The Atlanta Braves offense is down bad right now

Braves hitters are caught between two approaches and aren't doing anything well right now.

I’ll admit, the Boston series gave me hope.

Going 2-1 in Fenway Park, the Braves finished the three-game set with six homers, 36 hits, and a .333/.417/.528 line. It was the continuation of a good stretch at home that week against Washington, leaving Atlanta with a .305/.372/.444 line and a 5-2 record at the end of the seven days.

In retrospect, friends, we all got got. Atlanta’s offense has cratered over the last week, with the Braves hitting just .239 across a 1-5 stretch that culminated in a shutout loss to Philadelphia on Tuesday that had a runner reach base in each of the first eight innings but just TWO at-bats with a runner in scoring position for the entire game.

What’s going on, and is it fixable? Let’s talk about it.

What did the Braves do in previous years?

Hit the ball hard.

For multiple seasons now, Atlanta’s been among the league leaders in hard-hit rate and barrels per plate appearance:

2022: 43.5 HH% (2nd) & 7.3% Barrels/PA, 1st
2023: 46% HH% (1st) & 8.3% Barrels/PA, 1st (by a LOT)
2024: 42.6% HH% (1st) & 6.8% Barrels/PA, 2nd

Those hard-hit balls typically came in the air, too, with Atlanta’s 19% rate of pulling the ball in the air across that three-year span being a top-four mark in the game.

Pulling the ball in the air results in a higher batting average (.547 versus .319), slugging percentage (1.227 versus .0.527), and wOBA (.733 versus .353) versus airballs that are not pulled, so there was nothing wrong with this approach, provided the strikeouts don’t get to an excessive point.

It’s a combination that results in a lot of homers. Atlanta’s 763 homers across those three seasons is not only the best mark in baseball, but only four other teams are even over 600 in that span - the Yankees hit 710, Dodgers 694, Phillies 623, and Rangers 607.

As you can imagine, all of the process stats in here are pretty impressive as well - Atlanta’s bat speeds, swing length, competitive swing rate, etc, are all the best in baseball over that span (for when we have bat speed data - that was added in the 2023 season).

But in 2025? Things are different, and not in a good way.

They’re trying to implement a new approach

When Atlanta brought in Tim Hyers from Texas to be the new hitting coach this offseason, one quote in his introductory press conference stood out to me:

“The fluid part of this is important, because you have to be able to score runs in multiple different ways. There’s days that we can slug, and obviously this team can slug and hits the ball really hard. I’m excited to be a part of that. But also, there’s days when you gotta score runs in different ways, and how quick can we be fluid into identifying that and do that as a group to be consistent with it?”

The problem right now is that the Braves aren’t built to be fluid.

Remember when I talked about Marcell Ozuna’s new walk-heavy approach and broke down whether it was good or not?

In case you forgot, we determined that it was roughly just as valuable in a vacuum but the current roster construction wasn’t conducive to it paying off in increased runs. High-contact/OBP profiles work best when you have a lot of them in the same lineup, because they start to drive each other in. It’s a multiplier. Without a lot of them, you have a few times a month where there’s an extra guy on base when you do get that home run, giving you two runs instead of one. That’s useful, yeah, but not a great payoff if you hit significantly less homers in a season.

With 56 homers in 53 games, the Braves are on pace for about 171 longballs this year. Even if you (safely) assume Ronald Acuña Jr. will outproduce the previous rightfielders from earlier in the year, it’s still capping at what, 200? Congrats, you’ve underproduced the 2024 lineup by 13 homers and the 2023 lineup by 107.

You see, the Braves have tried to change the approach of a bunch of low-speed, high-power players that have been trained to hit the ball hard their entire lives into on-base, contact machines. But they’re not currently running high on-base percentages and not hitting homers.

Did we really think they’d completely change the way they’ve always done things in just three months? These types of changes take time. In retrospect, it might have been much better to just double down on hitting the ball hard when you have a roster full of players with long-term control that you can’t easily flip.

But the Braves went ahead with the approach changes. And unfortunately, Ozuna and Matt Olson are there, but that’s it. And it’s looking doubtful that the current roster can get enough players to adopt this new approach to get the engine running smoothly at this point.

How to fix it

At this point, I don’t really know what Atlanta as an organization can do. It’s going to be hard/expensive to make changes at either infield corner, right field, centerfield, or catcher anytime in the next few seasons.

These players have to be better. That’s all there is to it. At a certain point, for all their failings, it isn’t Brian Snitker or Tim Hyers striking out with the bases loaded; it’s Matt Olson. It’s not Walt Weiss failing to back up third base on a throw from right field; it’s Spencer Strider. It isn’t Rick Kranitz failing to hold runners; it’s the pitchers.

These players have to be better.

Because here’s the other issue - there are no major reinforcements coming out of the farm system. Nacho Alvarez is on the 60-day IL with some sort of wrist injury, suffered in spring training, and most of the top position player prospects are in the lower minors and a few seasons away.

Sure, Jurickson Profar will be back soon, but he’s also a complete unknown in the wake of his PED suspension and probably can’t be counted on for immediate results after his MLB-mandated 80-game layoff.

The improvement needs to come from within.

If the Braves get it, there’s still a chance of capturing a Wild Card berth in the National League. If they don’t, we might find out how a team full of long-term contracts navigates selling at the deadline.