No One’s Watching the Scoreboard Anymore, But We Should Be Watching This

The end of the 2025 Atlanta Braves season won't be measured on wins and losses, but rather signs of improvement

To paraphrase football coach Bill Belichick, “we’re on to 2026.”

Sitting at 45-60 entering Tuesday night’s action, this one’s done - the Braves won’t be coming back and making a surprise postseason push. Not with all five Opening Day starters on the 60-day IL and Joey Wentz, Erick Fedde and Carlos Carrasco - all midseason DFA pickups - getting three of every five starts on the mound.

No, we’re looking forward. Here’s what I’ll be looking for down the stretch to help decide what positions the Braves need to reinforce this offseason.

Offense today, pitching tomorrow. Let’s talk about it.

Growth in the final two months

There are both general offensive improvements that are needed across the roster, as well as individual players that need to do more. Let’s look at each category.

The entire offense

There are some notable spots in which the Braves come in the bottom half or third of the league, and they’re areas in which Atlanta hasn’t always been this bad.

Slugging: .389, 21st. While no one expects them to replicate the MLB-record .501 slugging from 2023, when they tied the all-time single-season home run record with 307, getting somewhere above .400 would be nice. The last few seasons, they have averaged in the low .400s, with a .435 in 2021, a .443 in 2022, and a .415 in an injury-riddled 2024 season.

The Braves aren’t quite as bad in the rankings when it comes to homers, coming in at just five longballs below league average with 115, it’s still just 16th in the league. It’s not just about homers, either — Atlanta’s lack of team speed contributes to their 157 doubles, which ranks 26th in MLB.

Batting average w/ RISP: .242, T-19th. Interestingly, Atlanta’s overall average is also .242 - good for just 23rd - so they’re actually slightly better with runners in scoring position, but still below average. It’s a thing we’ve all seen firsthand, with several prominent Braves having struggled in this area, but none so than the former All-Star himself, Ronald Acuña Jr. His .176 average is worse than anyone expected to start next year except for shortstop Nick Allen, who is sitting at .159.

This is likely to improve on its own, simply because several Braves regulars have been surprisingly good at this and the stragglers are mostly players who are no longer here. Austin Riley paces the team with a .316 average, followed by Sean Murphy at .304, Drake Baldwin at .302, and Matt Olson at .297. On the flip side, the now-departed outfield combo of Bryan De La Cruz and Jarred Kelenic combined to go 0-20 w/ RISP, while soon-to-be-gone Marcell Ozuna is hitting just .188 in those situations.

Pulled fly balls: 17.9%, 17th. Believe it or not, the Braves are better at hitting the ball in the air either to the opposite field (19.4%) or back up the middle (19.7%) than they are pulling it in the air.

This matters because of the impact on the power production figures I mentioned above. League-wide, pulled fly balls are hitting .476 with a 1.682 slug this season, while those same balls to the opposite field are only a .158 average and .375 slug and straightaway balls are a .183 average and a .505 slug.¹

Just last week, MLB.com wrote a story about how the Chicago Cubs have embraced pulled fly balls and, consequently, lead or are near the top of baseball in almost all relevant power and run-production metrics. Their 155 home runs is 3rd in baseball, as is their .441 slug. Their 558 runs scored are 2nd in baseball and just five behind the superteam of the Los Angeles Dodgers for the league lead.

This probably isn’t high on Tim Hyers’ to-do list, but it feels like it meshes with the overall roster-building philosophy the Braves have built and so seems like low-hanging fruit to work on slightly improving.

Individual to-do lists

Despite all the work that the team as a whole needs to do, there are specific players that we’ll be watching down the stretch to figure out what, if anything, the Braves need to do to supplement his position.

Michael Harris II: Continue showing better offensive production from the mechanical changes. We broke these down last week, the changes to both his handset and his overall stance. It’s worked, too; since implementing the changes versus the Athletics in Sacramento, Harris is hitting .367/.404/.714 with three homers, two triples, four doubles, nine runs, and three walks to just eight strikeouts entering last night’s game two versus the Royals.

(He added another triple as part of a three-hit game Tuesday night against Kansas City.)

Ozzie Albies: Work on the pop-ups. While it’s come down from the absurdly high >15% he was putting up earlier in the year, Ozzie’s still sitting at a well-above-average 11.9% on the 2025 season.²

The power started to come back as he got farther away from last year’s wrist injury, giving the impression that these two things might be connected.

BONUS: Find his stroke versus left-handed pitching. Ozzie’s always balanced a barely below average wRC+ mark of 95 (as a lefty) against righties by crushing left-handed pitching, to the tune of a 133 career wRC+.

But this season? He has a 89 wRC+ against righties and just a 40 wRC+ against lefties.

Austin Riley: Find that extra gear. As I discussed on the Tuesday episode of the Braves Today podcast, Riley followed up three seasons of top-seven MVP finishes and All-Star & Silver Slugger contention, where he had wRC+ marks in the low-130s to mid-140s, to just a 116 last year and a 110 this year.

That’s still solid, mind you, but not ‘largest contract in franchise history’ good, and that’s the next gear that Riley needs to get back to if the Braves want to have an imposing offense. I think we’ve learned that Ronald Acuña Jr. and Matt Olson are going to get theirs, but Riley’s the third essential part of that top of the order trio.

Ronald Acuña Jr.: Find his mojo against heaters. Ronald’s been decently productive on the whole against fastballs this year, but that argument breaks down when you look at his performance against velocity.

In the month of July, Ronald’s hitting just .176 with a .294 slug when facing fastballs 95 or harder. You can see it in several at-bats — he’s either picking up the pitch too late to barrel it or his timing’s just off.

(Editor: This was submitted for publication prior to Ronald’s placement on the injured list with an Achilles injury. We discussed everything we know, including video of Ronald’s postgame comments from Tuesday, in “Today’s Three Things” from last night.)

It’s clear that the offense isn’t beyond saving, but there’s work to be done, both collectively and individually. Getting more lift and pull in the right places, cleaning up some of the situational hitting, and seeing bounce-backs from core players like Harris, Albies, and Riley will tell us a lot about how much work this front office needs to do this winter. Tomorrow, we’ll look at the pitching side of the equation and spoiler alert: it’s going to take more than just good vibes and a few healthy arms.

1. Even if you adjust this for only hard-hit balls (>95 mph), both straightaway (.252/.865) and opposite field (.316/.994) hard-hit balls are still not as good as all pulled fly balls, even when not selecting for the contact quality of the pulled fly balls.

2. For contrast, the MLB average is 7.1%.