Why Every Starting Pitcher Looks Like an Ace Against the Braves

Opponents are winning strike one, leaving the zone and exploiting an Atlanta lineup that rarely adjusts before the third trip through the order.

Jesús Luzardo’s final start of the 2026 regular season was a complete-game shutout against the Atlanta Braves, with the lefty allowing just two hits on 109 pitches. But he’s not the only ace that’s dominated Atlanta down the stretch; Zack Wheeler held them to one run, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto did the same.

Sometimes, you run into a really good pitcher with excellent stuff that’s locating the ball well, and that’s the result. Good pitchers sometimes just dominate lineups, and there isn’t really anything that can be done about it.

It becomes harder to accept “it’s just a dominant performance from one of the league’s best starters” when Tim Mayza opens with three scoreless innings, Brad Lord records six strikeouts in 3⅓ scoreless, or Zach Agnos faces eleven batters without allowing a run.

Over the last 30 days, Atlanta has faced rookies, aces, openers, and the vast middle class of major-league starters. Only two of the 28 - Tomoyuki Sugano and Roki Sasaki - allowed more than three earned runs.

Collectively, those opposing starters, good and bad alike, produced a 2.53 ERA over 149⅔ innings. Seventeen of them allowed no more than one earned run, and twenty-two allowed two or fewer.

At some point, it’s not about the pitcher; it’s about you, and what you’re doing wrong.

Let’s talk about it.

It’s not the pitcher; it’s the count

When you go through the list of starters that Atlanta has faced during this sample, there are not a lot of commonalities - there are stuff monsters and soft-tossers, lefties and righties, veterans and rookies all represented in the sample.

The Braves aren’t dealing with one specific pitch family they can’t hit or one particular type of starter. Instead, they’ve repeatedly lost the same type of plate appearance: the pitcher establishes strike one, takes his newly created count leverage and moves his pitches outside the zone, and just waits for Atlanta to chase, producing either a whiff or weak contact.

The commonality is not the pitcher. It’s the count.

Atlanta has been MLB’s worst offense against starting pitching

The schedule has legitimately been difficult - the Brewers and Dodgers will be the top two seeds in October, the Cubs have been the sport’s best offense in the second-half, and the Yankees and Phillies both could argue that they, not the Dodgers, have the game’s best rotation (before Philly lost Luzardo, at least). The Braves had several of the game’s best starters thrown at them during that stretch, including likely AL Cy Young winner Cam Schlittler, likely NL winner Jacob Misiorowski, Dodgers ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Stuff monster Tyler Glasnow, veteran Zack Wheeler, and more.

But they’ve also struggled against openers, recent call-ups, and mid-to-back-end starters.

| Against opposing starters | Last 30 days | Previous 30 days | MLB rank, last 30 |
| ------------------------- | -----------: | ---------------: | ----------------: |
| Pitches per PA            |         3.93 |             3.72 |              15th |
| First-pitch strike rate   |        65.3% |            60.9% |       2nd-highest |
| Chase rate                |        35.5% |            32.5% |           Highest |
| Strikeout rate            |        24.3% |            21.1% |       6th-highest |
| Walk rate                 |         6.6% |             5.8% |        3rd-lowest |
| wOBA                      |         .272 |             .302 |            Lowest |
| xwOBA                     |         .272 |             .309 |            Lowest |
| Hard-hit rate             |        36.1% |            43.1% |       10th-lowest |

And when I say struggle…well, if you missed it in the chart, the Braves are dead last in both wOBA and expected wOBA against starters. With both figures at a paltry .272, you can’t blame this on bad batted-ball luck. This isn’t a month of hard-hit balls finding gloves, although that was the case against Tampa Bay last week. The Braves produced exactly as poorly as their contact and plate discipline suggested they should.

The easiest criticism is that Atlanta has become too aggressive and stopped working counts, but the pitches-per-plate-appearance figure belies a more complicated story.

The plate appearances are NOT unusually short

Atlanta averaged 3.93 pitches per plate appearance against these starters, almost exactly the major-league midpoint and up from 3.72 over the previous thirty days. Now, is some of that driven by exceptionally long at-bats by Mike Yastrzemski when he’s facing Aaron Nola? Probably, but the reality is the same:

The Braves are seeing more pitches without producing more favorable outcomes.

And that distinction matters. “Be more patient” isn’t a solution for an offense with the highest chase rate in baseball when they still average a normal number of pitches per trip to the plate. Atlanta is extending at-bats, but often that’s after they’ve given control of the at-bat to the pitcher.

These additional pitches are arriving in defensive counts, outside the zone and dictated by the battery, not the Braves. Seeing four pitches per plate appearance doesn’t matter when pitches three and four are you desperately flailing away at sliders outside the zone, hoping to stay alive after you fell behind 0-1.

Atlanta is not consistently ending plate appearances too early. It is losing them too early.

The problem begins with strike one

Opposing starters threw a first-pitch strike in 65.3% of their plate appearances against Atlanta over the past 30 days, the second-highest rate faced by any offense during the period.

