It’s been 12 months of this and there’s no end to it in sight with the way things have been going.
Hi folks! We’re entering June and the Atlanta Braves are still locked in the grips of a diabolically slow start for their standards. After Thursday’s action, they’re right back at seven games under .500 at 27-34 they’re fourth place in the NL East (fourth!) and have just got done getting swept by a Diamondbacks team that is treading water themselves. They finished that sweep in the most embarrassing way possible — the Diamondbacks had never won a game in 419 attempts in franchise history where they were down at least six after eight innings. The Braves had won 766 straight games where they were up by at least six after eight innings. They haven’t lost a game in that fashion since 1973. We witnessed some truly awful history from this team on Thursday afternoon.
Needless to say, things are looking very bleak! Honestly Additionally, we’ve gotten past my personal check-in date of Memorial Day, since that’s personally when I choose to start taking baseball standings even slightly seriously. Usually, however you’re doing around Memorial Day seems to serve as an indicator of how the season could go. I have no science or methodology behind this, it’s completely anecdotal on my part. With that being said, if Atlanta’s performance up to and through Memorial Day is any indication, it’s that it’s going to be a long, long slog for the Braves if they’re going to salvage this season.
Let’s start with the good news — yes, there is something positive to discuss when it comes to talking about the current state of the Braves. The good news is that there’s still time. Atlanta still has just over 100 gams left in the season and naturally, anything can happen over 100 games. Plus, this isn’t Atlanta’s first rodeo when it comes to struggling in the early portions of a season. The Braves won 97 games in 2019 but didn’t really get going until Mid-May in that campaign. You probably don’t need me to remind you that the 2021 World Series Champions didn’t clear .500 until August. The 2022 Braves were under .500 as late as June 3 and went on to win 101 games. The 2024 Braves struggled mightily and that bleak performance was still enough to win 89 games and make the Postseason. The Braves are no strangers to early-season struggles and if any club knows to treat baseball like a marathon rather than a sprint, it’s this team.
With that being said, it’s very difficult to see this team pulling off anything close to what they did in any of those seasons. Yeah, it’s impossible to predict the future and maybe we will be laughing about this ugly start to the season once October rolls around. Still, it’s hard to have any hope when this team just seems dedicated to going nowhere fast. In years past, the Braves reaching .500 probably would’ve been the end of it and that’d be when they’d start to reach the serious portion of the season. Instead, the Braves reached .500, actually got a couple of games clear and then slid right back into the seven game hole that they started the season in. It’s hard to see a resurgence coming when the team has already had one resurgence before seeing it peter out into a whimper.
Sure, the Braves could have another resurgence and eventually get back to and over .500 but at this rate, they’ve basically waited two months of the season trying to find themselves. They’re seven games under .500 here in 2025 and ever since last June, the Braves are 84-84. For the past calendar year, this has been a .500 ballclub on the nose. That’s 12 months of mediocre baseball and at this point, there’s really no easy fix in sight.
The Braves don’t exactly have a loaded farm system to deal from any more, so it’s not like we’re going to see any impact additions being made to the team. If the Braves are going to be active in the trade market, it’ll either be to add on a fringe player who they hope could maybe deliver a positive contribution here or there or it’ll be to start selling off parts for the future. Yes, selling at the deadline has become something of a viable scenario here in Atlanta and it’ll get more and more viable as long as this team continues to struggle like they have — and again, we now have at least 12 months of proof that this is just a mediocre ballclub at this point in time.
The weirdest part about it is that the problems just appear to be nebulous and it almost depends on something else going well in order for the other facet to fall off a cliff. This series was a prime example. On Tuesday, Chris Sale only gave up one run (or fewer) for the fourth straight start in a row. It didn’t matter because Atlanta’s lineup went completely nonexistent for eight innings before making the score look slightly better in a 2-1 loss. Less than 24 hours later, the lineup exploded for 10 runs and it looked like this was going to be a rare occurrence of the Braves cruising to a win. It didn’t matter because Atlanta’s offensive success coincided with the pitching staff picking just a wonderful time to have their worst performance of the season. Grant Holmes halfway blew a six-run lead. Scott Blewett and Raisel Iglesias all-the-way blew another six run lead as the Braves suffered a pair of losses back-to-back that both perfectly sum up their season so far.
They rarely ever put together a complete game. There’s always something missing — even in the wins, they’re either too close for comfort or depend on the other team having a nightmare of their own. The Braves have just been unable to assert themselves and that’s ultimately what makes this so frustrating to watch. They’ve shown plenty of glimpses of the great baseball team that’s currently hiding underneath all this muck and mire — the problem is that those glimpses just never stick around for long and they never come together to form a complete product. The entire operation is just piecemeal right now and again, it’s hard to find a solution that easily fixes it.
