When Michael Harris II pulled off another heroic feat in hitting a game-winning pinch-hit double yesterday afternoon, I remarked that it felt pretty unfair to just be able to plop in a guy having one of the better offensive performances in MLB in lieu of Sandy Leon in a key spot.
That also brought to mind a separate question: are we seeing the best run of Braves pinch-hitting, ever?
The answer is kind of complicated, especially because there’s a big sample-and-usage difference between “lots of pinch
hitters since pitchers were still batting” and “pinch hitting in the age of the universal DH.”
So, some food for thought:
FanGraphs maintains detailed splits from 2002-onward. The 2026 Braves have a 117 wRC+ as pinch-hitters so far this year. That’s tops in that span; 2008-2010 had an impressive above-100 set of wRC+s as well, but again, that involved a lot more pinch-hitting due to pitchers batting.
Part of it, too, is frequency. The Braves have already pinch-hit 61 times; in 2022, the most for the franchise in the universal DH era, the number for the whole season was 48.
Using Baseball-Reference’s Stathead gains us broader historical breadth, but loses some utility in terms of statistics. By OPS, this team is currently fourth among all Braves teams in pinch-hitter OPS. The 1947 Braves somehow had a .835 OPS in 175 PAs; 2008 and 1924 also clock in ahead of 2026. My back-of-the-envelope computations suggest that those 1947 pinch hitters had a similar 117 wRC+ to the 2026 crew, which suggests that yeah, maybe this is the greatest broad set of Braves pinch hitters ever.
You might be surprised to know (or perhaps not), that their success so far isn’t because the “regular” platoon guys are killing it when swapped into the game. 54 percent of the Braves’ pinch-hit PAs have come from the combo of Mike Yastrzemski and Dominic Smith. Those guys have an 83 and 41 wRC+ when pinch-hitting, respectively. Eli White is kinda-sorta a platoon guy, and he has a 7 wRC+ in five pinch-hit PAs. Instead, the reason the Braves have killed it when pinch-hitting has been something different:
- Harris – six PAs, 510 wRC+
- Jorge Mateo – four PAs, 237 wRC+
- Mauricio Dubon – two PAs, 189 wRC+
So, if this does end up being the greatest bunch of Braves pinch-hit performances ever, it might not be due to consistent quality… but due to the admittedly “yeah, feels pretty unfair” ability to slide Harris into a key spot when a nagging ailment kept him out of the starting lineup.
Random site note: Cubs pinch hitters have a 154 wRC+ in 70 PAs this season. The 2002-onward record in wRC+ from a team’s pinch hitters is a 167 mark from the 2009 Twins. If you want to move to the universal DH era (since even those Twins probably pinch-hit for a pitcher or three during interleague play), then we have the 2022 Brewers, 159 wRC+ in 124 PAs. Basically, the Braves’ current 117 mark doesn’t really even register. There are teams that have had great pinch-hitting runs, and the Braves’ awesome results in that regard in 2026 so far still pale in comparison to what some other teams have done over a whole season… or even in 2026 to date.
