The team with the best projections in baseball had the best April record in baseball.
Coming into the season, the Atlanta Braves were projected to be the best team in baseball. One month in, they had baseball’s best record. That seems like a wholly unremarkable set of events, but this April hasn’t felt unremarkable in any sense. Also, consider this: going back to 2016 (the first year FanGraphs playoff odds data are available), here’s how the best team finished April:
- 2016 (Cubs): 17-5, by far the best record in baseball
- 2017 (Dodgers): 14-12, 11th-best record, third in their own division
- 2018 (Astros): 20-10, third-best record
- 2019 (Yankees): 17-12, sixth-best record, second in own division
- 2021 (Dodgers): 16-11, fifth-best record, second in own division
- 2022 (Dodgers): 13-7, fifth-best record, second in own division
- 2023 (Braves): 18-9, fourth-best record
So, is it remarkable that the Braves were both projected for the best record in baseball and finished April with it? Kinda, yeah, since none of the best-projected teams had managed to appear at the tippy-top of the standings since 2016.
And yet, aware as you might be that the Braves won a slew of games in April and are still the only team with single-digit losses, do you think that the month felt dominant? I can’t answer that for you, but for those of you inclined to argue on the “no” side of the equation, I’ll give you one useful factoid. pLI is just a way to express the average leverage faced by a player or team — from 2018 through 2023, Braves batters had an aggregate pLI of 0.89 (2022) to 0.99 (2020). The dead-average plate appearance has an LI of 1.00; the 2018-2023 Braves teams batted, in general, in situations of average stress, or reasonably non-stressful ones. Yet, in 2024, the pLI so far is 1.08. That may not seem like a lot, but it’s pretty high — in the last five full seasons, only two teams have exceeded that mark.
The pitching end isn’t dissimilar, but is less extreme — the Braves’ pLI in 2024 for pitching situations is 1.04; past years ranged from 0.94 to 1.04, and over the past five years, no more than two teams exceed that each season. Basically, what I’m saying is that maybe the reason the Braves don’t feel dominant is that even though they’re winning, they’re not crushing opposing teams from the get-go, but racking up wins after games that are largely close.
You could read this as a bad thing, that the Braves are winning by consistently exploiting slim advantages and margins… or as a good thing, that the 2024 Braves are giving you interesting game after interesting game. I leave that up to you, but the reason I wanted to bring this up first is because the aggregate monthly stats obscure this to a decent extent, just like the record does. There’s no requirement that a team blow out other teams routinely to win a lot of games or be a good team, but if that’s your a priori mindset, the 2024 Braves might feel… weird… to you.
Anyway, the stats. The Braves went 19-9 in April. Their record was largely in line (give a take a fractional game) with their run differential, BaseRuns, and WAR-wins, and all of those were somewhere around tops in the majors or at the very worst, top three. They finished April second in position player value and wRC+ to the Dodgers, with above-average defensive and baserunning marks. Pitching-wise, the team reeled off an amazing stretch of performances to overcome a slow start, finishing tenth in MLB in fWAR for the staff (ninth for the rotation, 13th for the relief corps). They finished seventh in MLB in both ERA- and FIP- (85 and 92, respectively), and if want to feel even better about their outlook going forward, they were fourth in MLB in xFIP- (89).
Though the team’s xwOBA took a hit from the final series in Seattle, both due to the quality of Seattle’s pitching and whatever Pacific Northwest Blues that park sprinkles on offensive inputs as well, they still finished third in MLB in that regard. Unlike past Aprils, the team did not substantially underhit its xwOBA, for the first time since 2018 — given ostensible changes in the ball (again) and the fact that xwOBA clearly needs recalibration at this point (it’s off by .007 from wOBA), their offensive results have been somewhat better than they should have been to this point, but it’s a far less egregious example of outperforming inputs than what was seen from a few other teams in April.
If there’s one thing to harp on that probably matters more than all this, it’s something we’ve already lamented before: grounderitis. Despite having the league’s best exit velocity and other “how hard you hit the ball” measures, the Braves are currently getting out-barreled by the Athletics of all teams (okay, they’re fourth in MLB behind them and the Dodgers/Orioles, who also lead them in xwOBA, but still, the Athletics) because they just can’t, or won’t, and haven’t, elevated. The team still has a top-10 grounder rate and bottom-five fly ball rate; even being a top-10 liner rate team can’t salvage the damage that’s doing. If you break April into four “weeks” that include trailing days on the bookended weeks, then:
- First “week”: second-lowest fly ball rate, fourth-highest grounder rate
- Second week: middle of the pack in fly ball rate, ninth-highest grounder rate
- Third week: 19th in fly ball rate, 22nd in grounder rate (yay?)
- Final “week”: 22nd in fly ball rate, 10th-highest grounder rate
I hopefully noted some temporary improvement earlier, but it hasn’t really stuck that much. There’s a clear area for improvement here; the Braves are also talented enough to win even if they don’t get it, just like they have been. If you want another positive takeaway, though: last year, the Braves also had grounderitis early, with the third-highest grounder rate in baseball in April; after that, they never finished higher than tenth in a month. There was a similar reversal in a lack of fly balls.
