Two teams whose seasons have deviated from the proverbial rails will battle it out in Atlanta this weekend
At this point, you likely know all about the Braves’ trials and tribulations in 2024. At 36-30, the Braves are far below where they were expecting to be by the time mid-June rolled around. This weekend, though, they’ll play host to another team that’s had a bummer of a season so far: the Tampa Bay Rays.
While projection systems often struggle to incorporate the roster legerdemain the Rays so expertly leverage year after year after year, the Rays were expected to be a premiere contender in 2024 — they came into the season with MLB’s fifth-best projections, seventh-highest playoff odds, and fifth-highest championship odds. Just like the Braves, though, they’ve run aground on the rocky shoals of reality, as they’re currently 33-36, last place in the AL East. It’s been nothing short of a sinkhole of a season for a team that has a five-season playoff streak going, and hasn’t had a winning percentage below .537 (i.e., an 86-win season) in its last six tries.
The bad news doesn’t stop there, though. It’s one thing to have a bottom-10 record in MLB. It’s quite another to have a bottom-five run differential and BaseRuns record. In fact, the Rays are five games better than their estimated record using either of those methodologies; no team is outplaying its run differential by more, and only the Guardians are outplaying their BaseRuns by more than the Rays. Being 33-36 and in last place in your division sucks; having signs pointing to that 33-36 record being the result of small-sample weirdness on record? That’s brutal.
Like the Braves, the Rays aren’t hitting much, with a 95 team wRC+ (21st in MLB). They’re 22nd in position player fWAR. Unlike the Braves, this has been the case all season, as they’ve basically been mired in that below-average-but-not-awful zone all year — compared to the Braves, who started off great and have had awful results since. A key difference, though: the Rays don’t have broadly poor fortune to blame for their offensive shortcomings — their team wOBA is .294 but their team xwOBA is .299 (compared to the Braves’ .311 and .326).
There’s another huge similarity between these two teams, too: they have both gotten an extreme shaft on barrels so far. We’ve talked a lot about how the Braves are doing near-inconceivably poorly on barrels so far. Well, the Rays are right there too:
- The Braves are just barely ahead of the Rays in the rate of barrels that become hits, with both teams clocking in right around 59 percent (league average is 67 percent); and
- The Rays are second to only the Braves in terms of barrels not becoming homers. Tampa Bay has just 36 percent of its barrels become homers; the Braves are dead last at 34 percent. (League average is 45 percent.)
That said, there’s a bit more than meets the eye here, too. The Braves’ barrel non-luck has been so frustrating because the Braves hit their barrels fairly well. The Rays, though, have the second-slowest average barrel in MLB, and the third-lowest xwOBA on barrels. (By comparison, the Braves have the third-hardest average barrel, and are middle of the pack in xwOBA.) The Braves have far and away the worst luck on barrels in MLB, and no one else is even close to how badly they’ve been screwed; the Rays are bottom three in this regard, but again, not too close to the Braves.
While the Braves haven’t hit for about seven weeks, their pitching has kept them from collapse. For the Rays, though, that hasn’t really been the case. While their rotation has been fine-but-not-great, they’ve, perhaps, surprisingly, had one of the worst bullpen performances in the game. For a team that has been lauded again and again for taking castoffs and who’s-that-guys and turning them into dominant arms, the Braves haven’t even managed to get replacement-level relief pitching so far this season. Tyler Alexander, Colin Poche, Chris Devenski, Erasmo Ramirez, and Phil Maton have all been flat-out awful, but have thrown close to 40 percent of the team’s innings (some of this is guys like Alexander pitching bulk, so counting relief innings is a little muddled, as usual). On the flip side, only Pete Fairbanks has been particularly good, and he’s eighth in their bullpen in innings pitched (again, due to stuff like bulk guy usage).
The rotation’s been a mixed bag — Zack Littell, Zach Eflin and (non-Zach/k) Ryan Pepiot have been good, while Aaron Civale has been really unlucky and everyone else has struggled. As for the hitting, well, oof. Isaac Paredes continues to do his crazy pulled-down-the-line-massive-xwOBA overperformance thing, but everyone else has either provided value largely through defense, or little real value at all. Randy Arozarena and Harold Ramirez were both big parts of the strong Tampa Bay offense last year, but have been absolutely horrible so far this year.
