What The Atlanta Braves Can Learn From The Postseason's Final Four Teams

If the Atlanta Braves want to return to the playoffs in 2026, what can they take away from the four teams playing in the two Championship Series?

If the Atlanta Braves want to get back to the postseason in 2026 after breaking their streak of seven consecutive playoff appearances in 2025, they have some work to do.

Of the four teams still playing in MLB’s postseason, what lessons can the Braves take into their offseason as they look for a new skipper and roster reinforcements?

Let’s talk about it.

From LA: You can never have enough pitching

The Los Angeles Dodgers have built a monster out in Chavez Ravine, one that looks poised to cruise to a 2nd consecutive World Series title after going up 3-0 on the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series.

And the way they’ve done it has been amazing starting pitching. The trio of Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Tyler Glasnow have made eight starts, covering 54 innings, and have given up a total of 7 earned runs. In this NLCS against Milwaukee, the trio have combined for 22.2 innings of work with a grand total of two runs on seven hits.

But that wasn’t the story of their regular season. Only three starters even broke 100 innings and only one, Yamamoto, qualified for the ERA title by pitching at least one inning per team game. He finished with 173.2 innings across his 30 starts and a 2.49 ERA, the 2nd-best mark in the NL behind only phenom Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

No, injuries and ineffectiveness from their rotation was the name of the 2025 season for LA. 20 different pitchers went on the injured list for Los Angeles, requiring them to use 17 different starters (that’s including openers). Sure, the Atlanta Braves were heavily injured in their rotation, as well, with all five Opening Day starters spending time on the 60-day Injured List this season, but the Dodgers and Braves approached those situations differently.

For Atlanta, with the caveat that they were in a different situation standings-wise, the solution was to grab journeyman starters off the waiver wire or DFA lists. Atlanta gave starts to such quality options as Carlos Carrasco (3 starts, 9.88 ERA), Erick Fedde (4 starts, 8.10 ERA), and Cal Quantrill (2 starts, 13.50 ERA). The Braves also used somewhere between three or four different openers, depending on how you feel about José Suarez making a start in the season’s final week.¹

Los Angeles took a different tack: Armed with some impressive pitching prospects, they bounced them back and forth between the bullpen and the rotation as needed, letting them either air it out against Major League hitters for multiple innings in relief or giving them the ball to start a game. Some of them were mostly used as multi-inning relievers who made spot starts, like Ben Casparius (46 appearances, 3 starts, 77.2 innings) or Justin Wrobleski (24 appearances, 2 starts, 66.2 innings). Some of them were almost always starters who were the first ones bumped to the pen (or put in a piggyback role) in a rotation crunch, like Emmet Sheehan (15 appearances, 12 starts, 73.1 innings).

The Braves have been hesitant to use their starting pitching prospects as relievers at the Major League level, preferring to shuffle them back and forth between Atlanta and Triple-A Gwinnett. It’s possible LA avoids this because their Triple-A affiliate is half the country away in Oklahoma City, but I think it’s more likely that they trust the stuff and value the experience over the innings.

To put it simply: When it comes to innings, LA values quality and Atlanta values quantity.

The Dodgers prioritize getting Major League innings out of their pitchers and, for the most part, don’t care where they pick them up from. Atlanta, by contrast, prioritizes developing the prospects as starters, hoping to get an extended workload out of their arms once they’re promoted to the majors.

Some of this is team philosophy, which is influenced by resources: The Dodgers are not afraid of selecting players with great stuff but who carry injury concerns, because their financial might can cover for injuries. The Braves are looking for a higher floor in the number of innings they can get, which usually comes with a slightly lower ceiling because they’re balancing Stuff with control and injury risk.

While I don’t want the Braves to go target a bunch of oft-injured pitchers this winter, being willing to use starting pitching prospects with decent stuff in the bullpen would be a good way to help these youngsters adjust to the majors. Could Didier Fuentes survive in the majors as a #5 starter in 2026 if, instead of getting four mostly terrible starts last season, he got twelve relief appearances? We’ll never know, but it’s possible. In recent history, both Max Fried and Spencer Strider first appeared in the majors as relievers before moving to the rotation.

From Milwaukee: Team speed helps

The Milwaukee Brewers are what I call a “speed and D” team - while they don’t hit for a ton of power, with just 166 home runs in the regular season, they stole 164 bases and were MLB’s best team at baserunning. Per Statcast’s Baserunning Runs leaderboard, Milwaukee led all of baseball with +15 Baserunning Runs.

And we’ve seen it time and again in these playoffs. Even when they don’t score, it’s putting pressure on the opposing pitcher and defense to be crisp in their throws and pickoffs.

The Braves, by consequence, don’t do a lot of that. With the caveat that Ronald Acuña Jr. was a lot less aggressive on the basepaths after returning from his torn ACL (and doubly so after the calf injury), the Braves were one of the worst baserunning teams in the league this season. On that same Statcast Baserunning Runs leaderboard, Atlanta was 26th at -4. They rarely attempted stolen bases (105 total attempts, 27th in baseball) and were the worst team in the league at advancing the trail runner.

