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
How did the Braves do recently?
The post All-Star Break portion of July was a fun one for the Braves. You probably recall that June was terrible for this team, and the start of July was… okay, because the team played .500 ball instead of continuing to plunge through a June-esque abyss.
Two weeks ago, I asked whether 6-6 to start July was going to serve as a springboard from recovering from both June’s record and the fact that the team just didn’t actually produce for a whole calendar month. The answer is complicated.
Or, maybe it’s simple, because it’s a similar answer to when the Braves faked it to that .500 record.
The Braves went 10-5 in their final 15 games of July. They won three straight series coming out of the All-Star Break, including taking three of four from the Padres at home (they hadn’t taken a home series from San Diego since 2018). They then dropped a series to the Mets in New York, but ended the month winning three straight, including two over the Nationals. That’s the second-best record in baseball in that span. All problems solved, right?
On the position player side, the Braves produced enough. They finished sixth in fWAR and seventh in runs and wRC+. I opined at the end of June that they’d need to find a way to have a top-ten offense going forward to succeed, and that’s what they did. They had the fifth-highest wOBA, the ninth-highest xwOBA, and the league’s fourth-biggest xwOBA overperformance. To be clear:
- Start of the season through June: eighth-biggest xwOBA underperformance
- July: fifth-biggest xwOBA overperformance
Thanks, baseball gods! After so many seasons and months of underperforming, no help will be scoffed at.
On the pitching side, the Braves narrowly escaped a bottom-five performance. However, the FIP was stung by HR/FB, as the staff finishing 21st in xFIP-, but 26th in FIP- (also 21st in ERA-). It was kind of a weird turnaround with a middling rotation performance for two weeks and one of the league’s worst bullpen performances… but the bullpen performance was largely just weighed down by letting Connor Thomas eat a blowout loss, the continued roster existence of Tyler Kinley, and a few homers given up by Raisel Iglesias and JR Ritchie.
Put this together, and the Braves are still doing their weird record-versus-production thing that I noted in the middle of this month. A combined 3.5 fWAR in 15 games suggests an 8-7 record, not the 10-5 the Braves pulled off. But, the Braves continued to win close games and leave their terrible performances for hopeless contests. In theory, a team hitting pretty well but not insanely so, even with some a lot of luck, shouldn’t be able to pull away if it has a dire pitching situation. But, the Braves overcame. The game-by-game odds for these 15 games also suggested 8-7 would’ve been expected, so, again, yay.
How are the Braves doing for the season?
The Braves now have MLB’s third-best record. Their division lead is back up to eight games, meaning that despite playing just 15 games after the All-Star Break and winning ten of them, they somehow gained six games on the Phillies. That’s pretty efficient! As a result, playoff odds are back to about 99 percent, and division odds are up to 90 percent. These numbers don’t really budge even if you consider alternative forecast schemas (i.e., ones where the Braves’ current production governs how they’ll play going forward), because August tends to be the point of standings inertia, and an eight-game lead is pretty inertial as far as things go.
Overall, the Braves are middle of the pack (and close to dead average in MLB) in most position player categories. Their July run has made their wOBA equal their xwOBA. The aggregate is still being weighed down by June, of course. The pitching is also middling in similar fashion, split between a bottom-ten rotation performance and top-five bullpen performance. The rotation has a silly eighth/23rd/14th delineation in ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-, respectively; the bullpen is a much more consistent third/ninth/ninth.
Put all this together, and the Braves’ production without any context suggests a .500 team. Average hitting, average fielding, average pitching. That they’ve been able to pull out one of MLB’s best records amid all this… it’s a little dizzying. This sort of thing is also somewhat starting to catch up to the team in other measures. For example, the Braves are now +4 over BaseRuns, one of the bigger marks in the majors. However, since the Phillies are an absurd +6 over BaseRuns, it’s hard to fret too much about this sort of thing as far as the season standings go.
Still, the Braves do need to make some real improvements if they want the next two months to be as enjoyable as the last two weeks have been — they can’t hope to coast on divine baseball providence. We know as well as anyone just how fickle the presence of that boon can be.
How are the hitters doing?
Maybe the funniest and/or most informative biweekly cut of these data for the season so far.
Drake Baldwin went nuclear after the All-Star Break. He had a rough two games to close out the month, but was batting like a berserker in the ones before that. Matt Olson, Ozzie Albies, Michael Harris II, Dominic Smith, Joey Bart, Eli White, and Brewer Hicklen were the main beneficiaries of excellent luck on balls in play in this span. On the flip side, Mauricio Dubon caught the opposite, and for some reason, the universe still has it out for Ronald Acuña Jr. Anyway, if you look at the right-hand side, you’ll see that the aggregate lines for Harris, Dubon, and Smith have converged after some large discrepancies in smaller cuts throughout the season. Baldwin-Acuña and Albies-Olson seem to be occupying some sort of grand balancing across them, with the former still substantially unfortunate through the arc of the season, and the latter getting undeserved rewards to make up for it.
You can see the extent of Baldwin’s dominance since his circle up there is like some sort of sinister descending planet that can’t even be fully captured in-frame. Also, Acuña is quarantined in the “punished for crimes of unclear provenance” zone. On the flip (right-hand) side, you can see the inputs and outputs are kinda-sorta working as intended, with only Albies defying the natural order of the universe.
A special shoutout to Jim Jarvis for: 1) producing a respectable .306 xwOBA while also 2) leading the hitters in WPA over these 15 games. It’s actually really impressive that he managed to get a number of big hits, and avoid big outs, while not actually producing particularly good outputs in this span. Again, that’s pretty efficient.
How are the pitchers doing?
I feel like I type the same thing about the rotation every time, more or less.
- Chris Sale is awesome. Sometimes he is super-awesome, like in this span, and sometimes he’s just his regular level of hard-to-believe amazing. He’s having another elite season, even if it is a little overshadowed by some freaky young arms doing even better.
- The Braves have a few other guys that intermittently pitch like generic middle-of-the-rotation arms with homer problems. These past few weeks, it was Bryce Elder and Reynaldo Lopez; Martin Perez is that kind of guy over the course of the season.
- The remaining rotation guys are worse-than-average and may or may not have homer problems. Grant Holmes continues to be miscast as a starter and would really help the bullpen as a multi-inning option that can be deployed in close games appropriately (instead of Elieser Hernandez, Victor Mederos, and a sacrilegious level of prayer from the dugout), but here we are, approaching August.
On the bullpen end of things, Dylan Dodd had a very nice two weeks or so, and Didier Fuentes didn’t take a hit numbers-wise despite doing stuff like pitching in both games of a doubleheader. Raisel Iglesias gave up a few homers, and Tyler Kinley is a problem — or will be, if he gets any more higher-leverage opportunities.
A special shoutout is warranted to Danny Young, who has the most bizarre line. On the season, he’s at 49/142/137; over the last two weeks, it’s 0/127/147. He appears to be the team’s lucky charm — in seven games in this span, he garnered positive WPA in each (and two shutdowns), despite only actually pitching well twice. I think Young can be useful in theory, but he’s still recovering from Tommy John Surgery and is only about 16 months removed from the operation. The current version, where he’s apparently the luckiest man in baseball, is preferable to him still working his way back to full effectiveness and causing the Braves to lose games as he does so.
So, the Braves head towards Monday’s Trade Deadline in a great place standings-wise, if not production-wise. Will that compel them to make a move? I can see it either way.
