October Has Come Early for the Atlanta Braves

The Braves are facing the 1st place Milwaukee Brewers for a three game series, and it’ll be a preview of October

(Today’s newsletter previewing the weekend Braves/Brewers series will likely be the last bit of content from Braves Today until Sunday, as I’ll be out of town.)

Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction series on television, starting in 1963 and encompassing 41 combined seasons/series. The show follows the Doctor, a Time Lord who travels through time and space in a stolen, sentient spacecraft called the TARDIS (”Time and Relative Dimension in Space”).

A familiar Doctor Who setup features some sort of contrived reason for the Doctor and his companion/s to get into the TARDIS and emerge…somewhere, usually not at the place or time they expected or envisioned when they stepped into the iconic blue police box that serves as the disguise for the TARDIS.

And at the end of the episode, it’s revealed that while the Doctor didn’t intend to go to that place and time, it’s exactly where he needed to be.

For the Braves, this weekend’s destination is October, with Atlanta taking on the first-place Milwaukee Brewers in a three-game set that could easily pass for an NLDS or (God willing and the creek don’t rise) NLCS matchup.

Atlanta isn’t actually skipping ahead six weeks, of course. But this might be about as close as the TARDIS can get them.

Let’s talk about it.

Welcome to October: Sale vs Misiorowski

If you want proof that the TARDIS delivered Atlanta into the postseason, look no further than the pitching matchup for today’s game one. Chris Sale and Jacob Misiorowski are two of the National League’s three best starters, both expected to be two of the top vote-getters in the NL Cy Young balloting.

Sale’s been awesome this year - a 2.16 ERA, 1.02 WHIP and 160 strikeouts against only 28 walks in 129 innings. He’s allowed three runs or less in 19 consecutive starts, dating back to April 6th against the Angels (1.91 ERA in that span).

Misiorowski, somehow, has been better - a 1.75 ERA, 0.75 WHIP and 210 strikeouts in 139 innings. And if you thought Chris Sale was a strikeout machine at a 94th percentile mark of 30.9%, Misiorowski’s even better at 39.8%, a 100th percentile mark.

Some of this is “The Miz” possessing baseball’s best fastball, averaging 100.7 mph with the heater and carrying a 41.6% whiff rate on the pitch. And when you start sitting fastball, he can unleash a deadly curveball (43.2% whiff rate) or slider (35.8% whiff), while throwing a changeup that’s harder (92.5 mph) than Bryce Elder’s four-seamer (91.7 mph).

Friday’s matchup will answer a big question for Atlanta fans: What does the Braves offense look like against premium October stuff?

It’s important to point out that not only have the Braves already faced Misiorowski this season, they’ve beaten him. Atlanta scored two runs off of Miz in a six-inning outing back in June, hanging a loss on his record in a 3-2 Braves victory.

He ‘only’ struck out seven, walking just one…but it proved he was human.

Milwaukee Scores Runs Differently

These two teams are among the league’s best despite doing things in radically different ways.

| Category            | Braves | Brewers |
| ------------------- | -----: | ------: |
| Record              |  75-53 |   79-49 |
| Runs                |    608 |     642 |
| OBP                 |   .310 |    .337 |
| Home runs           |    167 |     119 |
| Walks               |    371 |     535 |
| Stolen bases        |     62 |     129 |

And one game in their June series proved that. Milwaukee roughed up Bryce Elder for eight runs in the 2nd inning of a 9-4 victory to wrap up the series and avert a sweep. While they had a single home run, a “revenge game” three-run shot from former Braves catcher William Contreras to wrap the scoring in that second inning, it’s not a big part of their game.

Milwaukee, on the season, is dead last in home runs with just 119. Their team slugging of .397 is a more respectable 19th in MLB, albeit not where you’d expect the team with the league’s highest winning percentage to be.

It’s because they make their own extra-base hits.

Milwaukee’s roster has the 2nd-highest average sprint speed in all of baseball, coming in at a blazing 28.0 ft/sec, and they use it. The Brewers are third in baseball at stealing bases, with 129, and grade out as MLB’s best at taking extra bases (+7 Run Value). They’re tied for fourth in advances with 25 while simultaneously being the best at not being thrown out, with a Run Value of just -3 (MLB average is -8).

