Is this the season Austin Riley becomes an MVP contender?

All of the tools are there for the All-Star to reach that next tier of production, but a few tweaks (and some luck) have to happen.

Fangraphs is releasing their updated ZiPS projections for each MLB team, and our own Jake Mastroianni covered at length about the exceedingly positive outlook for the 2024 Atlanta Braves. 

But there's one player that's seemingly getting lost in the discussion of Atlanta's recent success and future projections: Austin Riley. 

He's talked about, of course, but the conversations of this Braves team revolve around reigning National League MVP Ronald Acuña Jr, last year's MLB homer leader Matt Olson, and the lethal duo of Spencer Strider and Max Fried atop the rotation. Riley's just...there - a reliable All Star contender and cornerstone of the top part of the lineup. 

Riley batted .281/.345/.516 last season, with 37 homers and 97 RBIs.

But it's entirely possible that he can do even more. 

Riley's 2024 projection, via ZiPS, is 34 home runs, 103 RBIs, and a slash line of .282/.351/.519, good for the third-best OPS+ on the team at 132. 

(For comparison, Acuña is at 164 OPS+ and Olson's at 134)

But there's a few small tweaks that, if they happen for Riley, could absolutely supercharge his production into that MVP candidate realm. 

Get back to crushing fastballs

Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports

Austin Riley absolutely raked against fastballs in the last few seasons, but wasn't as proficient at hitting them in 2023. 

2021 & 2022 saw him put up a combined +19 run value against fastballs, with an absurd .314 batting average and .572 slug in 2021. 2022 was somewhere between the two, with a .264 average and .500 slug, while 2023 actually saw Riley go negative against fastballs. 

The surface stats for 2023 appear okay, with a .251 batting average and .492 slugging against fastballs, but both the peripherals and expected stats show some luck was involved. 

Riley's 29.6% strikeout rate against four seam fastballs was the highest since his debut season of 2019 (where he batted only .226 overall and struck out 33.7% of the time against heaters). 

The expected stats show that his true performance against four seamers, subtracting batted ball luck, was a .232 average. Heat maps show Riley struggled with fastballs on the inner third, especially on the corners, with swing percentages under 35% and significant swing and miss up and down the inner third of the plate. 

Continue working with Chipper on sliders

Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports

It was a familiar pattern in Riley's first few years in the major leagues - he'd chase sliders down and away. 

Lots of players do, especially young ones. And most don't ever truly figure it out. But for a while there, it looked like Riley had. He went from a negative run value against the pitch his first two years in the league (-1) to absolute dominance against them in the last two seasons, with a +15 run value combined between 2021 & 2022. 

Austin Riley gets the Braves going this evening.

He is slugging .497 (181 total bases in 364 ABs) on sliders since the 2020 season, 6th best in MLB.#ForTheA pic.twitter.com/S0PVic8djj

— Inside Edge (@IE_MLB) April 18, 2023

So what caused the -6 against sliders in 2023?

He went 1-128 against sliders thrown down and away. 

(He added a second hit in the postseason, when he launched a slider from Phillies reliever Jeff Hoffman into the bullpen to cap off Atlanta's 5-4 comeback in game two of the NLDS) 

Hitting consultant (and Hall of Famer) Chipper Jones has discussed Riley's issues with sliders before, saying it's a matter of adjusting both the barrel and where he sets his sights for the swing. Let's see if he can get back to what was working for him in the previous two seasons. 

His defense is significantly improved, but it's probably not enough

Neville E. Guard-USA TODAY Sports

Defensive metrics - all of them - have never been kind to Austin Riley. 

OAA, my preferred defensive metric do jour, has graded Riley as a negative defender every season of his career until 2023, where he was...neutral. Zero Outs Above Average. 

Improvement! 

A lot of the defensive issues for Riley, at least in the metrics, relate to range and arm strength. Despite good speed for a third baseman (28.1 ft/sec, 69th percentile in all of baseball and 16th out of 66 qualified third basemen in 2023), his range is merely average per Statcast, at 46th percentile. 

His arm, never an asset but not considered poor, has actually dropped in both max and average velocity each of the past four seasons. For 2023, Riley's hardest throw was 86.9 mph, and his average was only 83.4, 28th our of 49 qualified defenders at third. 

(Statcast doesn't calculate a true average - rather, they use the average of your top 5% of throws, to remove the impact of routine plays where you're not exerting yourself to get the ball over as quickly as possible). 

All this is to say that it's unlikely Riley will receive extra MVP consideration for his defense at the hot corner, but provided he continues to make the routine plays and a few spectacular ones, it shouldn't be used against him. 

So what's a realistic jump in offensive performance that would get Riley into the MVP conversation? 

Well, about that - he's tecnnically already in the MVP conversation, having finished 7th, 6th, and 7th in the last three seasons of voting. 

But we're trying to win him the dang thing, right? 

There's a few things that need to happen: 

The first is a drop in his strikeout rate (and the corresponding bump in his batting average that would come with it.) He's hovered between 23.8% and 25.4% the last four seasons - it doesn't need to be as extreme as Acuña's 12.2% cut, but if Riley can get under 20% (perhaps by less chasing of sliders down and away), it'll raise that batting average enough to get him over .300 on the season. 

The 2nd is juicing the homer rate a little (and yes, those two things don't normally both happen together, but we're assuming everything clicks here.) Riley's career average is 5.2%, and that's exactly where he finished in 2023. If he can see that naturally tick up, possibly as a result of turning on more fastballs, that could get him over 40 homers. The only two corner infielders to win the MVP with less than 40 homers was 2010 Joey Votto (37) and 2022 Paul Goldschmidt (37), but both featured on-base percentages over .400 and more than 110 RBIs.

And the third thing is, simply, some luck. That's how baseball awards work. Luck comes and goes -  many Cy Young winners have higher FIPs than ERA in the year they win, and many hitters have unusually high BABIP's or some sort of gaudy league-leading stat that gets attention. 

But the raw tools are there. Riley's already one of the best hitters in baseball, and with a few tweaks to his production (and a little luck), he can rocket into that conversation rather easily. 

Let's see if he can pull it off. 

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