Past summaries:
- So far, so good through mid-April
- Even better in late April
- May-be they’re just really good
- Late May just good, rather than absurdly awesome
- A June swoon so far
- Awful
- Fake it and maybe make it
- With some luck, back on the horse
The dog days of summer extend into August, and while they’re astronomically over now, the metaphor still works. Sorta. Has it been hot? Yes. Have the Braves been hot? Believe it or not, also yes. But, do you feel like there’s a degree of lethargy and listlessness? Maybe? Possibly? If so, well, the dog days stuff is right on the money.
This is really for a different post, so I’ll save most of it for that post, but this might be the weirdest Braves team I’ve seen in over a quarter-century.
They are, wins-wise, almost as fine as can be, with their fourth-best record in baseball and on a see-saw for the Dodgers for second playoff bye in the NL. Yet, production-wise, they are the expected “reasonable playoff team that’s dealt and continues to deal” with a lot of injuries. Given their production, they should be on pace for 85 wins and not their current 96. Having a team whose identity is “we somehow end up with more wins than you’d think” without any specific way in which they get there is bizarre. There’s more to say, but elsewhere. It’s just weird, and perhaps all the weirder that it’s a quirk in the Braves’ favor for once.
How did the Braves do recently?
The Braves went 8-5 in the first half of August. It was an erratic performance. The month started with a continuation of their win streak from end of July; the streak ended at eight, with five in August. They then lost a series to the Yankees, won a series against the Mets, and lost the first two games in a set against the Diamondbacks. 8-5 is pretty good, both among MLB teams in August, and in general (100-win pace). But, the nature of how it was racked up — basically two series losses and two wins, with the back half of one series added in, is what potentially prompts that dog day ennui.
The reason for that ennui is partially illustrated below, and dovetails with the words above: the Braves are good at winning games, especially ones where they play okay, but they also have a lot of particularly blah performances that make the aggregate look worse than the game-to-game. To wit:
- Braves are 18th in position player fWAR in August, including 16th in offensive outputs and 10th in offensive inputs. (That luck from late July has evaporated…)
- Braves are ninth in pitcher fWAR in August, seventh/11th/11th in ERA-/FIP-/xFIP- respectively, and split with the rotation being fourth and the bullpen being 24th in fWAR for the first half of the month.
Would you have guessed they were 10th in xwOBA and ninth in pitcher fWAR over the last two weeks? Or does it feel worse after they got smushed in two games by the Diamondbacks?
Speaking of that… By game-by-game odds, the Braves should’ve gone 7-6ish over these 13 games, so no huge divergence there. But, this stretch did feature the team’s worst loss-against-expectations thus far: 2-0 to the Diamondbacks in the Chris Sale-Brandon Pfaadt matchup at home. Pre-game, it was the Braves’ third-“easiest” on-paper matchup all year, and they won the two with higher victory odds. So, that was the worst loss of the season, in a way. (They also won the fourth-easiest, on August 1, against the Nationals.) On the flip side, two of their three games against the Yankees (the non-Sale ones) were tied for third in hardest matchup to date, and the Braves split those, so… baseball?
How are the Braves doing for the season?
The further we get in, the more same-y this reads, which I guess is a good thing in some ways.
The Braves have a 7.5-game lead over the Phillies. Given that there is a three-way tie in the standings for the last two NL playoff spots, the Braves’ lead over the Phillies is their hold on a playoff spot, too. The Braves have division odds of over 91 percent, a 1-in-3ish chance of grabbing a bye with a top-two record, and playoff odds north of 99 percent. Basically none of these numbers budged in August, although their chances of a bye did go up by a few percentage points as the Dodgers have continued to scuffle.
The Braves’ aggregate team stats are not impressive, though you already knew that.
- 19th in position player fWAR, including 11th in defense, 16th in hitting outputs (wRC+), and 11th in hitting inputs (xwOBA).
