The Atlanta Braves and their tenuous relationship with Lady Luck

It feels like the Braves can't seem to catch a break right now, but things will change.

It’s been an ignominious start to the season for the Atlanta Braves.

The Braves are 0-3 on the season, and there’s been some…frustrating issues in these losses.

The game-winning runs in all three losses came against the Atlanta bullpen, which is a “validating your priors” moment for the large subset of the fanbase that identified the relief corps as being the biggest problem entering the season.

The Braves have not been able to hit with runners in scoring position. Like, at all. Atlanta’s sitting at 1-20 on the year with runners in scoring position, with the only success there being Marcell Ozuna’s 2-RBI single on Friday in the 3rd inning. That’s been a large part of the reason they’ve stranded 23 runners on base.

Three different potential home runs have resulted in a double and two outs. We mentioned two from Friday’s loss and Matt Olson added another on Saturday - it was launched 399 feet but went off of Fernando Tatis Jr’s glove and the padding on top of the wall before falling back into play for a double.

(On his birthday, too. The Baseball Gods are cruel.)

Even the ricochets are bad hops for Atlanta. Rookie Drake Baldwin was robbed of his first career hit on Friday when he launched one back up the middle, off of the pitcher…and it promptly rolled to the first baseman, who picked it up and tagged the bag.

But when a Padres player sent one back up the middle and off the pitcher, it went off of Aaron Bummer’s foot and into the visitor’s dugout on Saturday, giving him a ground-rule double.

Frustrating.

I don’t know if we need Dansby Swanson to come back and burn some sage in the clubhouse, but it’s less than ideal so far.

But baseball’s the longest season of any of the four major sports. Three-game slumps happen all the time, but when it’s the first three games, the impact and importance that folks play on it is magnified.

Do you know when the last time the Atlanta Braves lost three straight games to open the season? It was 2021, and they lost four straight. Philly walked them off in game one, they got shut out in game two and held to only one run in game three before being walked off again in game four, this time by Washington.

They went on to win the World Series.

They also went 0-3 to open the season in 2019, 2012, and 2023. They made the postseason every time and had 94 or more wins in each of those three seasons.

The point I’m trying to make is this: It’s three games out of 162. This stuff happens. Just because it happened to start the season doesn’t mean it’ll happen all season.

It’s natural to overreact to small sample sizes because right now, that’s all the information we have.

Are the vibes off right now? It’s obvious that they’re off. Is this team capable of more? It’s also obvious that they’re capable of more than we’ve seen.

Whether the stats reflect it or not, the guys are whacking the hell out of the ball - Austin Riley has five hard-hit balls, while Drake Baldwin has five and Matt Olson has four.

Those three have combined for just five hits on the season. Going off of the average batting average for hard-hit balls, that should be seven or eight hits. These things happen. It’ll even out eventually.

Hold the faith.