Atlanta's Offensive Approach Swung Too Far The Other Way
The Atlanta Braves, strangely, aren't hitting for a lot of power this year. I figured out what happened.
If there’s one thing the Atlanta Braves offense was known for, it was hitting for power.
This is mostly the same offensive crew that tied the single-season record with 307 home runs in the 2023 season. To contextualize just how good the 2023 Braves were at hitting for power, their MLB-record .501 team slugging percentage was only matched by 16 individual players that season.
But that was then, and this is now. Atlanta’s hit just 162 home runs this season, putting them squarely average - they’re 17th in baseball entering Thursday’s action.
Where did all those missing homers go? I think I might have found them.
Let’s talk about it.
You gotta punish the mistakes
I recall some of the criticism of Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees during his MVP campaigns of 2022 & 2024 centered on how much of his power production came from mistake pitches - middle-middle meatballs that he launched to Yankee Stadium’s short porch.
Across both seasons, Judge hit 35 of his combined 120 homers on pitches that were classified as attack zone 5, so as middle-middle as one can get on a heat map.
A couple of thoughts there.
One: If you don’t like it, play better.
(Former Braves prospect Vaughn Grissom, relaying the advice he was given from former third base coach Ron Washington after he lost the shortstop battle to Orlando Arcia in 2023.)
But two: isn’t that what he’s supposed to do? The very definition of a ‘meatball’ pitch, per Baseball Almanac, is an easy-to-hit pitch that comes right down the middle of the plate.
And Judge hit them all right. Across those two MVP seasons, the Yankees slugger hit a combined .472 with a 1.282 OPS on middle-middle pitches of all kinds.
The Atlanta Braves, while not being that good on the mistakes, were also among the league’s best at those pitches in the last few seasons. From 2021 through 2025, the team’s collective stat line on pitches in attack zone 5 is a .351 average and .680 slug, launching 260 homers across the five seasons.
Here’s the thing: In 2025, they’re just doing it less.
Atlanta’s down to a 76.6% swing rate on middle-middle pitches this season, nearly 4% below what they did in 2023.
They’re not just doing it less, though - they’re also not doing it as hard.
While bat speed measurements didn’t come online in Statcast until the second half of 2023, Atlanta’s barrel rate per plate appearance on middle-middles was 20.1% and their bat speed (in the second half) was a collective 74.9 mph on those pitches, resulting in 74 homers.
This year? A 12.8% barrel rate per plate appearance on middle-middles with a bat speed of 73.2 mph, resulting in just 40 homers.
To contextualize those bat speeds, 74.9 mph this season would come out to 28th in the league, right behind All-Star outfielder Kyle Stowers of the Miami Marlins. 73.2 mph, however? Tied for 75th with Eric Wagaman, also of the Marlins. Stowers hit 25 homers in 117 games before going on the injured list, while Wagaman has 9 in his 128 games.
Now, a difference of 34 homers doesn’t directly explain where the power production went for Atlanta, but it does let us understand the impact of Atlanta’s new offensive philosophy. Under Tim Hyers, the Braves are looking to be more selective at the plate, as well as being more…I’ll call it ‘situational’ in their swings. Instead of nearly always swinging for the fences, they’re trying to both draw more walks by swinging less and making more contact in general.
And they’re succeeding at it, by the way. Looking at that same dataset, swings at middle-middle pitches, the Braves have cut their whiff rate down on those pitches from 14.9% to 12.8%. In general, the 2025 Atlanta Braves whiff nearly 3% less than last year’s roster (24.7% to 27.5%) and their 9.1% walk rate is the best they’ve shown since the short 2020 season messed with everyone’s sample sizes.
But is this a worthwhile tradeoff?
There are currently two Braves players who have even twenty home runs on the season - Matt Olson’s sitting on 23 and Marcell Ozuna’s popped exactly 20. Last year, their leader had 39 and in 2023, Matt Olson’s 54 led all of baseball and seven different players had more than twenty longballs.
While I don’t think 2023 is repeatable, not without another juiced ball and maybe figuring out a new way to hack PitchCom (this is a joke, I think), having a 23-homer bat be your team leader is, frankly, a bit embarrassing in modern baseball. There are 48 hitters with more homers than Matt Olson, including such illustrious power hitters as Kerry Carpenter (24, in just 115 games), Jose Altuve (also with 24 HRs despite being both 5-6 and 35 years old), shortstop Zach Neto (26), and four different catchers. Marcell Ozuna’s tied for 67th, while Atlanta’s third-place hitter (Michael Harris II, with 17) is tied for 99th.
What needs to happen going forward
Atlanta’s swung too far in the wrong direction, in my opinion. The ‘contact and walks’ strategy works when you’re not the worst baserunning team in baseball, as I wrote about earlier this week.
They need to moderate somewhat. I think I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I remember sitting down with Auburn University head baseball coach Butch Thompson and despite him being a pitching guy and me being an amateur pitching nerd, he talked to me about the team’s hitting philosophy. To boil it down, “the at-bat’s yours until there are two strikes. Then it becomes ours.”
Their players are encouraged to attack that at-bat however they think is best (and the analytics team has prepared data to show them what that best way is). But once they get to two strikes? It doesn’t matter what you originally wanted out of this at-bat - your job is now to not strike out, by either walking or getting that ball into play.
While that’s overly simplified for MLB, that’s the concept I’m looking for here. Matt Olson likely won’t hit 54 homers in a season again, but he should be hitting more than 23. Atlanta now swings at the first pitch just 30.8% of the time, in the bottom third of the league. Prior to this season, they’d always been in the top six, including leading the league in 2021.
The aggressiveness, with both the swing percentage and speed, needs to return. Develop a two-strike approach, but save it for two strikes, not every single pitch. And for the love of goodness, stop striking out looking (*cough Marcell Ozuna cough*).