- 16th in pitching fWAR, including 20th in the rotation and sixth in the bullpen. Their ERA-/FIP-/xFIP- ranks are fifth/18th/11th, which is an exceedingly silly line that suggests that their defense/strand rate timing is chef’s kiss-esque, but that they’ve also been very homer-prone in a way that hasn’t actually caused a bunch of runs to accumulate. As noted above, the HR/FB has at least normalized a bit recently.
A big signpost for me was whether the offense could play at a top-ten rate after their June swoon — the pitching is what it is, especially in the management, and I think the team needs to hit in some fashion (whether sustainably or just by getting lucky) to power through the end of the season. At this point, they’re juuuust making that mark when you go from July 1-forward: tenth in wRC+ (seventh in wOBA) but 13th in xwOBA. It’s a similar-ish story post-All Star Break (tenth-ish across the board), but there are some warning signs in August as they haven’t been able to sustain late July’s xwOBA overperformance and have sunk to middle-of-the-pack offensive production. They will need something (luck, better hitting) to avoid the remaining six-ish weeks of the season from getting uncomfortable.
How are the hitters doing?
We’ve hit the point in the season where there’s a lot of normalization between wOBA and xwOBA. But, moreso than that, this was a very stars-and-scrubs two weeks.
Matt Olson, Austin Riley, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Mike Yastrzemski carried the load. Everyone else was kinda awful. It’s hard to carry multiple guys doing what Jim Jarvis, Ozzie Albies, and Drake Baldwin have done so far in August, but they’ve largely been regulars.
On the season, it’s a weird mix of guys, too, in the production sense. Olson, Michael Harris II, and Baldwin have done the business. A few guys have chipped in. Jim Jarvis entirely undid in a couple of weeks any good vibes he may have brought to the shortstop position earlier in the year. It’d be nice if Riley and/or Yastrzemski extended a tear into the rest of August and September, or if Acuña went on a tear (or at least had his inputs normalize with his outputs), or if Albies could get back to where he was earlier in the season.
At least the bubble charts look like everyone’s along a single (diagonal) axis now:
I do just want to call out, in case it’s buried in said dog days, that Riley and Yastrzemski were legitimately on fire for these two weeks. They also led the team in WPA among position players, but since that WPA was 0.12… it’s not really that exciting.
How are the pitchers doing?
It was a fun two weeks for the rotation.
As I always write here, Chris Sale is Chris Sale. The video game numbers continue, and were especially video game-y in August’s first half. His seasonal numbers are pretty ridiculous, too. Tyler Mahle showed up and had two epic starts. I’m torn on whether, for Mahle’s sake, the right side of the table should be as a-Brave or just the season in general. In any case, those are some pretty insane numbers for someone in two starts. Martin Perez and Grant Holmes were decent (Perez riding a homerless stretch helped his value immensely) while Bryce Elder struggled. On the season, the pecking order between the three seems to be Perez (less homer-itis), then Elder (same pitching, more homer-itis) and then Holmes. All in all, Perez has pitched like a mid-rotation starter, and Elder is either there or a little worse depending on how much you believe in his lack of homer suppression. Holmes has nasty (the bad kind) of numbers on the season; he seems very primed to be a multi-inning, nine-batters-max weapon in a playoff bullpen, but we’ll see if the Braves agree.
In the bullpen, Didier Fuentes had hilariously video-game level numbers in six outings in the first half of August. Dylan Lee had a funny line in six outings with no runs charged, but a decent FIP and a bad xFIP. Raisel Iglesias, Tyler Kinley, and Danny Young all had a horrible two weeks.
A special shoutout to Dylan Dodd, who somehow had a bad two weeks pitching-wise, but a great two weeks WPA-wise. Dodd’s line was a funny 38/122/116, which will happen in a small sample. But, he joined his Dylan compatriot as the only reliever with multiple shutdowns and no meltdowns in this span (3/0 for each). He played rescue ranger twice: once coming in after a leadoff single in the seventh with a 1-0 lead, and in the other, appearing in a bases-loaded jam in walkoff territory after Iglesias blew his save chance against the Yankees.
See you at the end of the month!
