This post doesn’t have a specific point. It’s more just a series of observations. But, I think the main takeaway is that on top of everything else the Braves are dealing with, they are now also dealing with Matt Olson having a down August. (On the flip side, you could say that having a down Olson August isn’t a real issue these days, because the season is toast and has been toast for a while. I guess that’s the pessimist’s silver lining, if such a thing even exists.) What do I mean by down month?
Well, Olson’s xwOBA for August currently sits at .294. He was at .344 in July, and no lower than .365 in each of the past three months. His April and June were both blistering (.390+), but we’re a ways away from that now.
Olson having a down month isn’t all that weird. It happens to him here and there. During his Braves tenure, he’s been good for about one a year, except of course 2023, — July 2022, June 2024, July 2024, and now, August 2025. Every other month, he’s been above average on an inputs basis, and has had as many months (four) with a .400+ xwOBA (including April 2025) as with an xwOBA below .329.
The sheer consistency of his one-bad-month thing is kind of bewildering. The only c-c-c-combo breakers were 2023 (none) and 2024 (where it lasted more like two months). Even before he was traded to Atlanta, he had a similar one-bad-month thing in September 2020, August 2018, a small sample in July 2017, and a small-ish sample in September 2016. (He avoided it in 2019, which was his best pre-Atlanta xwOBA season.)
It’s so easy to chalk up issues in August to his one-bad-month pattern that I could just stop there. But, I want to note some other stuff that’s interesting about how his 2025 has gone.
Olson’s 2022 and 2024 were eerily similar; we all know about his 2023. His 2025, as it has progressed though, has been all over the place. Olson was a peripherals deity in April, but his contact quality didn’t follow suit. In May, he was a peripherals peon, but absolutely killed the ball when making contact. June was like a reboot of April (slightly worse, like reboots in most cases). July was when things kind of curdled, as the peripherals got worse and the contact quality got way worse, but he was on a pretty lofty perch to begin with, so it wasn’t a horrible month. And then we come to August, which just looks terrible, accelerating July’s slide vis-a-vis June, with much worse peripherals and even worse contact quality.
None of this is really surprising if you think of player success as basically a tide level and individual player stats as just buoys floating out there — a player that “is good” or “feels good” can probably have better peripherals and better contact quality, and vice versa. But you can also think of things in terms of tradeoffs, as we saw in Olson’s April relative to May.
The plate discipline stuff is also kind of a mix of stuff to be interpreted in various ways. You can see Olson chasing way less through June, though a lot of that was because he was just way more passive at the plate in general. (These are teamwide trends to a large extent.) The worrying part is how bad August looks in terms of swing decisions, which chasing back to his usual rates but a pathetic z-swing rate that doesn’t jive. The z-contact is roughly consistent with the other trends; we can see Olson trading some contact for some power, except in May. But again, August is just a horrorshow, where he’s not trading contact for power, he’s just being sad at both.
So, basically, Matt Olson has been bad in August, all-around. The bad news is that, well, it sucks to suck. The good news is that he seems to do this about once a month every season, so it’s not much of a comment on his long-term outlook or anything.
Olson’s bat speed hasn’t really changed month-to-month. He’s been inching up in the box pretty consistently over the time; August is the first month he’s moved up to where he spent 2024, in aggregate, in terms of intercept point. But, it’s clearly not working for him.
Olson also started off the year with a swing path oriented towards going the other way relative to anything he’d done before going back to the advent of bat tracking data in 2023. You can actually see this in some topline stats, as he has his highest opposite-field rate ever and his lowest pull rate since his cup of coffee debut season. July and August have seen most of the action in him trying to get back to a pre-first-half-of-2025 placement in the box and pull rate, but it hasn’t really worked out. I suppose that there’s no better time to make adjustments to going back to a prior approach, if one were invested in doing so, than during the latter part of a lost season… but it’s interesting that Olson may potentially be abandoning what worked for him through June, even as it utterly failed for many of his teammates. Is this a sign of things to come for 2026 and beyond for the Braves? At this point, I have no idea.
