In May 1924, Walter Shewhart handed his supervisor at Bell Telephone Laboratories a short memo containing a simple graph.
The graph became known as a control chart, and it changed how manufacturers thought about quality. An operation could produce the correct result on average and still be fundamentally unreliable if its individual outputs varied too widely.
A machine designed to cut a 10-millimeter component cannot alternate between eight and 12 millimeters and declare success because the average is 10. The average may be correct. The process producing it is not under control.
The Atlanta Braves had the statistical outline of a good offense in 2026. They finished among MLB’s top 10 in runs, batting average and slugging percentage. Over 162 games, the average output looked perfectly acceptable.
But what they weren’t was dependable.
Looking at it chronologically, you can see how the offense wasn’t exactly dependable on a month-by-month basis, as measured by wRC+:
April = Above-average (116 wRC+)
May = Average (101 wRC+)
June = Terrible (65 wRC+)
July = Above-average (111 wRC+)
August = Below-average (91 wRC+)
September = Below-average (88 wRC+)
Their best month, April, tied for the 23rd-highest team wRC+ in all of baseball this year, while their worst (June) was 180th out of 180—the literal worst offensive month among the 180 team-months produced from April through September.
At his season-ending press conference, Anthopoulos described the same contradiction. “As a whole, we had a good year offensively, just streaky, right? Very, very streaky across the board.”
The question this winter isn’t how Atlanta builds a good offense. It’s how the Braves build one they can trust.
Let’s talk about it.
The problem wasn’t the ceiling. It was the floor.
Atlanta scored 742 runs, the eighth-most in MLB. That production was real; scoring and preventing runs are how teams win baseball games.
But the season total tells us what happened, not how dependably Atlanta produced it. The team’s offensive profile helps explain the volatility: The Braves ranked among MLB’s top 10 in slugging percentage and hard-hit rate and had the 11th-lowest strikeout rate, but they also had the third-lowest walk rate.
In retrospect, Atlanta did not need its best offense to become better. It needed its worst offense to stop becoming uncompetitive.
And let’s be clear - every team has some fluctuation from month-to-month, but when you look at several of the playoff teams, their lows aren’t as low as Atlanta’s and there aren’t as many of them. The Milwaukee Brewers are heading to the World Series partly on the back of an offense that didn’t have a single below-average month after May. The Los Angeles Dodgers had the exact same 121 wRC+ in the season’s first and last full months, putting up just two months below 100 (and the lowest, August, was still a 90 wRC+). The Tampa Bay Rays never dropped below a 97 wRC+ any month this season, providing the type of stable floor that Atlanta desperately needs.
Every offense fluctuates. The contenders Atlanta is chasing generally kept those fluctuations within a much narrower range.
Anthopoulos’s definition of a complete offense
So, what are the Braves trying to do here? Here’s Anthopoulos from last Sunday:
“You want to be complete. You want to walk, you want to have power, you want to steal bases, you want to hit for average and so on.”
To clarify here, because this has been misinterpreted somewhat in recent days: Anthopoulos isn’t talking about deemphasizing power. He was correct when he argued later that the exceptional quality of postseason pitching makes home runs especially valuable.
Instead, he’s arguing for diversification. You can’t JUST hit home runs; you have to do the little things, too.
The Braves had a top-ten offense in batting average and were just outside the top ten in strikeout rate, so they were putting enough balls in play. But because they were so poor at drawing walks and overall on-base ability, fewer runners were aboard when the power arrived. The Braves also ranked 23rd in baserunning runs, with negative marks in both extra bases taken and stolen-base value. Even when they reached base, they weren’t consistently manufacturing additional runs.
The on-base problem made every slump worse
This season, Atlanta had a league-average pitches-per-plate-appearance figure but a bottom-three walk rate. The plate appearances weren’t unusually short; they simply weren’t producing enough favorable outcomes after those additional pitches. Part of the problem was that the Braves were exceptionally prone to take a called first strike, leaving them in disadvantage counts for the rest of the at-bat.
(When getting behind 0-1, Atlanta’s hitters put up a .199 wOBA/.223 xwOBA and struck out 33% of the time.)
The league average for walk rate was 9.1% this season; only three Braves with 150 or more plate appearances beat that: Ronald Acuña Jr. (11.3%), Mike Yastrzemski (10.0%), and Matt Olson (9.2%). Only one other Braves player was even over eight percent, with Drake Baldwin putting up an 8.9% walk rate for the season.
Walks don’t create a dynamic offense by themselves. They create a floor. When Atlanta’s hits and home runs disappeared, the lineup had too few free baserunners to keep innings alive.
