Max Fried gets the ball in his old stomping ground seeking to push the Braves to a 2-4 road trip.
As they tend to be, it’s been one of those West Coast trips for these Braves so far. The Braves ended last weekend with a win over the Guardians that gave them an MLB best 19-7 record and a 1.5-game division lead. Since then, they’ve been hobbled to a 1-4 stretch that’s seen them fall behind both the Phillies and the Orioles in the best record race; they now trail in the NL East by 1.5 games. It hasn’t just been a racking up of losses; rather, the play on the road trip has been pretty poor. While generally entering the trip first or first-ish in things like run differential and BaseRuns, the Braves have slid to fifth in both. They’re no longer in the top five in team WAR-wins, either, as the terrible performance of Bryce Elder and the bullpen against the Dodgers yesterday resulted in the team shedding over 12 percent of its accumulated pitching fWAR to date.
Struggles on the West Coast aren’t really anything new for the team. The Braves went 2-4 on their “true” such trip in 2018, were swept in Los Angeles by the Dodgers in both 2019 and 2021, and went a combined 7-8 on two such “true” trips in 2022. While they’ve largely done better on mixed trips that have involved midcountry stops or matchups against the Diamondbacks and Rockies, they also did stuff like losing a series in Oakland last year. Probably the best-ever showing for the Braves out West was last year, when they went 5-2 against the Giants and Dodgers and also swept the Rockies in three games in the process; suffice to say, this trip hasn’t been that.
Since the start of the week, the Braves rank dead last in baseball with a 29 wRC+; they’ve shed over ten percent of their prior accumulated position player fWAR in the process. Nor can you blame this entirely on ball-in-play stuff — while they do have the third-biggest xwOBA underperformance in this span, they also have the second-worst xwOBA. Basically, it’s been a bad week.
But, there’s little reason to fret. The Braves still have the league’s third-best xwOBA overall, and anyone can have a bad week. The 2023 Braves, for example, had a 1-5 week in mid-May at one point. Plus, they have Max Fried on the mound this afternoon, and that’s generally a pretty good thing. Right now, even after two absolutely horrible outings to begin the year, Fried’s line sits at a 97 ERA-, 91 FIP-, and 83 xFIP-. After another particularly weak outing in Houston, he’s bounced back in grand fashion, Maddux-ing the Marlins and then throwing six no-hit innings against the Mariners at the start of this trip.
Fried, a local kid from Santa Monica who grew up about 20 minutes (a short jaunt on I-10) from Dodger Stadium, has generally fared exceptionally against the Dodgers. Consider that his career line is 3.07/3.29/3.35, and that the Dodgers are, well, the Dodgers. In eight career regular-season starts against them, Fried’s line is 2.68/2.62/2.44. Four of those starts have been on the road near his hometown, and his line in those? 2.57/2.94/1.97. The only even remotely-bad start Fried has had against the Dodgers was when he was forced out with injury after just an inning. (Fried has also made eight postseason appearances against the Dodgers — some poor relief appearances in 2018, and a combination of a good and bad start in each of 2020 and 2021, without much of a difference in where the starts happened.)
As they go for the sweep, the Dodgers will send at the Braves the man once nicknamed “Big Maple” — James Paxton. The Canadian 35-year-old signed a one-year, $9.5 million deal with the Dodgers in the offseason, and, well, it has gone quite poorly so far. Paxton was a high quality arm from 2016-2019, but then was barely able to pitch over the next three years due to injury. He kinda-sorta bounced back with a 99/109/93 line in half a season last year with the Red Sox, but through five starts with the Dodgers so far, he has -0.1 fWAR and a really ugly 88/137/155 line. That line is particularly bad because of an absurd game against the Padres where Paxton somehow walked eight batters in five innings while striking out just one, but honestly, that wasn’t even that weird for him. In just one of his five starts this year has he struck out more batters than he’s walked; he hasn’t had an FIP or xFIP below 4.00 in any start this year.
In some ways, then, this game is kind of a matchup between a recently very-stoppable force (the Atlanta offense) and a frictionless object (Paxton’s pitching). As to what actually ends up happening, well… tune in and find out.
Game Info
Game Date/Time: Sunday, May 5, 4:10 p.m. ET
Location: Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, California
TV: Bankruptcy/Carriage Negotiations Breakdown Sports Southeast
Streaming: MLB.tv, where it’s the free game
Radio: 680 AM / 93.7 FM The Fan
XM Radio: Ch. 187