They certainly haven’t out-walked them. Har.
This is not a long post. It’s really a table. I could blather, but really, you just need the table.
Okay, that’s a big table, and maybe it’s a little hard to read. If you’re intrepid, you can stick with the table. But I’ll try to break it down for you.
First, let’s cut out all the team rank bits, and just look at the numbers.
There we go, that’s a bit less of a table for ants. Here’s the story, by this table.
- In 2024, the Atlanta Braves were good offensively in April, not-so-good in May through July, and then got back on the horse down the stretch. In 2025, they’ve been trending down, from meh to bad.
- But wait! The big issue for the Braves in 2024 was that three-month stretch where their inputs were much worse than their outputs. And in 2025, guess what: their inputs are much worse than their outputs.
That’s really it, that’s the story. Whatever rigamarole the Braves did, or didn’t do, to avoid having 2024 happen again, in terms of offensive underperformance? Well, sorry, but it’s happening again. Add in a pinch of “and now you will also underperform on grounders in June 2025,” and you have a recipe for a sub-.300 team wOBA in June. “Fun.”
Want to see the ranks? Sure.
It’s not any different, it’s just funnier or sadder or both. Somehow, amid all the other problems, the Braves have been plagued with the league’s worst xwOBA underperformance in June. The kicker is that on a calendar month basis, they still haven’t ever had a below-average xwOBA. But, through nine months, they’ve had an above-average wOBA in three of them. They had a horrendous time getting “fair” results on fly balls and barrels in 2024. Nothing’s changed in that regard, either.
They are certainly walking a lot more — from just outside the top ten in April and May, to third in MLB in June, giving them the league’s fourth-highest walk rate overall. It hasn’t ameliorated anything; adding those guaranteed, not-possible-to-vary from xwOBA walks to the ledger has done nothing.
The team went from one attempting to slug (third in xSLG in 2024) and still succeeding (ninth in SLG in 2024) to one not really attempting it (14th in xSLG in 2025) and still getting screwed to basically the same extent (21st in SLG in 2025). I’m not saying “there’s no escape” because there’s some universe where the Braves are romping because they have the league’s sixth-best wOBA from outhitting their xwOBA the way the Reds have this year, but that’s not this universe. So, there’s no escape for these Braves. Whatever they tried to do to mitigate the problems in 2024 — well, it’s back to the drawing board for them at this point.