Pressed into the middle of the lineup by injuries, the moment keeps finding the Braves’ shortstop
Offensively, so far, the Braves are not having the season they wanted to. Orlando Arcia is definitely not having the offensive season he wanted to. After outhitting his xwOBA a fair bit to end 2023 with a 99 wRC+, Arcia’s hitting ability has tumbled severely in the early going. While the 90 wRC+ is livable, it’s driven by him outhitting his pathetic .250 xwOBA by nearly .050. Is “pathetic” too harsh a term here? Not at all. Among the 107 players with 180 or more PAs so far this season, Arcia’s .250 xwOBA ranks dead last. Even if you lower the cutoff to 100 PAs, to get pretty much every regular and semi-regular active so far this season, Arcia still figures into the bottom ten. He’s also one of just three guys to be hitting that poorly inputs-wise with enough of an overperformance cushion to have something resembling league-average outputs.
Offensively, his issues are myriad. It’s important to keep in mind that while his viewing of the famed PowerPoint has become a part of recent Braves lore at this point, Arcia was never really that great at integrating The Approach as we know it. While the Braves, as a whole, swing at lots of strikes, miss lots of strikes, and do tons of damage when they connect, Arcia was relatively passive in terms of swinging in 2023, and his z-whiff was essentially league-average. His contact quality, correspondingly, was also pretty average; while a vast improvement over his time with Milwaukee, he hit a ton of weak, pull-side grounders. Basically, The PowerPoint was perhaps partially successfully at assimilating Arcia into the Braves’ hivemind.
Part of this partial success can potentially be attributed to an evolving approach. Arcia started the season largely eschewing breaking pitches until July, where he swapped towards hunting them and laying off of fastballs, before reverting.
This had kind of a weird effect on his season, as he posted a nice .355 xwOBA in April and then saw it decline as pitchers realized gradually realized what he was doing (he had a huge spike in breaking pitches seen in June, plunging his xwOBA to .270). He was able to exploit this in July en route to a best-month-in-season (.359 xwOBA), but then August and September were fairly muddled. He ended the season on a big skid as pitchers went back to the fastball, something he recognized but struggled to keep up with, perhaps due to just end-of-season fatigue, or maybe because he was trying to juggle his second half breaking-ball-first approach while also occasionally trying to punish a fastball.
Come 2024, though, things are much more sinister than a guy playing rope-a-dope with pitchers to varying degrees of success. Arcia is now swinging at pretty much everything in the zone, making the same rate of contact as 2023 but on a greater share of pitches. Last year, he knew what he wanted (middle-in, middle-and-above) and did damage on a lot of it; this year he’s diversified his swing palate to include stuff away as well as low-and-in, too. In addition to pitches in those areas diluting his contact quality because he offers at them more, whether because he’s less locked in to a specific zone, or for an unrelated reason, his contact quality on anything that isn’t just down the middle has fallen apart.
Long story short, Arcia’s offensive problems are myriad at this point, and he could probably stand to be a lot more judicious about the types of fastballs he goes after, like he did early last year. If nothing else, it might improve the absurdly high rate of rollover, pulled grounders he’s managed in the early going. If he wants to flip to hunting breaking balls, that’d be fine too, but the same concept about swinging out of his shoes only at the stuff he thinks he can mash, and leaving everything else to the whim of the umpire, should be the prerogative.
But, I titled this post “Orlando Arcia’s wild win expectancy ride,” and we haven’t even gotten there yet. I just felt it would make less sense without the above context. So, here’s the deal:
- From May 10-onward, the Braves have played 13 games.
- Orlando Arcia has led the team’s hitters in WPA in three of those games.
- Orlando Arcia has had the lowest WPA among the team’s hitters in seven of those games, including both games of the doubleheader against the Padres.
- That leaves just three games where he wasn’t at the top or the bottom.
This, in and of itself, is wild. We’re talking not just a guy who has been the win expectancy laggard in over half of the team’s games in a two-week span, but also a guy who managed to be the leader in three others. If you take into account the fact that Arcia has also been the leader and laggard three times each in the period before these last two weeks, he’s been a laggard in 13 of the team’s 47 games (28 percent, nearly triple the “expected” rate assuming all hitters are equally likely to be the laggard in any given game).
Just because it’s wild doesn’t mean there isn’t an obvious explanation. Arcia has been thrust into the fifth spot in the lineup by injuries to Austin Riley and Travis d’Arnaud, as well as the fact that Michael Harris II and Jarred Kelenic have their own multifaceted problems at the dish. Marcell Ozuna has an OBP north of .400; in the May 10-onward span, Matt Olson’s non-impressive .333 OBP is second among regulars, too. Arcia, approach problems, tendency for suboptimal contact on the ground, and all, is right in the thick of things, which is not that great.
Note that I’m not arguing for anything from a lineup perspective, necessarily — this is just what happens when you’re down multiple good hitters and you have a trio of guys (Arcia, Harris, Kelenic) struggling pretty badly. It’s more just a general lament that maybe if Arcia wasn’t struggling, say, by just doing what he did in 2023 and taking advantage of his sweet, sweet, .050-point xwOBA overperformance, things could look quite different. Instead, he and the Braves will just have to muddle through, and absent a beneficial approach adjustment, hope that he can keep sneaking grounders through the left side like he was managing to do early in the season.
I’ll end on a positive note, though. You know how Arcia has a below-average batting line buoyed only by a massive outperformance of his batting inputs? Well, get this: he’s nonetheless easily on pace for a career-best season. He finished last year with 2.3 fWAR in 533 PAs (2.6/600). This year, he’s already at 1.1 through just 184 PAs (3.6/600). Why? Because the defense has been on the pointiest of points. In 2023, Arcia started the season with some dropped pop-ups and other nastiness, and while he played great defense in May and June, that early stuff and some late-season lapses put him at “just” +3 OAA-runs for the season. So far in 2024, he’s already at +5. He’s one of just 14 defenders with five runs above average already racked up, and is in a virtual tie for the fifth-most defensive value accrued this season after accounting for position. Yes, that means he’s above all but one catcher, for one thing.
This has actually been a thing for the Braves as a whole this season: the defense has been essentially elite, even as the hitting has suffered from overall underperformance in both the expectations and actual balls in play sense. Still here’s hoping that Arcia makes the adjustments he needs to maybe pass the “laggard way too often” mantle onto someone else, if not help the team yeet it in the dumpster altogether.