The Braves Are The Worst Baserunning Team in the League

And while there’s an important note to be made about Milwaukee’s success - they’re the 2nd-fastest team in the league at 28.0 ft/sec - pure speed isn’t required to be a good on the basepaths. Right behind Milwaukee on that Baserunning Runs leaderboard is the New York Mets at +12, who were insanely successful at stealing bases despite a team speed that comes in dead last in the league. Averaging just 26.9 ft/sec, New York just barely lost out to Atlanta’s 27.0 for the slowest roster in the league…yet they had two 30-steal guys (veterans Juan Soto and Francisco Lindor) and three others in double digits. By contrast, Atlanta’s leader in stolen bases was Michael Harris with 20 and only two other Braves, Ozzie Albies (14) and Eli White (10) even broke double digits.

(And to bring it back to the postseason teams, 1B Josh Naylor of the Seattle Mariners stole 19 bases after the trade deadline despite a 3rd percentile sprint speed of 24.4 ft/sec. Come on Matt Olson, you know what you need to work on this winter.)

For Toronto: Team defense matters

The Toronto Blue Jays were far and away the best defensive team in the majors, finishing with a +45 Fielding Run Value. The gap between them and the #3 team, Milwaukee at +31, was greater than the difference between Milwaukee and #9 Kansas City.

With the exception of Bo Bichette, who was the worst shortstop by FRV at -10, no Blue Jays defender was worse than -1 at their position and six of the eleven most frequently deployed fielders were at least +5 Fielding Run Value or better.

Toronto also showed the value of a strong utilityman - Ernie Clement played all four infield positions, including 170 innings at shortstop, and was 2nd on the team with +10 FRV.

The Braves, by contrast, weren’t terrible - their +5 FRV as a team was 14th in baseball - but the distribution was very uneven. While the quartet of Nick Allen (+13), Matt Olson (+8), Michael Harris (+7), and Sean Murphy (+6) were all dependable with their gloves, Atlanta also had two defenders come in at -8 in their corner outfielders, Ronald Acuña Jr. and Jurickson Profar, with four other defenders coming in negative.

One of the reasons I’d love to sign either a starting-caliber corner outfielder or a defensively sound utilityman is so that the next manager can start chipping away at the corner outfield playing time. Sure, it has the potential to help them be a bit fresher and/or healthier, but given that they both were at -8 in somewhere between 700-800 innings, a Matt Olson-like workload of ~1400 innings would have both Profar and Acuña as potentially the worst outfield defenders in baseball. Rotating Eli White and/or a free agent through the corners once or twice a week could kill two birds with one stone.

From Seattle: Stars playing like stars can cover up a lot of mistakes

The Seattle Mariners, by many measures, were an incredibly flawed baseball team. They had the 2nd-lowest regular season batting average of anyone in the postseason field at .244, while striking out 1446 times, 6th-most in the league. Their team defense was overall pretty poor, coming in 26th at -29 Fielding Run Value, and they struggled to run the bases (25th at -4 Baserunning Run Value).

But…their stars played like stars. Catcher Cal Raleigh set a bunch of records for catcher or switch-hitter homers in a single season with his MLB-leading 60 bombs, while Julio Rodriguez had a 30-30 season and Randy Arozarena missed one of his own by just three homers. Two different starters qualified for the ERA title with >30 starts and 180-odd innings each in Bryan Woo and Luis Castillo, while Andrés Muñoz was one of the best closers in baseball with a 1.73 ERA and 38 saves.

I think the point I’m trying to make here is, despite the intensity of the discourse on the topic at times, Nick Allen at shortstop isn’t the thing keeping the Atlanta Braves from being successful on offense. Him improving from a 56 OPS+ to a 85 or 90 OPS+ won’t make nearly as much of a difference as Austin Riley getting back to “downballot MVP vote” form will, or full/healthy seasons from Ronald Acuña Jr. Sean Murphy, and Jurickson Profar will.

Nick Allen was worth 0.7 fWAR this season; that’s just barely over replacement level. Changing that to 1.5 WAR isn’t how you win a division title. Changing Ronald Acuña Jr.s 3.5 WAR to 6.0 is how you win the NL East. Getting Austin Riley from 1.7 back to his 5.2-5.9 peak is how you make a deep postseason run.

Philadelphia Phillies general manager Dave Dombrowski directly addressed this today in his end-of-season press conference, talking about Bryce Harper. “He’s still a quality player. He’s still an All-Star-caliber player,” Dombrowski said to reporters. “He didn’t have an elite season like he’s had in the past. I guess we only find out if he becomes elite or he continues to be good.”

Just to be clear, Harper hit .261 with 27 homers, 75 RBI, and 72 runs, a 131 wRC+ that resulted in 3.5 fWAR. But last season, he hit .285 with a 144 wRC+ and 5.1 WAR. That’s what Dombrowski is talking about - this version of Harper was very good, but their “stars and scrubs” roster construction philosophy required Harper to be ELITE for the team to reach their full potential. Amid poorly timed October slumps from Harper, Trea Turner, and Kyle Schwarber - they combined to go 10-45 with two homers (both from Schwarber) and 16 strikeouts - Philly was eliminated in their first round matchup yet again.

Your stars have to star.

1. Sure, he’s nominally a reliever, but he was starting in the minors before they called him up for a spot start so I’d argue that was a traditional start.