Takeaways from yet another Braves’ series loss to the Nationals

A disappointing and frustrating stretch for the Atlanta Braves continued Sunday with an 8-5 loss to the Washington Nationals. Atlanta is now 35-28 for the season and are now 9.0 games back in the NL East standings.

The Braves still hold a healthy 4.5 game lead in the Wild Card race, but at this point, that’s not much comfort, mostly because “haha everyone else sucks too” isn’t exactly a feel-good sentiment to hang one’s hat on. While all of the metrics point to a lot of noise and underperformance, this simply isn’t a good baseball team at the moment. There’s a lot of stuff that the Braves are doing right, but they can’t seem to actually translate that to a win, because they seem to do a lot more stuff wrong that actually tanks their chances of winning. Honestly, it’s pretty much the same story for any team that goes on a bad run: you find ways to lose, no matter what the underlying peripherals are. That is where this club is right now. It’s a far cry from successful runs this team has had over the past half-decade, where some aspect of the team (usually offense, usually via homer) picked up whatever else (rotation, bullpen, in-game tactics, defense, luck, etc.) happened to struggle at that particular moment.

Sunday’s loss dropped them to 2-4 on their current road trip. They have an off day Monday before facing a tough opponent in the Baltimore Orioles, one of the few teams in MLB that’s not stuck in neutral at the moment.

NL East Struggles

During the Braves run of six straight Division titles, they have dominated the NL East. After Sunday’s loss, Atlanta is 12-11 against the rest of the division. That includes a 5-1 mark against the Marlins. They are 3-3 against the Mets. Atlanta took two of three from the Phillies during the opening weekend and won’t play them again until July.

The Braves are 38-21 against the Nationals since the start of the 2021 season. They are 2-6 this season with Washington winning a pair of four-game series in the last two weeks.

Atlanta is just 9-15 over its last 24 games and are 16-16 away from Truist Park.

Rookie Starters Exist

Hurston Waldrep was the latest Braves pitching prospect to make his debut this season. Waldrep cruised through the first three innings Sunday before falling apart in the fourth inning. He allowed four hits, four walks and ended up being charged with seven runs in just 3 2/3 innings. His 1/4 K/BB ratio left a lot to be desired, even aside from the three-run homer he allowed. Waldrep may very well figure into the picture down the road, but Sunday he looked like a pitcher that needs more time.

Spencer Schwellenbach is penciled in to start Wednesday’s game in Baltimore. He looked okay in his debut, allowing three runs over five innings to the Nationals on May 29, but then was knocked around in his next start, charged with six runs over 4 2/3 innings against the Red Sox. The Orioles will present his biggest challenge to date from an opponent standpoint.

As of this writing, Atlanta hasn’t announced a roster move for Waldrep, but I’d expect him to go back down. The reason he was brought up was (say the line, Bart) to give the rest of the rotation an extra day of rest. It will be interesting, if maybe frightening, to see how Schwellenbach looks against Baltimore, and whether or not he sticks in the rotation beyond Wednesday’s start.

Timely hitting has evaporated

The Braves went 5-for-24 with runners in scoring position in the four games against Washington. That is skewed a bit by the 3-for-7 performance Sunday.

While Atlanta still ranks in the top 10 of the league with runners in scoring position, they are trending in the wrong direction. Entering play Sunday, the Braves were hitting just .209 with runners in scoring position since May 1. That was the third-worst mark in the league ahead of only the Angels and the Cubs over that span. They’re massively underhitting their xBA and xwOBA in that span in that split, but again, while they have time to mess around and eat that underperformance right now, they’re eventually going to run out of runway for it not really mattering.

Comforting or not, mostly everyone is terrible

Despite the struggles, the Braves have MLB’s eight-best record, and they’ve been ensconced there for a while now, though the Mariners are vaguely creeping up to them. Most of the league is below .500, and with the Padres trailing big at the time of writing, it’s looking like the NL will continue to have just four of the ten above-.500 teams in MLB at the moment.

It’s not really clear what the Braves can do, that they’re willing to do, to turn their fortunes around. The good news is that they can probably wait out some of the things that are plaguing them. But they probably can’t wait all of them out, and you wonder when you might start to see more of a sense of urgency in terms of, well, anything.

Part of the issue is that the Braves can’t seem to, or aren’t interested in trying to, sustain any potential component gains. For example, Matt Olson started the season with a good .372 xwOBA in April, but underhit it by .070. In May, his xwOBA dropped to the .350s, but he stopped underhitting it. In June, his xwOBA is down to a horrid .230, and while it’s not too noticeable because he’s now outhitting it a ton, it’s not a particularly great sign for the future. The Braves only have four player-months at this point where both wOBA and xwOBA exceeded .350 — Ozuna’s three, and Travis d’Arnaud’s April. They’ve had four others where the xwOBA hit the mark, but the wOBA fell short — and just one month with an unsupported wOBA above .350.

In a separate happenstance, the Braves have three of the league’s top 30 pitchers by fWAR, but have given them a bunch of extra rest, such that those guys have made just over half of the team’s starts despite being three-fifths of the rotation. Similarly, the expensive relief backend has thrown just barely over half of the team’s relief innings.

Basically: there’s plenty of time to figure things out because mostly everyone else is terrible. But one day, there may not be, especially if everyone stops being mostly terrible. The Braves are still ninth in net wOBA, and more importantly, fifth in net xwOBA… right now… but eventually there’ll be a point where standings inertia, if it’s working against the Braves, is too strong to overcome. At least, so far, it’s in the Braves’ favor.