Off-Day Nerd Out: Atlanta Braves Offensive Numbers

What can advanced stats tell us about the Braves this early in the season?

Sample sizes are obviously small on April 20th, but with the Braves returning home from a successful road trip today, is there anything in the statistical profiles that can give us a clue what to expect going forward? Or is there anything in there that shows a marked difference in baseball with the new rule changes in place?

Well, the first two words in this article are "sample sizes" for a reason, as most of these statistical categories really need more data to be useful. But just for the sake of argument, let's dig into some of what we have and compare it to what we've seen in the past, particularly last season. Note - the numbers I cite in here are taken from either Fangraphs or MLB's Baseball Savant page.

Launch Angle

One of the simpler newer stats to get your head around is launch angle, which you tend to hear in regard to home runs. The Bally Sports broadcasts usually show it on screen as a home team player rounds the bases after swatting a tater (along with exit velocity and distance, all three of which are provided by Statcast).

With that said, would it perhaps surprise you to find that the Braves rank dead last in baseball as a team in average launch angle? It certainly surprised me, but indeed, the Braves' average launch angle so far this season is 8.8, which is 30th out of 30 in the majors. (It was 13.5 last season, which ranked tenth.) Unsurprisingly this also leads to the club being fourth in ground-ball rate offensively.

Now, obviously, the team has hit the ball well on the whole this season, and this lower average launch angle doesn't appear to have affected the club's home run totals much. Atlanta is currently tied with the Yankees for fourth in baseball with 27 taters. (Ahead of them are the Giants with 28, the Dodgers with 33, and the world-beating Rays with a whopping 42.) 

So, can we read much into it or is it just early-season statistical noise? I'd tend to think the latter, especially given how the club has performed in other categories, but maybe keep an eye on this as the season progresses. (It should be noted, too, that higher launch angles don't automatically produce elite results. A pop-up is the worst kind of batted ball generally speaking, and of course its launch angle will be extremely high. So avoiding them, which is very good, can pull your average LA down. The Braves have the second-lowest infield fly-ball rate, which is excellent.)

The player who originally led me to this stat category is Ronald Acuña Jr., who had a career-low average launch angle last season (10.8), which seemed to reflect his dip in power (career lows in slugging percentage and isolated power, and a full-season career low in homers). Obviously his balky knee was an overriding factor in everything that happened in 2022, and the long layoff following the mid-2021 injury may have messed with his swing. His LA this season is actually much lower (4.7) so far, though, with only Orlando Arcia having a lower figure among Braves with enough batted balls to qualify for Baseball Savant's chart.

Again, it's early, and Ronnie has strong numbers is most other offensive categories - three homers, a .367 overall batting average and a .419 average on balls in play, an OPS of .995, wRC+ of 169, and 1.3 fWAR, which is tied for second-highest in baseball with the Mets' Brandon Nimmo (boo, hiss). He still hits the ball as hard as anyone, with an average exit velocity of 93.4, good for second on the team among qualified batters behind Matt Olson (96.1) and 25th in all of baseball. And the new rules banning shifts plus his speed have created and will continue to create opportunities for him to generate offense on ground balls and line drives, even ones that aren't hit well. So no reason to panic, but still, like the team's LA, something to keep an eye on.

Exit Velocity

Speaking of hitting the ball hard, let's take a broader look at that. I mentioned that Acuña was second on the team among qualified batters, but when we look at all batters, some more names pop on to the list and we can get a sense of where they are in terms of solid contact.

According to Savant, the average exit velo this season across the bigs is 88.9. As a team, the Braves are roping the ball, a Statcast number that's more in line with the team's early overall performance. Their average EV as a club is 90.6, tied with the Royals (?) for second in baseball behind the Dodgers. (The Royals are straight garbage in most other offensive categories, traditional and advanced, so that average EV is classic baffling small sample size stuff.)

Looking further, of the 16 Braves who've put a ball in play so far this season, 11 of them are league average or better in terms of exit velo. Austin Riley, surprisingly, is bang on 88.9, league average, just behind (shudder) Marcell Ozuna's 90.1. Hilariously, small sample god-king Chadwick Tromp is tied with Olson for highest EV on the team (96.1) based off his one ball in play this season, a fly-out against the Royals on Sunday. (He played in one game last year, went 3-4 against the Marlins and was injured in the process, leaving him with humorously gaudy rate stats on the season. Trompical storm warning, indeed.)

On the downside of the EV chart is recently called-up Vaughn Grissom. His sample size is even smaller than most, but his 85.9 average EV is lowest on the team, just behind middle-infield mate Ozzie Albies' 86.0. Ozzie's exit velo has never been great and is one of the things that's probably held him back as a hitter, though his barrel and hard-hit rates are higher than past years in the early going (small sample rules notwithstanding). The combo of being aggressive early in counts and generating so much weak contact has always been the biggest frustration with Albies, especially batting left-handed.

For Grissom, as he develops as a MLB regular, the main thing most fans view as holding him back is his defense, which certainly isn't great. But even a possible move to left-field or DH could be impacted if his batted-ball numbers don't improve. His 85.9 EV off 21 balls in play this season is actually an improvement from last year's 84.6. His launch angle last season was 9.0, but has dropped to 3.3 this season. (I can't see these numbers for his minor league work.) Couple those with low walk rates at the big-league level, and you have a concerning profile, especially given what the Braves' brass tends to prioritize in a hitter. Of all the players mentioned in this write-up, I'd probably watch Grissom's numbers in these categories the closest.

Good News

The good news is that the things above are more exceptions to the team's performance and not the rule (and by performance I mean on the scoreboard and on the stat sheets). The club profiles as a top-six-ish offense in just about every category, old-school and new, with the only exceptions being the aforementioned launch angle and ground-ball rate, plus strikeout rate. That last one obviously isn't ideal either, and it affects the strikeout-to-walk ratio, too. 

But otherwise, the team is hitting the ball hard, getting on base, hitting dingers, stealing bases, and recording hits on balls in play all at high levels, as you would expect from such a deep and dangerous lineup. And there are big pieces missing that will hopefully return and add to the fun.

Rule Change Effects

It will certainly take much more data to really get a sense of how the rule changes are affecting performance, with many of the players and teams likely still adjusting their approaches (if they even plan to adjust). But an early sampling shows that, league-wide, basically every major rate stat is up slightly on last year's full season results with the exception of launch angle, which has slightly dipped from 12.7 to 12.3 (more grounders are likely being rewarded with hits now that the shift is gone). The gains are similarly modest elsewhere - battering average up three points, on-base up ten, slugging up seven with roughly equivalent increases in the advanced metric numbers.

Again, it's really early to make any kind of grand proclamations here, but apocryphally, pitchers tend to be ahead of the hitters in the early going, so if that's true, this could portend more offensive gains to come. (Someone better with these stat websites than me could likely run down data just through April 20th of last season to get a more fair comparison.) We'll keep an eye on things as the season progresses.

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