I am once again here to talk about homers. A lot of times, when I talk about homers, it’s “the Braves aren’t homering enough and that’s why they’re losing.” This time, it’s kind of the opposite: the Braves are giving up far too many homers, and that’s why they’re losing.
On June 9, the first game in Chicago and the start of the Braves’ ignominious skid, they lost on a walkoff homer to a guy making his MLB debut — it wasn’t all that well hit, but it cleared the fence, handed them a loss, and tied the within-game homer tally at two apiece. Since then, here are the tallies of homers allowed by the Braves: 0, 3, 0, 2, 3, 3. That’s 13 homers allowed in seven games. That’s a season high over a seven-game stretch, but even more tellingly, if you take every seven-game stretch the Braves have had, their average homers allow is seven.
The volume of multihomer games is also a problem. That’s five in seven games (zero homers in the other two). The Braves haven’t done that since early July of last year… a stretch where they also, incidentally, went 1-6. They had three different stretches of five homers in seven games last year (two overlapping), but none in 2024. And in 2023, there was a fairly silly thing where at one point they allowed 26 homers in 11 games in September, with seven multihomer games, and a three-game stretch of 13 homers (4, 4, 5), but that stretch happened around them clinching the division.
In many ways, this has been a very minor correction of sorts. (There’s that word again). Through June 7, the Braves had a below-average but not particularly notable HR/FB rate. Their FIP was under their xFIP by about 0.10. Now, after seven (well, really five) games of being straight-up pounded, their FIP and xFIP is basically identical. It just happened very quickly, as a result of a 20 percent HR/FB rate in those seven games. To be fair, 20 percent isn’t hilariously high in a seven-game stretch, it’s not even the highest in MLB over this time period (third-highest, though). And, the Braves aren’t pitching well, either, with a 107 team xFIP- as they’ve gone 1-6.
Combine the worse-pitching-but-also-very-high-HR/FB with the team: A) having a bottom-ten set of offensive inputs, B) the second-biggest xwOBA underperformance in baseball, and C) the pitching being both worse than previously and sequencing/etc. going against them, and that’s how you go 1-6.
B, and to some extent, C, will probably resolve themselves. If they don’t, things are gonna get a lot more interesting. A is an issue and is hopefully just a temporary lull.
But, again — I think the mindset I’m most comfortable here is, “The Braves are a pretty good team that played out of their minds for about nine weeks. The season wasn’t supposed to be a breeze, and it won’t be weird if they’re actually in a dogfight for a big chunk of it.” The Braves seemed to embrace that “we need to battle” mindset from a strategic and tactical management perspective early on, and it was easing their collective foot off the proverbial pedal that started this skid. Maybe as their margin for faffing shrinks, we’ll see that sort of impetus to win every game again. We’ll see!
In some ways, it’s been tempting to think of this season as a pseudo-2023, with meh pitching and bashing the ball everywhere… but they’ve stopped bashing, and the pitching has resembled June 2023 at times (and especially during this stretch). (If you recall, June 2023 was the insane month where the team went nearly-undefeated despite some of the worst pitching in baseball.)
But in the interim, oh my Ohtani, stop giving up so many homers. Jeez.
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