Who is to blame for Atlanta's losing record?

We go game-by-game to assign blame for the losses

I’ve noticed something recently on social media among Braves fans - they’re not happy.

That goes without saying, of course - when you started the season with World Series aspirations and are currently 29-38 with just a 0.6% chance to win the championship (per Baseball Reference), fans are right to be mad.

The problem is that they don’t agree on who to be mad at for the underperformance.

So let’s look back at the team’s losses and assign some blame. This isn’t entirely a statistical enterprise - while I’m going to be looking at runs scored in wins versus the league average and all that, there’s also going to be some tough calls where I’ll need to split the blame here and there.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, or on social media.

Let’s define the categories

I’m going to break down the losses by who was responsible for the loss on the field, meaning the players, and then go from there to who was ultimately responsible for that player/those players not being able to deliver - the player themselves, the manager (Brian Snitker) who put them into that position, or the president of baseball operations (Alex Anthopoulos) who built the roster in the first place.

So, let’s break it down:

‘Pitchers’ isn’t going to be a catch-all term here; we’re going to delineate between starters and relievers.

Similarly, I’m going to separate the position players, but not in the same way. We’re going to separate long-term lineup stalwarts from role players. Here’s who counts as a core member of the position player group:

Matt Olson
Austin Riley
Ronald Acuña Jr.
Ozzie Albies
Sean Murphy
Michael Harris II

Every other position player, be it offseason additions Alex Verdugo or Jurickson Profar or rookie Drake Baldwin, goes in the ‘role player’ bucket for now. (Spoiler alert: they’re not single-handedly responsible for any losses in this sample.)

Let’s get to the losses.

This will probably confirm your priors

By far, the most obvious determinant in Atlanta’s losses has been the offense, with 19 losses I can directly attribute to them. This is cutting them a break, as well, as there are a few games that a pitcher stumbled (like Spencer Schwellenbach’s six-run outing in Toronto) where they only gave three runs of support, but I tagged the loss to the starter instead of them.

Across the team’s 38 losses, the position player group has hit .206 with a .603 OPS and just 31 homers. The blame isn’t evenly spread around the core, either - Marcell Ozuna’s batting just .185 with a .319 slug in those losses, while Sean Murphy has a .141 batting average and Michael Harris II is sitting on a .153.

While Ronald Acuña Jr.s been dynamic in his 13 losses played, hitting .354 with a .947 OPS, several other members of the core are playing okay and we’re losing despite them - Matt Olson’s carrying a .221 average and .787 OPS with seven homers, while Austin Riley’s batting .237 with a .637 OPS and four homers and Ozzie Albies has a .210 average, .612 OPS, and four homers of his own. Not good enough, clearly, but not nearly as bad as Ozuna, Murphy, or Harris.

If you’re curious, several role players are doing okay in those situations, with Drake Baldwin hitting .253 with a .779 OPS and five homers as the leader of that pack. Nick Allen, interestingly, is more efficient with his stolen bases in losses (three for four) than he is in wins (three for six).

The bullpen has been a problem…but who gets the final blame for that?

The bullpen has been bad this year, as well, with my count pegging fourteen losses on them. While several can be directly tied back to Raisel Iglesias, which is a player performance problem and not a roster construction problem, he’s far from the only one who deserves some blame here. Hector Neris was tagged with the very first loss, coming on Opening Day against the Padres, while Pierce Johnson has been tagged with several road losses, most notably back-to-back walkoffs last weekend in San Francisco.

Aaron Bummer, Dylan Lee, and Enyel De Los Santos are in here twice, while Daysbel Hernàndez, Scott Blewett, and Nathan Wiles make one appearance each. (These numbers don’t directly add up because some losses, like the Diamondbacks comeback in the finale, are tagged to multiple relievers in a collective effort of suck.)

I tagged a few of these early losses as “pitcher usage” losses, meaning they went back on manager Brian Snitker. Take that Opening Day loss I mentioned earlier - Atlanta led 4-3 entering the 7th inning, but went with Héctor Neris and he ended up with three runs and no outs on his ledger. Aaron Bummer came in to try and clean up the mess, taking a run of his own, but the blown save and loss went to Neris, and that is more on manager Brian Snitker for running him out there in a one-run game late than on the player for being bad.

It’s also on Alex Anthopoulos for going quantity over quality on the bullpen over the winter. AA got tagged with both of the Giants losses last weekend as well, as Pierce Johnson might not be the closing option du jour had another high-leverage relief option been signed over the winter.

AA and Snit shared blame on May 14th against Washington, as well - this was another situation where a different bullpen composition doesn’t require the Braves to run out Aaron Bummer and Enyel De Los Santos in a close game in the 7th inning. While both runners against Bummer were unearned thanks to an Austin Riley error, four runs ultimately scored in the inning, and Atlanta went on to lose a one-run game.

The starters aren’t blameless…but they aren’t the problem

One of the best things for Atlanta in the last two seasons has been the quality of the rotation. This year’s no different, with the team’s starters producing a combined 3.68 ERA that’s below last year’s league-leading mark, but in no way the primary or even secondary problem with this team.

While Braves starters have taken 23 losses this year, several of those games fall more on the offense not providing run support than the starters getting shelled. I tagged only five games as falling primarily on the starters getting blown out - two each on the Spencers, Strider and Schwellenbach, with a fifth going on Bryce Elder (April 11th in Tampa Bay). Every other bad start by an Atlanta starter has either been manageable enough where a normally functioning offense could keep it competitive or a bad-luck loss.

Chris Sale has four losses on the year and the earned runs allowed by him in each start are three, three, two, and one. I’m sorry, but I’m not blaming a starter who goes five or more innings and gives up three or fewer runs with the loss. One of those was actually against Colorado on April 30th - that’s the game where the Braves were held to just three hits and one run in Coors Field.

Grant Holmes is in a similar boat - of his five losses, he allowed two runs over six innings in one of them, but Atlanta couldn’t get anything going against Yoshinobu Yamamoto and lost 2-1. Two others were just three runs allowed off of Holmes, but the pen allowed the opponent to add on while the offense was quiet; those games finished 6-1 and 4-3. He also has a 4-1 and a 3-1 loss on his ledger.

The final numbers

Surprisingly, I finished with nineteen losses associated with the pitching staff and nineteen associated with the offense. A few of these could be shared, as I mentioned above with Schwellenbach’s start in Toronto, but my goal was to blame one person/category of player for each loss and then assign further responsibility from there.

Here’s the final calculation:

Pitchers took 19 losses, distributed between 14 on relievers¹ and five on the rotation.
The position player group took 19, as well, almost entirely assigned to poor offensive performances from the core of the lineup (although there is one or two mentions of a crucial defensive error that resulted in the winning run to score, so it’s not entirely on the bats.)

Paid subscribers to the newsletter can access the Google Doc below to see the math as well as leave comments both here and on the spreadsheet directly about my choices. Let me know your thoughts.