Friday, June 14 (7:20 pm ET, Bally Sports Southeast)
Chris Sale (12 GS, 74 2⁄3 IP, 74 ERA-, 61 FIP-, 63 xFIP-, xERA somewhere between xFIP and ERA)
Sale returned from a rare horrendous outing against the Oakland Athletics by dominating the Nationals with a 10/1 K/BB ratio in seven frames… but the Braves lost that game anyway, as they couldn’t overcome two non-homer runs the Nationals scraped together off Sale. Overall, Sale has largely continued to ascend up the pitching leaderboards; he currently ranks sixth in MLB in pitching fWAR with 2.3, but has one or two starts fewer than the five guys ahead of him. Among the 145 starters with at least 40 innings pitched, he’s fourth in FIP- and third in xFIP-; no pitcher in baseball has a lower FIP- and xFIP- than Sale.
Zack Littell (13 GS, 74 1⁄3 IP, 97 ERA-, 85 FIP-, 92 xFIP-, xERA a little above xFIP)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the Rays acquired a guy with a career 0.0 fWAR in over 170 innings last year off waivers. Now, he’s their best pitcher and an above-average starter. Yep, that’s Zack Littell for you.
Littell was really dominant through his first 11 starts, but two consecutive outings against the Orioles have really tarnished his line. He was at 93/76/85 previously, but had freakishly similar 6 IP, 3 R, 1 HR, 1 BB outings against the Orioles both times, with two strikeouts in one and three in the other, with the Rays winning the first but losing the second.
In true Rays fashion, Littell gives batters a confusing look because his primary pitch is a slider-cutter, and his main secondary is a great split-finger. His four-seamer surprises batters because he doesn’t lean on it to get ahead.
Saturday, June 15 (4:10 pm ET, Bally Sports Southeast)
Charlie Morton (12 GS, 67 2⁄3 IP, 101 ERA-, 99 FIP-, 98 xFIP-, xERA a little above ERA)
Morton will face his former team on Saturday and will likely continue his season of being pretty much average with weird component pieces from start to start. After a bizarre 6/5 K/BB ratio that somehow turned into zero runs against the Athletics, Morton managed a 3/0 K/BB ratio but had five runs (four earned) tallied against him by the Nationals. A glance at Morton’s game log suggests that this season he’s kind of like a last-minute box of chocolates snagged from CVS — chocolate is great so it’s fine, but you never really know what you’re gonna get, other than the confidence that it’s probably not going to blow your mind because again, CVS chocolate.
Ryan Pepiot (11 GS, 58 1⁄3 IP, 111 ERA-, 91 FIP-, 85 xFIP-, xERA just below 3.00)
Acquired in the Tyler Glasnow trade, Pepiot’s made big strides with the Rays, though a low strand rate has hurt him a fair bit in the box score.
Through his first six starts, Pepiot was inconsistent, doing stuff like dominating the Rockies (11/0 K/BB ratio) and Brewers (7/0 K/BB ratio) for six shutout frames at a time, but also getting crushed by teams like the Rangers and Tigers here and there. He then had two terrible starts back-to-back, but has seemingly turned a corner and dominated since. In his last three outings, he has a combined 24/1 K/BB ratio… but has nonetheless been charged with nine runs in those three starts.
Pepiot has a beautiful, maybe-close-to-ideal fastball both in terms of shape and location, so this could be a tough matchup for a Braves team that seemingly can’t decide whether they’re going to look for, or be able to hit, fastballs this season.
Saturday, June 16 (4:10 pm ET, Bally Sports Southeast)
Hurston Waldrep (1 GS, 3 2⁄3 IP, nope/nope/nope/nope, not posting this explicit content)
Highly-touted prospect Hurston Waldrep will continue the Braves’ six-man rotation experiment in the series finale and will try to do something less ghastly than his first career start, in which he completely fell apart the second time through and ended up getting lambasted by the Nationals. At least with a 1/4 K/BB ratio in his career to date, there’s nowhere really to go but up for the young right-hander.Z
Zach Eflin (12 GS, 68 2⁄3 IP, 109 ERA-, 93 FIP-, 94 xFIP-, xERA below FIP)
Eflin was incredible in his first season with the Rays, posting 4.8 fWAR across 177 2⁄3 innings of work, but has taken a substantial step back so far in 2024. While he’s not walking anyone at all — he has just four free passes this season — his strikeout rate has also tumbled. Eflin is pounding the zone like crazy, and while he’s not really being killed for it, he’s not exactly blossoming, either. His outings are pretty much the same every time — a few runs due to sequencing — and largely just hinge on whether someone deposits one of his pitches over the fence, which fortunately for him and the Rays, hasn’t happened that often. As a result, the Rays haven’t lost one of his starts since May 1.