Alright, so here we are, folks. It’s the day after Memorial Day which is usually the moment in the season where I’d say that it’s safe to start taking whatever’s happening in the standings a bit more seriously. We’re over a quarter of the way deep into this campaign and basically the news is nothing but positive for the Braves as they enter into the Summer portion of the baseball season.
Heading into today’s action, the Braves are 36-18, they have the best record in the National League, they’re tied on percentage for the best record in all of baseball and they’re 8.5 games clear at the top of the NL East, with only the Washington Nationals joining them in the “Over .500” Club at this point in the season.
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Whoa. I bet y’all didn’t see any of this coming, now did you? I’ll happily admit that I figured that this team wasn’t going to put on a performance that would have them looking like something closer to what we saw this team do for the second half of 2021 and throughout the 2022 and 2023 seasons as well. “They don’t have enough starting pitching,” I cried. Well, Bryce Elder is looking like a more-improved version of his 2023 version and Martín Pérez has developed into a solid fifth starter while Chris Sale, Spencer Strider and Grant Holmes have all performed as expected The starting rotation is putting up great numbers as a collective (3.02 ERA, 75 ERA-, 4.01 FIP, 102 FIP-) but the bullpen has been just as good as well (3.07 ERA, 76 ERA-, 3.52 FIP, 90 FIP-), combining to make Atlanta’s pitching staff the current ERA and ERA- leaders (3.04 and 91) while also making sure that their FIP is in a position where this doesn’t seem too unsustainable going forward. That’ll do it!
It also helps that the offense has returned to something that looks a whole lot similar to what it looked like back when this team was really clicking. Braves President of Baseball Operations and General Manager Alex Anthopoulos said on multiple occasions during the offseason that he figured that if the Braves were going to bounce back, it would be because of the offense rather than the pitching. It’s almost as if one of the best front office executives in baseball was onto something, huh? Heading into tonight’s game, the Braves are sitting on the third-best team wRC+ in all of baseball (113, only behind the Yankees and the Dodgers), they’re tied for first in batting average (.260) with the Rays, they have a top-10 On-Base Percentage as a team, they lead baseball in slugging (.431) and they only trail the Dodgers in OPS (.755) and wOBA (.334).
Ronald Acuña Jr. and Austin Riley have both performed below their respectively lofty expectations and normally that’d be a recipe for disaster. Instead, they’ve just been serving as complimentary pieces to guys like Drake Baldwin (who was absolutely murdering the baseball before going down with an oblique strain), Matt Olson, Ozzie Albies and Michael Harris II. It also helps that some of the players outside of the core have been coming up big as well. Mauricio Dubón has been an invaluable piece for this team so far, Jorge Mateo and Dominic Smith have been reliable when called upon and we’re starting to get some good stuff from Mike Yastrzemski as well. If Ha-Seong Kim can get going and the Braves can finally play a game with a full-strength lineup at some point, the ceiling for this team figures to be about as tall as Victor Wembanyama.
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It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that if you’re hitting well and pitching well, you’re going to win a whole bunch of ballgames. Fortunately for the Braves (and outside of their most recent woeful series at home against the Nationals), the bad luck that seemingly tripped them up at all times is starting to turn around for Atlanta. As such, the team has played its way into a very comfortable position as far as their outlook for the rest of the season goes.
FanGraphs currently has the Braves winning 94 games and winning the NL East (86 percent chance by their current calculations) by eight games over the Phillies. PECOTA has a similarly rosy outlook for the Braves at the moment (94 wins, 84 percent chance of winning the division) and both Atlanta’s Expected W/L record and Pythagorean Record (both 38-16) suggest that this is no fluke on Atlanta’s part. Pretty much all of the statistics and metrics indicate that the Braves are right where they need to be right now and it’s something that they’re definitely capable of keeping up or even improving upon going forward.
While it’s been a tiny bit concerning to see them benefit greatly from the New Manager Bounce of going from Rob Thomson to Don Mattingly, Philadelphia would have to keep up an astonishingly furious pace all season while the Braves would have to suffer a significant slow down in order to make this even a nervous race for the Braves going forward. I’m not going full Sal Licata and saying that “The NL East is over” because there’s still plenty of baseball left to be played between now and September but it’s totally fair to say that everybody else in this division is going to be spending a lot of time looking up at the Braves while this season is still going on.
So am I saying all of this to say that the Braves are going to be on easy street from now until October? I’d love to say that but I think we all know that baseball is about as unpredictable as a washer when you throw a brick inside of it (for some reason or another) so there’s always a possibility that a nasty surprise here or there could pop up and throw a wrench in things for Atlanta. Despite the good times that the Braves have had so far, they’ve still had some injuries to key players. I mentioned that Drake Baldwin is currently on the IL and it doesn’t help that his fellow catcher Sean Murphy is also on the IL so Atlanta has already had to go deep into their depth chart for catching help at the moment. Ronald Acuña Jr. has had an IL stint recently and we all know how things go for pitchers nowadays where you kind of just have to pray for health and hope for the best.
Still, it’s hard to see how this train gets derailed for the Braves going forward. Sure, they had a woeful series against a Nationals pitching staff that has been one of the absolute worst in all of baseball so far this season but again, that’s just baseball for you! Not everything is going to go as planned and there’s bound to be some slip-ups and drop-offs here and there. With all of that being said, it really does seem like the Braves are back to playing at the level that we’re used to seeing from them.
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It’s also fun to think about where the Braves were at this time last year. At the end of the day on May 25, 2025, the Braves were 25-27 and 8.5 games back in the division. After Memorial Day in 2024, they were 30-21 but six games back. They were only up four games in the division after Memorial Day in 2023 but they were actually 9.5 back in 2022! It’s been a good long while since the Braves were in such a comfortable position after crossing the Memorial Day signpost and while the past has shown that the story of this season is far from being complete, it’s clear that the Braves have played themselves into a very good spot to be in now that it’s starting to get really hot outside. Hopefully we’ll see the Braves continue to keep rolling so we’ll have a very fun Summer around here. We’ll see what happens!
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