Anyway, onto completely meaningless awards.
Totally Meaningless Ivan Award for April 2024 Performance – Position Players
One way to get people to stop talking about if you have a “slice” or otherwise habitually underperform your xwOBA? Have an xwOBA so high that it doesn’t matter. That’s what Marcell Ozuna continued to do in 2024, finishing the month with a .445 wOBA on a .469 xwOBA, after his 2023 featured a .381 wOBA on a .396 xwOBA. In total, only six players finished the month with a higher xwOBA than Ozuna’s; four of those six players had 13 PAs or fewer. Basically, the “higher xwOBA than Ozuna in April” club consists of Ryan O’Hearn (.497, 75 PAs) and Shohei Ohtani (.477, 149 PAs).
Ozuna finished 24th in position player fWAR in April with 1.3, despite eating the DH penalty every single day. Only eight guys with 30-plus PAs had a higher wRC+ than him. Only seven finished the month with more WPA. Oh, and he hit a game-winning three-run homer while the team was down to its last strike.
It’d be cool to have a blurb here about how Ozuna’s xwOBA was the best for a Brave in a calendar month in a long while, given that it was, well, over .450… but unfortunately for me and him, he plays on the Braves, who have stuff like Ronald Acuña Jr. putting up three different months with a .469 xwOBA or higher last year.
Totally Meaningless Ivan Award for April 2024 Performance – Starting Pitchers
The evolution of Reynaldo Lopez’ perceived role from the time of his offseason signing to now has been pretty amusing. Things went from “oh look, another expensive reliever signing” to “sure I bet they’ll give him a token attempt to start in Spring Training” to “well he might get some runway as a starter” to “he has to be the fifth starter because you won’t be able to stretch him out later” to “he’s not the fifth starter anymore because Spencer Strider got injured” to “bruh the Braves are once again, blessed with a surfeit of genius.”
Lopez has made five starts in 2024. The Braves won three of them. His worst FIP- in any start was 106 (twice). His worst xFIP- in a start was 109, and he only exceed 100 one other time. He only had negative WPA in one of those five starts. He allowed just two homers, yielded just ten walks, and averaged six innings a start. He bested his rotation mates in FIP- and fWAR (Chris Sale took back over the lead on May 1), and honestly, his xFIP- of 90 would be a lot better if not for the fact that he (successfully) navigated the third time through the order a fair bit.
Mostly, though, I’ve been impressed at how well he’s mitigated the Rule of 17 biting him in the butt, albeit in a small sample. His 27 percent strikeout rate is higher than any of his past rates aside from 2023, his walk rate is pretty similar to his career. His FIP- and xFIP- basically haven’t budged from his career as a reliever, which is really something given that it’s not like he’s been a 1.5TTO guy or anything — he’s been dominating lineups early on and surviving afterwards. What a value, even if he won’t be able to last in the rotation all year.
Totally Meaningless Ivan Award for April 2024 Performance – Relief Pitchers
One reason the Braves’ record has been as good it is has to do with the incidence of when bad stuff has happened to them while pitching. Namely, not particularly late in the game, with time to overcome it. The Braves entered May with the second-fewest bullpen meltdowns in baseball with ten; the Blue Jays then promptly had one on May 1 to put them into a tie for the Braves for the fewest. You’ve seen how brutal it is to have something like A.J. Minter give up a score-reversing, walkoff homer; you’ve seen how un-brutal it is to have Marcell Ozuna pull off essentially the reverse on an opposing reliever. Anyway, all of this is a roundabout way of saying that while I don’t generally think about appreciating Raisel Iglesias that much, maybe I should.
Iglesias’ April was fairly ho-hum for him; second on the team among relievers with 0.3 fWAR and a 57/61/84 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) where he ranked fourth, second, and sixth among the eight relievers the Braves used, respectively. But, he participated in five shutdowns to just one meltdown, and the Braves won the meltdown game, anyway. Some of that was not being cursed by off-the-bat infield dribblers like Joe Jimenez, but maybe “not being cursed by Luke Jackson’s ghosts” could be a reason to appreciate a reliever, in the end.
Sprinkle a bit more of the ol’ “relievers, what are ya gonna do?” on Iglesias, and the Braves’ April looks a lot less appealing. So, maybe keep whatever shaker you keep that stuff in away from the bullpen.
Best Offensive Play – Ozuna Saves the Day
You already knew it was going to be this, because how could it not be? Down by two, with two on and two outs, Ozuna turned a very likely loss into a very likely win:
I’m not even sure what else there is to say about it, that hasn’t already been said.
Best Run-Stopping Play – That’s Why You Don’t Put It in Play
Runners on the corners, one out, bottom of the ninth. You put it in play, you can get a sac fly or an RBI groundout or something. Unless you hit into a double play, which is exactly what happened with Raisel Iglesias facing Jeremy Pena.