That’s up from 60.90% in the previous 30 days.

Let’s understand the causes of this. This is not exclusively a case of Braves hitters passively taking hittable pitches. Their first-pitch swing rate actually increased slightly, and opponents were marginally more in the zone on the first pitch. Atlanta’s first-pitch chase rate, though, was also up from 16.3% to 20.2%.

Some of these strikes were earned by the pitcher, by missing bats in the zone, but some were given to them by Atlanta.

For most at-bats in the major leagues, the defining pitch is the 1-1 offering - if the pitcher gets ahead, their rate of success is much higher than if they fall behind.

For the Braves in this period, it’s been the first pitch:

First-pitch strike:

• .199 wOBA

• .223 xwOBA

• 33.0% strikeout rate

• 5.2% walk rate

First-pitch ball:

• .347 wOBA

• .323 xwOBA

• 21.1% strikeout rate

• 11.5% walk rate

The first pitch doesn’t guarantee the outcome, but for the Braves more so than any other team in the postseason field, it radically influences Atlanta’s odds of any type of success in the at-bat.

When going up 1-0, Braves hitters could eliminate portions of the opposing pitcher’s arsenal and force something hard towards the middle of the plate. But when going down 0-1, their walk rate was cut by more than half, their strikeout rate jumped, and their offensive production collapsed as they got more spin to the sides and off the plate.

For this season’s Braves roster, one pitch has often separated an opportunity to hit from an attempt to survive.

Once ahead, pitchers no longer have to challenge them

Only 46.3% of the pitches thrown by opposing starters to the Braves in this time period are in the strike zone.

When the Braves reached two strikes, that rate fell to 36.3%, the fourth-lowest two-strike zone rate faced by any offense during that period. And compounding their issues was Atlanta chasing 45.4% of those two-strike pitches outside the zone, the fourth-highest rate in baseball.

The end result of a high chase rate and a low in-zone rate means that more than 77% of their plate appearances against starters have reached two strikes, up from 72.6% over the previous 30 days.

In essence, the sequence is going like this:

1. Establish strike one.

2. Force Atlanta to protect.

3. Move the ball outside the zone.

4. Let the hitter create the out.

Opposing pitchers haven’t needed to throw pitches in the zone to finish plate appearances - they only needed to make the pitch appear that it was going to be in the zone long enough for Atlanta to commit to swinging.

I do want to clarify something here, because folks have asked: It didn’t matter what specific pitches the opponents are throwing here. The commonality is count structure and locations, not that it’s all sliders or splitters or sweepers or what have you.

The Braves have spent too many at-bats protecting the strike zone while swinging at pitches that were never intended to enter it.

The second trip through the order? Even worse

Here’s another handy table for you:

| Trip through the order | wOBA | xwOBA | Hard-hit rate |
| ---------------------- | ---: | ----: | ------------: |
| First                  | .269 |  .261 |         35.8% |
| Second                 | .237 |  .254 |         31.3% |
| Third                  | .351 |  .334 |         44.9% |

It goes without saying, but this is the opposite progression of what an offense normally wants to make. The previous 30-day period before the one we’re looking at, Atlanta went from a .300 wOBA the first time through the order to a .313, but in this stretch, its second-time-through wOBA actually fell to .237.

And as much as this is on Atlanta, it’s also on opposing pitchers changing the way they attack the Braves:

During the first trip:

• 56.3% fastball usage

• 68.5% first-pitch strike rate

• .269 Atlanta wOBA

During the second trip:

• Fastball usage fell to 43.9%

• Offspeed usage climbed to 21.7%

• Zone rate fell to 44.9%

• Atlanta’s whiff rate rose to 26.6%

• Atlanta produced a .237 wOBA

Opponents were fastball-heavy the first trip through, but then started exchanging velocity for spin and soft stuff and were rewarded with Atlanta making worse contact, despite having already faced the pitcher once and having seen some of these pitches.

The Braves did manage to reverse this trend the third time through the order, putting up a .351 wOBA and .334 xwOBA. You can see this trend in the micro with Atlanta’s win on Wednesday against the Cubs - they scored six runs; the first came on Kevin Gausman’s third trip through the order, with the final two coming against the Cubs bullpen.

Turns out the TTO penalty just might be stronger than even Atlanta’s offensive futility the last 30 days.

This has been a major problem against left-handers

I’m not saying this is a platoon problem, officially, but lefties have handled Atlanta’s offense to a degree that their right-handed counterparts can’t match.

Vs left-handed starters during this stretch:

• .235 wOBA

• .216 xwOBA

• 29.9% strikeout rate

• Zero home runs in 157 plate appearances

• 84.6 mph average exit velocity

• 28.6% hard-hit rate

That’s right, they haven’t homered off a lefty starter in the last 30 days. This lineup, built to slug over everything else, has had 157 plate appearances without a single home run against a left-handed starter.¹

Vs right-handed starters during this stretch:

• .285 wOBA

• .292 xwOBA

• 22.2% strikeout rate

• 12 home runs

Their results against righties aren’t good enough, so this isn’t just a platoon problem, but left-handers have been more effective at magnifying Atlanta’s weaknesses: more strikeouts, almost no loud contact, and no home-run damage.

