What happened to the 2023 Atlanta Braves?

Being eliminated in the Divisional Series for the 2nd straight year is a severe underperformance for the winningest team in baseball

Lindsay Crosby | Oct 13, 2023

For the 2nd straight season, the Atlanta Braves have exited the postseason in the Divisional Series round.

Dropping last night's game four to the Philadelphia Phillies, 3-1, sends Atlanta home and advances Philly to the NL Championship Series, where they'll take on the Arizona Diamondbacks.

We're going to get into offseason content later today, but I want to take a second to break down some of the common conversation points around why Atlanta lost and where to go from here.

Atlanta's offense didn't show up

The Atlanta Braves had one of the most prolific offenses in MLb history in the regular season, tying the 2019 juiced-ball Minnesota Twins for most homers in a season and finishing with a team slugging percentage over .500. Atlanta led all of baseball in runs scored in the regular season, but couldn't come anywhere near that scoring pace in the postseason.

Against Philadelphia, Atlanta scored only eight runs in the four games, with five of those coming in the game two victory. (Their lowest scoring output during the regular season in any four game stretch was nine runs.)

And the blame is spread across most of the entire roster - Austin Riley hit .353 with two home runs, but outside of the 3rd baseman, Atlanta saw only three other hitters with a batting average over .200 in the series.

Is the layoff to blame?

There's an argument among the fanbase that the format of the postseason could be to blame - we're in year two of the expanded postseason and history has repeated itself across baseball. The top two seeds in each league get a one week bye through the Wild Card Round, and those teams are a collective 3-5 in their Divisional Series matchups, with only the 2022 & 2023 Houston Astros and the 2022 New York Yankees advancing past their second round matchups to get into the League Championship Series.

The thought behind the struggles ends up being one of timing and momentum - it's incredibly hard to not play meaningful games against quality opposition for five days, and then jump right into a playoff series and produce. Obviously the Astros have figured something out, having won both of their Divisional Series matchups under the new format.

I think there's a bigger factor at play than just the layoff, though...

Atlanta clinched the division very early

Atlanta won the National League East on September 13th, almost exactly a month prior to getting eliminated (and they were eliminated by the same team they clinched against, on the same field, to boot.)

This postseason, the teams with the best records in baseball that clinched their divisions and postseason berths earliest are the same ones that were eliminated first, with the Dodgers, Orioles, Brewers, and Twins all locking up their divisions in the month of September and then being eliminated in the Wild Card or Divisional Series round.

Of the remaining teams, Houston clinched the division the game before the regular season ended, with Philly, Texas, and Arizona locking in their postseason spots in the final week.

It's possible the chase for the postseason resulted in those teams being more "locked in" and hot as they entered the postseason; by contrast, the Braves had an 8-8 record after winning the division, including losing four straight games after clinching in Philly.

(The flip side to this argument is the 2022 Braves, who chased down New York to win the division crown on the last day of the season and still dropped the 2022 NLDS, but they did have significant injury concerns in their rotation and it was to the team that went on to narrowly lose the World Series).

It's something intangible, something this Braves roster doesn't have

Postseason baseball is just different. We heard Brian Snitker say that entering the postseason, and we heard Nick Castellanos say that last night after the Phillies clinched.

Philly's been one of the best teams in baseball down the stretch, playing at a 100-win pace after they overcame their slow start.

(The 2021 Braves were similar, playing as one of the best teams in baseball after the trade deadline and riding that heater all the way to a World Series championship.)

Philly's got quality starting pitching, a bullpen full of high-octane gas throwers, and a lineup that's built to blast home runs - 53.3% of the postseason's runs have been scored via the home run, whereas the regular season was at 41%.

But more importantly, they have something intangible - this sense of (deserved) swagger that's impossible to quantify. Seemingly irrational confidence. And I keep coming back to this.

The 2021 Braves had it

The 2021 Braves had swagger in spades. Remember Joc Pederson's "We Just Might Be Those..." essay in The Player's Tribune? Remember the pearls? Remember The Night Shift, and Tyler "Nutsack" Matzek?

The 2023 Braves don't have that. And I'm not immediately sure how you fix it. I'm not saying go out and sign Joc Pederson, but there's a clubhouse chemistry component that's missing. The trade deadline acquisitions for the 2021 team provided much needed outfield reinforcements, but also a sense of excitement and newfound energy to the team that it was lacking.

It's almost like you need to make a deadline trade for a personality over a skill set, bringing in someone that exudes that confidence and swagger, and can help get the team fired up to be playing (and feeling) their best when the postseason gets here.

So, what do the Braves do from here?

That's a good question.

The roster's missing something, that's for sure. How you go about getting it, I don't know. And there's no blueprint here for Alex Anthopoulos to work off of - it's not like your analytics guys can find swagger in a stat sheet.

But there's something that needs to be changed. I don't think it's the manager, and it's not the core of the team. But there's a missing element here that the 2023 Braves just didn't have, and it came back to bite them in the end.

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Published Oct 13, 2023