It’s kind of cool when you get the one specific result that’s most ideal in that situation, and that’s what happened. It didn’t even take a fancy double play; Pena’s ball in play was about as perfect as it gets for ending the game right there.
Most Dominant Single Game Offensive Performance
It’s easily Ozuna in that April 14 game against the Marlins. Not only did he hit the come-from-behind game-winning homer, but he also had two other hits, including an RBI double, which you can see in this video:
This game Ozuna something like 0.97 WPA, depending on the specific WPA structure you use. That makes it the highest since 2010, when Jason Heyward had a two-out walkoff single against the Rockies, plus a go-ahead bases-loaded walk and another key walk earlier in the same game.
Most Dominant Single Game Starting Pitching Performance
I always think these are funny when they’re in losses, but I was going with this one almost no matter what. On April 27, the Braves threw Charlie Morton against the Guardians. In that game, Cleveland apparently did the reading and started just two right-handed batters. Morton, though, was (for once?) wholly unfazed, racking up a 6/1 K/BB ratio over seven breezy innings.
It’s one thing to cruise when you have a big lead, but that’s not what happened here, as neither team scored until Morton departed the game. So, this wasn’t just a smashing success against a lineup structured to give you trouble — it was that, but with a very low margin for any kind of error or miscue.
Most Dominant Relief Pitching Performance
Look, you stop a team from scoring a ghost runner in a fashion that not just sets up your own team to win (which the Braves did multiple times in April), but actually seals the win, you’re probably gonna get this. Thanks, Raisel Iglesias and the magical double play ball!
Most Crushed Dinger
Okay, so it hasn’t been the most dinger-full month for these Braves, ever. Far from it. But still, we had this:
Unsurprisingly, this is both the hardest-hit homer by the Braves so far this year, and the one with the greatest estimated distance.
Of course, part of the problem with playing a lot of close games is that it makes the bad stuff really bad when it happens. Cases in point…
Worst Offensive Result – Austin Riley’s WPA Vortex Continues
There’s a post, or maybe yet another in a series of posts, about the fact that Austin Riley’s ability to accumulate WPA appears to be cursed. He hasn’t had a positive Clutch score since his rookie season in 2019, because his career splits include a 99 wRC+ in high leverage situations but a 143 wRC+ in medium leverage. While this season, despite battling game-winning homers not quite happening due to increased drag on the ball, he actually has a 131 wRC+ in high leverage situations and a 72 wRC+ in medium leverage, this nonetheless happened on April 2:
Riley actually hit this ball pretty hard (98 mph), but that just made it easier for him to get doubled up en route to the Braves dropping a game to the White Sox. And, in addition to the loss, part of what stings is knowing that if that ball is a little more pulled, it’s a go-ahead double; if it’s a little slower, maybe it ties the game.
This also capped the worst single-game offensive performance for the month, as Riley had gone 0-for-3 before the brutal double play. Riley has only ever had one game worse than the -.400ish WPA he “earned” in this game, and it came back in 2021.
Worst Pitching Result – Welp
Like Ozuna’s big bail-out blast, there was no chance it was going to be anything other than A.J. Minter turning what once looked like maaaybeee a combined no-hitter into, well, this:
It’s kind of funny in a dark way that Minter’s strategy of “let’s just not walk people” devolved in this way — he fell behind 3-0, got arguably a gift strike, then threw a more conventional strike, and then… oops. He probably didn’t mean to throw such a meatball, and he probably wanted the 3-0 pitch to be a more definite strike, too, but however inadvertent, this was the dark side of his strategy. To date, Minter has still only walked two batters all season; perhaps unsurprisingly, his second walk came after he got burned by the Mariners and didn’t even throw a single pitch in the zone to Cal Raleigh after falling behind.
This was also month’s worst single-game relief pitching performance, because duh.
Worst Single-Game Starting Pitching Performance
Max Fried’s season got off to a terrible start, but something I want to highlight here is what happened when he took the mound for a second time, against the Diamondbacks.
Fried ended up facing a whopping eleven batters in the first inning. There was a leadoff homer, three singles in a row, a walk, and some more stuff, like Ketel Marte hitting a double in the same inning he had already homered. Fried departed that frame with the Braves already down 6-0. He then buckled down for a while and yielded nothing else until the fifth, when some more singles and defensive issues, including his own, made it an 8-2 game.
Yet, despite all that, Fried still managed a 5/1 K/BB ratio. So, for the ridiculous line that is a 14.54 ERA, 4.52 FIP, and 2.49 xFIP across his 4 1⁄3 innings of work in this one, I highlight it here, because the only thing worse than allowing eleven guys to bat against you in the first is having that happen in the span of what could’ve been at worst, an okay outing with some decent sequencing and ball-in-play stuff. (Yes, Fried did allow a .348 xwOBA in the game, but a .450 wOBA.)
Most Crushed Dinger Allowed
Speaking of Max Fried’s outing, it was this:
Ah, remember the halcyon days of early-to-mid April, when everyone was freaking out about the rotation and Max Fried being broken, and not the offense? I know I do!
See you next month!