A single’s not just a single with the Milwaukee Brewers on the basepaths, is what I’m saying.

And they have plenty of opportunities to run on the basepaths, too, possessing MLB’s best team on-base percentage at .337. It isn’t purely a product of plate discipline, either. The Brewers rank second in walk rate at 10.8%, but they also carry MLB’s second-highest BABIP at .308 and fifth-highest batting average at .253. Strikeout avoidance is a much smaller part of the equation: Their 21.6% strikeout rate is only slightly better than league average and virtually identical to Atlanta’s. This is a patience-and-singles offense, not an elite bat-to-ball or power offense, and the elevated BABIP is the portion of the formula most vulnerable to regression.

With Atlanta’s pitchers having allowed 95 steals on the year, it would behoove the Braves to put the much stronger defensive arm of Sean Murphy behind the plate for at least two of the games, if not all three.

Saturday and Sunday’s Pitching Matchups

The good news is that the Braves are following up lefty Chris Sale with another southpaw, veteran Martín Pérez. While the two couldn’t be more dissimilar in styles and Stuff, they both lean into Milwaukee’s most obvious weakness: hitting left-handed pitching.

The Brewers have an OPS 51 points lower vs southpaws, .747 to .696, and the pitcher facing first base can help mitigate Milwaukee’s stolen base advantage somewhat.

Pérez has experience against Milwaukee, too - he was the opposing pitcher in that Misiorowski loss back in June, besting Miz with only one run allowed in his six innings despite averaging an absurd 13.3 mph LESS on his fastball than Misiorowski (101.6 mph to 88.3 mph).

Pérez will face off with Logan Henderson, who has gotten to his 2.70 ERA through pairing a 93 mph fastball (with exceptional IVB - think Joe Ryan here) with a low-80s changeup that sports a 38.8% whiff rate. But as with many changeup-dependent starters, Henderson is vulnerable to the long ball, giving up 10 homers in his 63.1 innings, including five in his three starts in August. While he has a low WHIP, just 0.87, and has walked only 12 batters so far this season, there’s a path here for Atlanta to generate runs one swing at a time.

Sunday’s a lefty on the mound for Milwaukee in Shane Drohan, who is going through it right now - his 3.86 ERA/3.62 xERA are undermined by his second half, with a 5.64 post-ASB mark and a 6.57 in August. Free baserunners have been the issue here, with nine walks in just 12.1 innings this month. The Brewers actually used him in relief earlier this week, letting him throw 39 pitches across two innings on Tuesday before announcing he’d start on Sunday.

His obstacle is going to be both landing his kitchen-sink-esque six-pitch mix for strikes and getting past bats to do it - his first-pitch strike percentage of 66.5% has been steadily dropping in the second half, and his ability to generate whiffs in the zone is cratering along with it.

Tyler Mahle, by contrast, has the advantage of facing a team that is almost universally bad at hitting splitters, with just two hitters who have seen more than 25 of them having a positive run value off the pitch.

The top hitter against splitters, by the way? DH Christian Yelich, who is hitting just .173/.228/.308 with seventeen strikeouts and just three walks in his 15 August games. Not a bad time to face the veteran.

The October Problem: Atlanta Not Having Home Field

If this really is an October preview, there's one important detail Atlanta would probably like to change: where the games are being played.

The Brewers are currently 79-49, holding MLB’s best record and winning percentage (.617). Atlanta is currently third at 75-53, two games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers for the second seed.

And that means that were this to be a postseason matchup, the Braves would be flying to Milwaukee.

Now, there’s still time for this to change, and winning the series will go a long way towards that (Atlanta’s up 2-1 in the season series, so winning this series would guarantee them a tiebreaker). Atlanta sweeping Milwaukee, ignoring how unlikely that feels, would go a long way to ensuring the Braves are at least the #2 seed and able to skip the Wild Card round provided they split the season series with Los Angeles, who comes to Atlanta next week. (The Braves took two games from LA in Dodger Stadium earlier this season).