The Braves were still too dependent upon power
It’s somewhat obvious that most teams will score more when they hit home runs. But the extent to which Atlanta was dependent on the home run was pretty alarming. 42.2% of their runs this season came off of home runs, one of the ten highest marks in the league.
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the World Series matchup is between the two teams that had the lowest percentage of runs scored via homer, the Milwaukee Brewers (32.1%) and Tampa Bay Rays (34.4%). Hitting home runs is important in the postseason, and Milwaukee’s stepped up in that area, but they have diversified offenses that aren’t contingent on power production like Atlanta’s.
And you could see that power dependence in the Braves record when they didn’t send one over the fence: 17-33. Atlanta could still score in those close games, but they averaged fewer than two and a half runs per game.
| Braves HRs| Games | Runs | Runs per game | Record |
|-----------|-------|------|---------------|--------|
| 0 | 50 | 119 | 2.38 | 17–33 |
| 1 | 52 | 227 | 4.37 | 27–25 |
| 2 or more | 60 | 396 | 6.60 | 50–10 |
| Total | 162 | 742 | 4.58 | 94–68 |The takeaway isn’t the obvious “Atlanta’s better when they hit multiple homers” - that’s a given. It’s how bad they are when they don’t.
Power raises Atlanta’s ceiling. The absence of other reliable pathways removes the floor.
Almost everyone got hot. Almost no one stayed hot.
Anthopoulos practically wrote this segment for us, talking about how several of Atlanta’s aircraft carriers struggled at times this season.
Drake Baldwin was outstanding before his injury and inconsistent afterward.
Ronald Acuña Jr. flashed his old production but dealt with leg injuries and prolonged downturns.
Ozzie Albies made the All-Star team before scuffling during the second half.
Matt Olson had a good overall season but was also “up and down.”
Austin Riley never produced the expected rebound.
Michael Harris II was the one player Anthopoulos described as consistent “wire to wire,” with a first-half wRC+ of 123 and a second-half 118 (and a postseason 206 wRC+, the 6th best in the entire field).
The Braves had enough individually productive seasons to create a respectable team total. They rarely had enough hitters producing simultaneously to make that offense stable.
The postseason proved both sides of the argument
Atlanta led all postseason teams with 30 walks at the time of Anthopoulos’s season-ending press conference. The Braves were second in postseason on-base percentage, and despite being a small sample size partially driven by the poor control of Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow, the Braves were more selective.
They still struggled to convert that additional traffic against Los Angeles, not cashing in even a single one of their 18 walks, going 1-for-23 with runners in scoring position, and leaving 28 runners on base across the four games.
It’s not as simple as “walk more”, is what I’m saying. That’s only half of it. The postseason Braves created baserunners without consistently producing damage. During portions of the regular season, they produced damage without creating enough baserunners.
A genuinely diverse offense must do both.
How Atlanta can raise the floor
I wrote about this before the season, but there is some research, limited but instructive, on lineup diversity.
Essentially, adding on-base ability to a lineup of power hitters ends up being more productive than asking the existing sluggers to try and walk more. The ideal distribution is four on-base sources to five power bats, in a neutral, league-average run environment.
Any free agent or trade addition Atlanta considers needs account for this. The marginal upgrade of adding one more power bat doesn’t go as far as adding one more source of on-base ability, as that makes the existing power more productive from a run-scoring perspective.
Here are some profiles to prioritize for Atlanta; we’ll use these criteria to evaluate potential free agent additions starting this upcoming weekend, once the World Series gets underway and free agency is on the horizon:
Above-average walk rate
Low chase rate
Reliable bat-to-ball ability
Speed and extra-base advancement
Production against both handednesses, or enough roster flexibility to create favorable platoons
Defensive versatility that allows Walt Weiss to pinch-hit aggressively
A hitter whose value does not disappear when his power does
Shortstop and left field are the most obvious places to add those traits, although not having a set designated hitter and the inevitable injuries that always strike every season mean that they can make it work at almost every position but first base and catcher.
The Braves don’t necessarily need another middle-of-the-order slugger, although I wouldn’t turn one down. They need hitters who preserve scoring opportunities when Olson, Riley, Baldwin or Acuña aren’t driving the baseball.
Anthopoulos does not need to eliminate variation. No baseball offense produces identical results for six months. He needs to keep that variation within tolerable limits.
A championship offense cannot allow a good six-month average to conceal baseball’s worst month.
Atlanta does not need to raise the ceiling of its offense. It needs to reinforce the floor.