Braves Offensive Struggles Confound Players and Coaches Alike

The Atlanta Braves are below-average in most offensive measures despite hitting the ball harder than any team in baseball

A season after hitting a MLB-leading 54 homers, Atlanta Braves first baseman Matt Olson has just eight at the one-third mark of the season. / Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports

After one-third of the season, the Atlanta Braves offense is not in a great place. 

One season removed from leading the league in several offensive categories, including batting average (.276), on-base percentage (.344), slugging (.501), OPS (.845), OPS+ (125), runs scored (947), homers (307, tying MLB’s single-season record) and more, the current iteration of the lineup is significantly worse. 

The 2024 Atlanta Braves are below-average in homers, sitting one behind the league’s average of 57. They’re two behind the league’s average in runs (243) and sit six above the average strikeout total in baseball with 479 on the year. 

And the month of May has been even worse.  

Atlanta’s scored only 3.4 runs per game in May, third-lowest in baseball and behind only the Chicago White Sox (15-42) and Cincinnati Reds (24-32). No matter the results of tonight’s game against the Oakland Athletics, it’ll be a losing record in the month for the Braves, a feat that hasn’t happened since June of 2022. That fourteen month streak was the longest active streak in the majors. 

So, what’s going on? 

No one knows. 

“We’re in a rut right now. Just can’t get it going offensively, passing the baton to the next guy,” Austin Riley told the media in the clubhouse after Thursday night’s loss. “And it’s like, when we do hit balls hard, it’s right at guys. You try to take the positives out of everything, and hopefully this is just callusing us for down the road and make us better baseball players, better people down the stretch.”

That comment from Riley about hard-hit balls being outs does bear out when you look into it. The Braves have seen 3.9% of their hard-hit balls, defined by Statcast as having an exit velocity of 95 mph or higher, turn into outs. That’s the fourth highest percentage of hard-hit outs in baseball, behind only the Houston Astros (4.2%), Baltimore Orioles (4.1%), and Kansas City Royals (4.0%). 

Breaking it down by individuals, several players have seen an even higher impact to their production from this: Michael Harris II has a 5.3% hard-hit out ratio, leading the team. His average hard-hit out is 103.0 mph, fifth-hardest in the sample and behind notable power sources as Giancarlo Stanton (104.1), Aaron Judge (103.1), and Vlad Guerrero Jr. (103.4). 

Six different Braves players all have 25 or more hard-hit outs, with the highest percentages behind Harris being several Atlanta hitters that are off to slower starts: Austin Riley (4.4%), Matt Olson (4.2%), and Ronald Acuña Jr. (4.1%). 

As a team, the Braves lead baseball in both hard-hit percentage (44%) and exit velocity (90.3 mph) and yet are below-average in homers, putting up just 57. The current batting average and slugging sit at .249 with a .407 slugging, almost 100 points lower than last year’s record-setting .501 team slugging. While the expected numbers aren’t as high, based on batted ball quality the Braves should mathematically be at a .255 batting average and a .433 slugging. 

According to the inputs, Atlanta should have the fourth-best slugging numbers in the league. The three teams ahead of Atlanta in slugging , the Baltimore Orioles (.435), Los Angeles Dodgers (.435), and the New York Yankees (.434), average 76 homers per team and are all among the best run-scoring units in baseball. 

Hitting coach Kevin Seitzer, talking to Justin Toscano of the Atlanta Journal-Constutution prior to Thursday’s game, isn’t worried yet. 

“If they all started off like they normally hit and then they hit a rough time in July, nobody would be talking about it because the numbers would be there. But when the numbers aren’t there, you’re not scoring runs and you’re going through a tough stretch early, it gets magnified. It’s all about perspective, really, and these guys are real good about not panicking, and that’s the biggest thing.” 

And while the players aren’t panicking, they’ve definitely felt the frustration, as the comment from Riley laid out. 

The coaching staff feels it too, but there’s not an easy solution other than continuing to try and fix it. “We haven’t hit,” said manager Brian Snitker last night. “I don’t know, honestly. If I knew, I’d tell them and we’d correct it. It’s not that easy. Just got to keep grinding, and that’s what we’re going to do.” 

Seitzer said the struggles are magnified not only because of the timing, happening early in the season, but because it’s seemingly everybody outside of designated hitter Marcell Ozuna struggling at the same time. 

“You hit tough stretches, and offenses go into slumps. It’s no fun when it happens and usually when things start rolling again, there’s still no time to relax and breathe easy because usually there’s two or three guys that are struggling when things are going well – which is what happened last year.

“We’d have two or three guys scuffling, but the other six were on fire, and then when the three guys would get going again, two or three of the other guys would start to struggle, and everybody was picking each other up. We were able to cover up when guys were having a hard time, but when you got six or seven guys that aren’t doing what they’re capable of doing – it’s part of the job. It’s part of what I have to do as a hitting coach, is weather the storms and keep looking for the sunshine and pointing guys toward the sunshine, and it’s gonna get better.”

This team is too good for it to not get better.