Evan Gattis hitting well as a part-timer, and a whole lot of bleh. Only about half the team’s PAs to that point were taken by guys who weren’t substantially worse than average; about 30 percent were going to free outs. (By comparison, this 2024 Braves team has had only 27 percent of PAs taken by above-average bats, and 24 percent by essentially free outs; the current team has a lot more morass in the middle with less extreme highs and lows.)
The 2014 team was getting great pitching from Julio Teheran and Ervin Santana, and great efforts from Aaron Harang. Craig Kimbrel was dominant in the bullpen and other relievers were solid-to-very good as well.
At the Trade Deadline, the 2014 Braves did essentially nothing. On July 30, the day before the Trade Deadline, they were had a half-game lead on the last NL playoff spot, but were just 1.5 games out of the division lead. Their choice was to do essentially nothing, acquiring Emilio Bonifacio (my enemy) and James Russell, and nothing else. Things blew up spectacularly from there.
August was another month of treading water, but the team collapsed with a 7-18 September that featured two five-game losing streaks and no consecutive wins until the meaningless final games of the season. It was a slow collapse, kind of a frog-in-increasingly-hot-water metaphor, as those Braves were generally only about 1.5 games out of a playoff spot and didn’t fall more than three games out until September 14, which was the final game of a 2-7 road trip that basically sealed the team’s fate.
Performance-wise, the offense basically just died down the stretch, going from 19th to 27th in wRC+. The pitching went from good to meh (14th in fWAR post-All Star Break). Even though the rotation actually improved to some extent thanks to some great work from Alex Wood, the bullpen basically just fell apart. Kimbrel was fine if not as insanely elite as he had been, but basically every other reliever imploded to some extent. Not that it mattered too much, though, because the team just didn’t hit. Scared, yet?
In that fateful stretch run for the 2014 Braves, only three guys hit, at all. Everyone else basically turned into a free out. Emilio Bonifacio somehow had a 57 wRC+ and kept getting playing time, and he wasn’t even the worst batter the Braves kept running out there (Andrelton Simmons).
Sure, this season could evolve in some different way. By broad strokes, though, the 2021 and 2014 blueprints seem fairly likely to cover a lot of the hypothetical territory into what we’ll see over the next nine weeks or so. The Braves could successfully plug their holes with stopgaps and/or benefit from the sort of not-out-of-the-ordinary-but-sorely-missing-so-far usual baseball fortune and start winning games... or they could do the equivalent of acquiring Emilio Bonifacio and have things just go from bad to worse, especially if they’re forced to push their carefully-safeguarded pitchers so far out of desperation, which leads to an injury and/or performance-based backfiring.
At this point, I hope they at least have the lessons from 2014 squarely in the back of their mind somewhere. While I don’t expect even a poor outcome this season to be as disastrous as 2014 was, setting the franchise back years because of how it created a vacuum filled with inanity/insanity following Frank Wren’s firing, it would still be quite awful. So, let’s just hope they don’t trade for any Bonifacios and get the ball-in-play results they’ve been lacking.
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