Braves Offense Producing Despite Power Outages

The Atlanta Braves offense is pacing the league in several categories despite slow starts from some of the stars

Atlanta Braves third base Austin Riley only has two homers in his first nineteen games of the 2024 season / Jim Rassol-USA TODAY Sports

The Atlanta Braves have one of the best offenses in baseball for the second year in a row.

A season after tying the single-season homer record with 307 longballs (2019 Minnesota Twins) and leading all of baseball with 947 runs (5.85/game) and a team slugging of .501, the Braves are once again the class of MLB. Atlanta's actually improved on last year's runs per game mark so far in the 2024 season, averaging 6.37 R/G and sitting on top of the leaderboards with 121 total runs, despite only playing in nineteen games, two below the MLB average.

But there's one area in which the Braves are behind last season's historic pace, and that's homers. The Braves have hit 25 homers in 19 games, good for "only" a tie for 6th place. And while there's some notable homer performances on this team, like designated hitter Marcell Ozuna being tied with Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels for the MLB lead with eight and catcher Travis d'Arnaud hitting four, including a grand slam, over the weekend's pair of games against the Texas Rangers, not everybody's performing up to expectations in the homer department so far.

Last season's National League Most Valuable Player, Ronald Acuña Jr., finally hit his first homer of the season on Wednesday against the Houston Astros. His 65-at-bat stretch before his first homer was odd; it was the fifth-longest homerless stretch to open a season for a player coming off of a 40-homer campaign the prior year. There's some belief that he was still feeling the effects of missing at-bats while dealing with a knee issue in spring training, as well as a change in how opposing pitchers are challenging him, choosing to elevate fastballs at the highest rate Ronald's seen in his career to date.

But the biggest surprise so far is the combined lack of power production for the top four in the order, consisting of Acuña, Ozzie Albies (prior to his injured list placement on Tuesday with a broken toe), Austin Riley, and Matt Olson.

That foursome, who combined for 175 homers in 2023, including a league-leading 54 for Matt Olson, has a combined eight - the #5 hitter, Marcell Ozuna, has the same number of homers by himself.

And it's not for lack of trying. Several of Atlanta's inputs - hard hit rate, barrels, exit velocity, etc - are all tops in the league.

The Braves are #1 in baseball with a 46.3% hard-hit rate, defined as a batted ball event (BBE) at 95 mph or greater. Atlanta's barrel rate, which is a BBE at a predefined combination of exit velocity and launch angle that's conducive to hitting a home run, also leads baseball at a 9.9% mark. The Braves have the highest average exit velocity, 90.6 mph, as well.

So they're hitting balls hard. Why don't they have more homers?

There's a few factors here. One is just having played less games than the rest of the league. Atlanta's tied with the Minnesota Twins and Milwaukee Brewers with just nineteen games played; the league averages 21 contests played per team, with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, who opened the season in Korea, pacing the league at 23 games each. Atlanta's 3.3% homer rate is a top five mark in baseball, although down from last season's 4.9%, tops in baseball by a full percentage point.

The second factor is the schedule and the weather Atlanta's had to play in - the Braves opened the season in some chilly locales, including three games in the 50° in Philadelphia and two games in the lower 40° in Chicago against the White Sox.

But there's also the underperformance by the top of the lineup from a power perspective - Riley and Acuña immediately come to mind here - as well as injury absences to Ozzie Albies and Sean Murphy. One of the big things that immediately stands out is the increased rate of groundballs for several of those underperformers, with Acuña (56.9%), Michael Harris II (53.2%), Travis d'Arnaud (51.3%), and Ozzie Albies (50.0%) all at fifty percent or higher. Several Braves are still rolling over in the high 40 percent range, with Orlando Arcia at 49.2% and even Austin Riley (41.7%) hovering real close to the league average of 43.8%.

We made the argument on the podcast last week that this power outage was revealing some good things about this offense, with the Braves forced to rely more on stringing together base hits than just mashing a homer. Atlanta only has three games this season where they hit three or more home runs, all wins, but they've also won eleven of the sixteen games where they hit no or only one homer.

And once those hitters at the top of the lineup get hot? Look out.