Despite being swept by Padres, there's hope for a turnaround

The Atlanta Braves have some positive trends in the offensive profile after a brutal series against San Diego.

There’s no sugarcoating what just happened to the Atlanta Braves in San Diego - it was brutal. The Braves were swept by the Padres in a four-game series to start the season. It’s the first time the Braves have been swept in that exact situation since 1980, when the Cincinnati Reds bashed them to the tune of 25-4 across the four-game set.

To make it worse, the situational hitting in this Padres was downright awful - the team went 1-22 with runners in scoring position, stranded 22 batters, and was held scoreless for their final 22 innings of the series.¹

But there’s still reason to be hopeful about things turning around with some good old-fashioned regression to normal amounts of luck.

The batted ball quality is excellent

The Braves have typically been among the league leaders in hard-hit balls, defined as batted balls with an exit velocity of 95 mph or greater. As we discussed the other day, hard-hit balls in the Statcast era have ended up with a batting average somewhere between .490 and .530.

The Braves are 11 for 31, including going 0-5 in Sunday’s loss.

Some simple regression to the mean there would have given them somewhere between 14 and 16 hits in those situations on the weekend and probably a win in Saturday’s 1-0 loss, at least.

I can hear the angry comments (mostly on Facebook and Twitter/X) complaining that this happened to the team last year, too, and never corrected itself. Braves hitters were blasting the ball all year and not getting their fair share of hits out of those hard-hit balls.

Except, it did correct itself. The team finished with exactly a .490 batting average on hard-hit balls last year, the same figure as the league as a whole. Here’s the team’s actual batting average on hard-hit balls for every month of the season last year, per Statcast:

Mar/Apr: .495
May: .467
Jun: .445
Jul: .500
Aug: .553
Sept/Oct: .476

These things never evenly distribute, but they added up to exactly league-average performance at the end of the year.

They’re putting the ball in play

…with a few notable exceptions.

Several Braves are doing their job and putting the ball in play, including some unlikely suspects - on the young season, Matt Olson has two strikeouts, while Austin Riley has but four. Marcell Ozuna has five, but he’s also drawn seven walks.

While some players are struggling overall with plate discipline, that’s not a problem during those RISP situations. Michael Harris II might have five strikeouts and no walks on the season, but none of those walks have come with runners in scoring position. He’s put the ball in play all four times he’s come up in that scenario, although none of the batted balls have happened to fall for hits. Olson, Riley, and Jurickson Profar have combined for just one strikeout in five at-bats with RISP.

(If you’re curious, through Saturday’s game there’s been four hard-hit balls by Atlanta with RISP and all of them have been outs. One of them - a Riley lineout on Thursday - had a .817 xBA but didn’t fall for a hit.)

The bullpen isn’t as bad as Thursday made us think

With the exception of Héctor Neris, who is rocking a sweet ERA of 45.00 after five runs in one full inning across two outings.

Outside of him, the Braves have given up just four runs in eleven relief innings, which isn’t bad. One was charged to José Suarez, coming in his third inning of work on Sunday, with another charged to Dylan Lee and two charged to bad-luck Aaron Bummer.

And as we’ve discussed numerous times before, there’s going to be a lot of mixing and matching from Atlanta in the pen. Buck Farmer or Craig Kimbrel are both candidates to come up and take over for Néris as soon as the Braves get back from the West Coast trip, although Farmer’s much more likely than Kimbrel as he’s been throwing for longer this spring.

While we still don’t know the roles for each guy - we haven’t seen who gets the setup opportunity in the 8th inning yet - we know that each guy has been okay so far this season, with the exception of Néris.

Things will get better, but when?

There’s reason for optimism here, as I’ve tried to lay out.

But the other question is this: Can they turn things around in LA? I’ve got two distinct trains of thought here on the matchup.

The optimistic cup: There’s not going to be a better time to take on the Dodgers right now. On the pitching side, while their pen is formidable, they’re also missing several quality arms like Michael Kopech (forearm inflammation), Evan Phillips (rotator cuff), and Brusdar Graterol (shoulder). Freddie Freeman is still a bit bothered by his rib and ankle injuries from last season, while Mookie Betts just returned to the lineup after losing over 20 pounds² due to a mysterious illness that hit right him right before leaving for the Tokyo Series. Shohei Ohtani isn’t pitching yet, while Roki Sasaki doesn’t have his feel for the domestic baseball yet and future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw is still rehabbing from his offseason toe and knee surgeries.

The pessimistic cup: Have you seen what they’ve done in their first five games? Per Opta Stats, they’re the first team in MLB history to do all of this:

• 5-0 record

• 30+ runs scored

• 20+ walks drawn

• 10+ home runs hit

• 55+ strikeouts on the mound

• 0 errors committed

In any five-game span, let alone doing it to open the season.

It’ll be interesting to see how Atlanta fares here. I actually think they match up well against Tyler Glasnow and Dustin May, scheduled to start games one and two. Look for that breakdown to come later today.

Can Atlanta turn the ship around this week in LA? Or will they limp back east for the home opener against the Marlins not only in last place, but in a hole they need to dig out of?

We’ll find out together.

1. Promise all those instances of ‘22’ are a coincidence

2. Although the missing 20 pounds didn’t stop him from hitting two bombs on Saturday