And of course, just about every team they’ll face in the postseason has a lefty starter to throw at them: LA has Blake Snell (maybe - he reportedly has a mild groin strain), Philly has Cristopher Sanchez, Milwaukee has Kyle Harrison, San Diego has Robbie Ray, and Chicago has two in Shota Imanaga and David Peterson.

Love that for us.

It’s not EVERYONE failing here

There’s a little bit of important individual context that needs to be addressed: Some of Atlanta’s lineup regulars, their aircraft carriers, aren’t taking on water here.

Here’s everyone with an actual wOBA of .325 or better and an expected wOBA of .300 or better during this stretch:

Ronald Acuña Jr.: .367 wOBA/.359 xwOBA
Drake Baldwin: .325 wOBA/.304 xwOBA

End of list.

The lineup around these guys just wasn’t consistent enough, meaning that opposing starters could cruise too often for entire innings without dealing with multiple threatening plate appearances in the same frame.

Again, there’s no single pitch that’s the problem

I’ve written at length about Atlanta’s Trajekt machine, their advanced pitching machine that can help them prepare for any opposing pitcher’s arsenal by exactly replicating individual pitches, down to spin rates and seam orientation.

The problem with banking on Trajekt as the solution is twofold: first, they won’t have the same everyday access to it if they match up with Milwaukee or Los Angeles and don’t have home field advantage, and the second is that there’s no one specific pitch to eliminate.

It’s true that opponents are throwing more four-seamers, sinkers, and changeups/splitters in this 30-day stretch as compared to the previous 30, but Atlanta’s largely failed to hit anything:

• Four-seamers: .258 wOBA, .273 xwOBA

• Sinkers: .267 wOBA, .270 xwOBA

• Cutters: .291 wOBA, .270 xwOBA

• Curves: .258 wOBA, .247 xwOBA

• Changeups/splitters: .249 wOBA, .268 xwOBA

(Yes, I’m taking the fact that they’re still hitting cutters personally.)

And this lack of damage across pitch types is a change from earlier periods of the season - their average exit velocity against sinkers, for instance, fell from 91.3 mph during the previous 30 days to 86.5 mph, and their average four-seam exit velocity declined similarly, from 92.7 mph to 89.8 mph.

It’s a lot less of a lift for opponents to establish the fastball early before moving to the soft stuff when the Braves aren’t consistently punishing a missed location on the fastball. All it does is allow pitchers an out from their mistakes and a path to introduce a secondary from a pitcher’s count because Atlanta didn’t decision the plate appearance on an early fastball.

Essentially, pitchers can afford to begin in the strike zone because Atlanta has not made the cost overly prohibitive. The price of gas is skyrocketing right now, but the price of a mistake fastball is still pretty low when you’re facing Atlanta.

How to fix it

This isn’t some sort of binary decision between swinging early and trying to work a deep count, something this particular roster isn’t well suited to do. Rather, it needs better decisions at the specific moments that determine who has control of the plate appearance.

1. Damage the early fastball

As we’ve established, pitchers are using hard stuff to establish the count and quickly swing it in their favor. Atlanta must be able to distinguish between hittable early fastballs and pitcher’s pitches, rather than either passively taking strike one or swinging defensively from the very beginning.

2. Stop expanding because the count dictates it

A two-strike approach has to cover the strike zone, not every single slider, changeup, or curveball that starts near it and ends up six inches outside. Take those pitches, and if the umpire gets it egregiously wrong…well, that’s what ABS is for.

3. Make the adjustment the second time you see him

The third-time-through numbers show that the lineup can recognize what a starter is trying to do and adjust. The problem is that the recognition is happening one trip too late.

Why this is MORE of a problem in the playoffs

The quality of opposing pitching will only improve in October. Postseason starters have better Stuff, stronger game plans, and a shorter leash that will stop most of them from having a third exposure to a lineup. And when they’re replaced by the bullpen, it’s usually better relievers than a team’s 5th-best bullpen arm, as happens during a short start in August or September.

Atlanta can’t wait for easier opponents, and the last month has demonstrated that opponent quality is only part of the problem. Aces have dominated the Braves. So have mid-rotation starters, rookies and openers. They’ve done it with different repertoires, different velocities and different game plans.

There’s no such thing as a good matchup in October. Figure it out, or you won’t be playing for long.

1. They DO have four home runs against a left-handed pitcher in this span, but they’re all relievers: Michael Harris taking Milwaukee’s Aaron Ashby deep on August 23rd, Sean Murphy taking LA’s Eric Lauer deep on August 26th, Ronald Acuña Jr. taking Philly’s Brooks Raley deep on September 12th, and Matt Olson taking Philly’s Tanner Banks deep on September 13th.