As I mentioned earlier, they’ve got Ronald Acuña Jr. and Spencer Strider back but if the baseball world has learned anything from the Tungsten Arm O’Doyle Show that Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout put on in Anaheim for a few seasons, it’s that you’re going to need a lot more than two players showing out in order to save your team. Ronald Acuña Jr. is giving it a try with the level of performance he’s delivered since returning from injury, but he’s not a god. Spencer Strider is showing you he’s not a god as he’s definitely had a rocky return from injury, himself. They’re great players, sure, but nobody’s a god that can just flip the script.
It’s got to be a team effort and right now, the Braves are just unable to come together as a team unless it’s to struggle — they’ve got the art of collectively struggling to consistently win baseball games down pat. Michael Harris II has got to step up. Ozzie Albies has got to step up. Those two in particular have been a black hole at the plate fso far this season and until that changes, this lineup is not going to come close to realizing its potential. Even if they come around, there’s always the possibility that with the way things have been going, Ozzie and Mike will heat up while we’ll see Matt Olson, Austin Riley, and Sean Murphy fall by the wayside. It just never seems like everybody’s clicking at the same time, which was the case for long stretches in 2022 and 2023.
The rumblings of a change with the manager are also starting to ramp up a bit though even with that, I don’t see how firing the manager would change the results for this season. Of course Brian Snitker deserves his fair share of the blame for how this team has performed in recent times but at the same time, it’s not like he’s been making any more or less tactical blunders on his own. Firing the manager would probably feel good and serve as a bit of catharsis for some fans but as far as the long run goes, it’s not a move that you’re making if you think that this alone would move the needle.
I don’t think that they’d get rid of new hitting coach Tim Hyers so quickly, either. While there’s something to the idea that the new approach that Atlanta’s offense has been detrimental to this team’s usual plate philosophy, I still think that the Braves as a franchise aren’t the type to firing a hitting coach right after they hired them. With that being said, it’s pretty clear that this team’s main weakness has been the inconsistency of the offense. Again, we get flashes of seeing what this offense used to be regularly capable of but this time around, those flashes are always brief and usually coincide with the pitching staff having a bad day. It’s just really frustrating to behold but it’s also something that I don’t think firing the hitting coach this early on would solve the woes — just don’t take a look at how the Mariners are doing under Kevin Seitzer right now.
Instead, it’s totally fair to start looking at the pitching staff and here is where I believe that the Braves have experienced a failure from the top all the way on down. While you can argue that the Braves might’ve been able to get away with simply using their own internal resources to address the gaps in their pitching staff (especially the rotation), it’s pretty clear that not enough was done to help shore up this crew. Fortunately, Chris Sale and Spencer Schwellenbach have both held up their end of the bargain and it feels like it’s only a matter of time and adjustments before Strider gets back into form. With that being said, the fourth and fifth spot in this rotation have been in flux for a good long while now and we saw right away that the Braves figured that their bullpen needed some attention based on how they’ve been trying to fix it since they broke camp with Héctor Neris as an important part of the bullpen.
It’s the edges of the rotation and the bullpen that have been frustrating to watch. For a team that went into this season with World Series aspirations, this strategy of building a rotation/bullpen on the fly seemingly won’t fly. It also doesn’t help that Raisel Iglesias has suddenly gone from being one of the most effective closers in the game to suddenly having no business being anywhere near the ninth inning for the time being. The Braves were gambling with their pitching staff and it appears that the club has rolled snake eyes in that regard. A lot of this is hindsight but a lot of this is also valid concerns for the team eventually manifesting itself in the poor performance that we’ve seen so far. Craig Kimbrel is coming up and surely that’ll fix it, right?
With no quick or easy fix in sight, it would appear that the Braves are stuck potentially in one of the worst positions any given sports team could be in: They’re bad on accident. The offense isn’t consistent enough to overcome any struggles this pitching staff has. This pitching staff isn’t capable of overcoming a lineup that goes completely blank on a near-routine basis. The coaching staff is in a state of flux where it’s hard to figure out if any type of reshuffling would actually help. There’s no significant help to look to from the minors, either. This is just an awful, awful position for the Braves to be in at the moment and the picture gets more bleak with each passing day where this team isn’t going in the right direction.
Plain and simple, the only thing that’s likely going to save Atlanta this season is if they get on another one of those hot runs that I mentioned earlier. However, this is the part where I feel like I’m going in circles because then it just goes back to the fact that we’ve had 12 months of this team essentially playing mediocre baseball as a unit, with no quick fix in sight other than “get good” and/or “get good quickly.” If the Braves are going to salvage this season, the players are going to have to save themselves from themselves. Otherwise, the Braves are looking down the barrel of a lost season at the moment — a season that, at this rate, makes 2024 look like the good ol’ days, in comparison.