Past summaries:
How did the Braves do recently?
The Braves went 9-6 in the second half of May. They went 9-4 in the first half of May, so it was kind of a dropoff. Really, it was a dropoff from what they did in April too… but given that this team probably wasn’t going to win 110-plus games, I’m not sure it was a reasonable expectation for them to keep running some kind of absurd winning percentage in every two-week stretch for the entire season. They may even have (gasp!) a losing week, or a month close to .500 or whatever. It happens. (Though maybe not to this team? We’ll see.)
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9-6 is still good, mind. It was a top-ten record over that stretch, it’s equivalent to a 97-win season. It feels weird to be talking up that sort of performance, but that’s the bar the Braves set earlier.
The Braves continue to maintain a nine-game lead in the NL East. The Brewers and Dodgers had a good run in late May, so the nine-game lead is no longer something absurd like “bigger than the sum of all other division leads combined.” But, the Braves still have a 1.5-game lead on the Dodgers for best record in baseball, their playoff odds are approaching unity, and they actually gained half a game on the Phillies despite “only” playing at a 97-win pace for two weeks.
Let’s quickly talk stats. For this two-month period, the Braves were:
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13th in position player fWAR, because…
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…despite being fourth in xwOBA, they were only 14th in wOBA (the fourth-biggest underperformance in this period). It’s a testament to how this team’s fortunes just feel different that this unpleasant input-output mis-sync didn’t lead to a bad two weeks.
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11th in pitching fWAR, with ranks of 13th, 11th, and sixth in ERA-, FIP-, and xFIP-, respectively. Yes, after avoiding those issues for a while, HR/FB came back and punished the Braves a bit. Again, amazing that they didn’t get derailed as a result, just… won slightly less.
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16th in rotation fWAR, sixth in bullpen fWAR.
For May as a whole:
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Seventh in position player fWAR (seventh in defense, ninth in wRC+, sixth in xwOBA)
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13th in pitching fWAR (sixth, 14th, sixth in ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-, respectively)
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17th in rotation fWAR, 10th in bullpen fWAR
Using game-by-game odds, the Braves should’ve gone something like 8-7 in these 15 games. They did a little better. This wasn’t a particularly tough stretch; the game in which they had the lowest pre-game odds was a Martin Perez-Braxton Garrett matchup in Miami, and they won that handily, 8-4. On the flip side, they somehow lost the game against Jake Irvin and the Nats, 2-0, which was their second-biggest upset allowed this season. Their projected win total barely budged, from 94.5 to 94.8.
How are the Braves doing for the season?
For the season as a whole, through May:
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Fourth in position player fWAR (fifth in defense, third in hitting inputs and outputs)
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12th in pitching fWAR (17th rotation, seventh bullpen | second, 13th, and 10th in ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-, respectively).
Basically, as the story has been for pretty much the whole year, this is a team with great hitting and defense and a strong bullpen, all of which prop up some pretty meh starting pitching.
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The team’s Pythagorean and BaseRuns records are within two wins of their actual record (-1 Pythagorean, +2 BaseRuns). Both are top three in baseball. As a rejoinder from the last time I did this, it’s hard to find new, high-level stuff to say in these because the Braves are chugging a long. They’re good, yay. Rejoice.
How are the hitters doing?
Well, we’re at least at the point where the grayshaded fWAR/600 column in the “through May” isn’t ridiculous… for some players… the one on the left side is still not something to take seriously.
The main message here, I guess, is that the Braves persevered and succeeded with a performing-like-stars (Michael Harris II, Ronald Acuña Jr., Mike Yastrzemski, Jorge Mateo), performing-like-scrubs (Ha-Seong Kim and the fill-in catchers) approach. On top of that, Matt Olson, Austin Riley, and Dominic Smith really didn’t do anything these last two weeks, though at least Olson managed a pretty good xwOBA. The next-man-up-ness of “who’s gonna come through today” has been a big part of the season, and Acuña and Yastrzemski stepped up right as a bunch of other guys stepped down (or were pressed into duty and were horrible).
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Due to needing to include the catchers and Kim on these charts, they kind of lose granularity — but really, the story here is that the hitters have started to clump, whether talking about the last few weeks or the season as a whole.
The left-hand chart basically shows you how the “hit really well” quartet carried the last two weeks amid meh-to-bad performance from everyone else. The right-hand chart, which is the season to date, shows that there are really two different clumps: successful bats, and meh bats. There’s a little bit of variation in who is/isn’t getting unlucky on balls in play, but no one is off in a corner somewhere… except the catchers and Kim, which, woof. Chadwick Tromp had some moments, but get some hits, guys. If I told you before the season that, through May, Austin Riley and Mauricio Dubon would have too-close-to-distinguish bubbles on these charts, you’d either be really excited or really bummed. It turns out that the latter is the correct feeling in this regard — Riley had a nice run in early May, but went back to more-meh-than-we’d-like over the last two weeks.
On the season as a whole, Acuña continues to massively underperform his-now-.400 xwOBA, and is counterbalanced by both Ozzie Albies and Yastrzemski getting very fortunate for their worse-than-mediocre batting inputs. Yastrzemski continued to not only defy his inputs, but make sure that happened at key moments — he finished the month as the team leader in WPA, something also true over this two-week stretch. Also, Kim was last in WPA, which makes sense because it’s hard to get any positive WPA when nothing good happens when you’re at the dish.
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How are the pitchers doing?
At this point, the rotation has shaken out to Chris Sale being dominant (duh), Bryce Elder being really good (whuh?), Spencer Strider and Martin Perez hanging in there (also whuh), and Grant Holmes bringing up the rear, in a way. For the handful of starts over the last two weeks, Sale kept doing his thing, Elder and Perez were mediocre, while Strider and Holmes actually pitched pretty well but got eaten alive by homers (in a way that wasn’t really happening to the team earlier).
The Braves can probably keep this going for a while, but it does lead you to wonder whether they will try to play for a big-time rental starter at the Trade Deadline. Theoretically, they should get Hurston Waldrep and Spencer Schwellenbach back eventually, but it’s unclear whether that will turn out as fantastically as it could. If Elder actually keeps doing his new-and-improved thing then I guess the Braves would have few qualms about letting him start a playoff game, though he’s been interspersing more problematic starts into the game log lately, and the Braves could probably fake a really effective frontline starter outing by mixing and matching Holmes, Perez, and Didier Fuentes or something. Strider remains a wild card (by peripherals, he’s had three great starts, two poor ones, and a meh one — though he also got blasted homer-wise in one of his great ones). So, a lot of eyes on how Elder and Strider navigate the next two months, I guess.
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Bullpen-wise, it was a nice bounceback for Tyler Kinley, who struggled in early May — he was really the standout over these last two weeks, leading the team’s pitchers (including starters) in WPA and putting together a beautiful 32/13/57 line in seven outings. Robert Suarez had a weird month: 0/55/80 in his first six outings, which included five shutdowns and a low-leverage outing, and then 37/119/110 in his next six outings, with just one shutdown and one meltdown.
For the season as a whole, Dylan Lee is now up to 1.0 fWAR; he and Raisel Iglesias have video game-y numbers (32/35/61 for Lee, 25/30/65 for Iglesias). Lee, Iglesias, Suarez, and Fuentes (who I guess started one game) have more fWAR than any non-Sale, non-Elder starter.
See you in mid-June.
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