Despite Milwaukee’s anemic home run production this season, American Family Field is actually the 12th-best ballpark for hitting home runs, sporting a HR park factor of 103. (By contrast, Truist Park comes in as the 17th-friendliest for home run production at a perfectly even 100.)

It’s also likely to be a raucous environment given the intensity of the matchup, although that might get mitigated somewhat by the odd 4:10 PM (Friday) and 2:10 PM (Saturday) start times.

But Sunday’s going to get weird. Of course, because apparently the TARDIS wasn’t done screwing with the coordinates, Sunday’s game won’t be played in Milwaukee at all.

Game three of the series is being held in Williamsport, PA, at the site of the Little League World Series, Muncy Bank Ballpark at Historic Bowman Field. It’s only 323 feet down the left-field line and 331 to right, but an unusually deep 411 feet to center. (Eat your Wheaties, Michael Harris.)

This doesn’t feel like it’ll mitigate Milwaukee’s power deficiencies; their pulled air percentage is a league-worst 12.5%, nearly 3% worse than the next-closest team in the Athletics (15.2%).

The Braves, by contrast, sit 14th at 18.7%, led by pull-merchant (complimentary) Ozzie Albies at 26.2% and Lane Thomas, who likely starts on Sunday, given a lefty being on the mound for Milwaukee, at 26.1%. Both Mike Yastrzemski (23.2%) and Matt Olson (21.4%) are also over 20% on the year at pulling their fly balls, so Atlanta’s offense could give the kids a treat on Sunday night.

Both teams are staying in Milwaukee on Saturday night and then flying the roughly 547 miles to Pennsylvania on Sunday morning, so travel’s going to be a bit unconventional for the weekend.

Three Things This Weekend Can Tell Us About October

While I won’t be in the Braves Today studios for the first two games of the series, I’ll be watching both games before returning home for normal duties on Sunday and there are three major questions that I hope to get data to answer:

1. Can the Braves handle elite velocity/Stuff?

This is a Jacob Misiorowski question, mostly. Of the Braves hitters who have seen ten or more pitches of 100 mph or more this season, the most impressive to me has actually been Mauricio Dubón. He has a whiff rate of just 7.7% off of extreme velo, singling on a hard-hit ball off of Misiorowski back in June and putting four different offerings in play vs velo this year. Matt Olson homered off of Cam Schlittler’s 100, while Dominic Smith singled off of Misiorowski’s 102.1 back in that June matchup.

2. Can Atlanta prevent Milwaukee from manufacturing runs without homers?

Not only is exceptional defense going to be the cost of admission for Atlanta this weekend, but the strong arms of both Ronald Acuña Jr. in right field and Sean Murphy behind the plate are going to be required. Several of Atlanta’s potential September and postseason opponents, including Philadelphia (No. 1 in Baserunning Runs at +9), Arizona (+8), and the Chicago Cubs (+6), are also adept baserunning teams that require strong, on-target throws and fundamentally sound defense.

3. Can Atlanta make elite pitching work for every out?

Misiorowski has finished six innings in 15 of his 23 starts this season. But as a strikeout pitcher, he’s prone to running up higher pitch counts at times. At the same time, Milwaukee’s relief corps has been excellent but heavily worked, with leverage reliever Abner Uribe’s absence removing its best setup arm. Can the Braves work pitch counts against an elite arm and get into the Brewers’ middle relief? Turning 92 pitches over six innings into 103 pitches over five would go a long way to giving the offense the type of scoring help it needs, even if there’s not four runs associated with those five innings.

Final Thought

The Brewers have baseball’s best record because they can beat opponents in more ways than Atlanta currently can. They reach base, run, defend, miss bats and possess enough pitching depth to survive injuries.

But the matchups give Atlanta a real opening. Milwaukee is substantially less dangerous against left-handed pitching, and the Braves get Sale and Pérez in the first two games. If those two prevent walks from becoming stolen bases and Atlanta finds two or three appropriately timed home runs, this can become much more than an August measuring stick—it can tighten the race for the National League’s two top seeds.