The Braves left Philadelphia with a split, and the oddest part is how they got there: by leaning into the kind of batted-ball choices that have made their offense look both dangerous and strangely inconsistent.
That tension showed up all over the series. Atlanta’s most common ball in play was a grounder up the middle, with a ball in the air hit the other way next.
Philadelphia’s profile was different, with fly balls to center leading the way and pulled and opposite-field fly balls tied behind them. But the real story was what happened when the Braves put the ball in the air.
On opposite-field fly balls in the series, they produced a .180 wOBA and .167 on 19 balls. On pulled fly balls, they were a completely different team: .809 wOBA and .665 xwOBA on 15 balls.
That’s the basic problem, and it’s not exactly subtle. Pulling the ball in the air is good.
Pulling the ball in the air is very good. The question is why Atlanta keeps drifting toward the other way so often, even when the contact quality says it’s leaving value on the table.
The season-long numbers point to the same strange split. The Braves rank 15th in pulled fly ball rate, but seventh in the rate of hitting fly balls the other way.
And that hasn’t been steady from month to month. Through April, they were 10th and 14th in those categories.
In May, it flipped to 26th and 4th. June stayed ugly at 26th and 15th.
July jumped to 4th and 24th. Since August, they’ve been 17th and 1st.
Even with that late surge in opposite-field fly balls, those balls have still been productive enough overall - the Braves have a .302 wOBA and .297 xwOBA on them since August - but that’s still not the kind of contact profile you’d choose if you were drawing it up from scratch.
Ronald Acuña Jr. is part of that conversation, though not in the simplistic way it might first appear. In this series, he showed he can handle pitches away and make something happen with them.
The opener started with a sinker a little away but in the zone, and Acuña drove it for a hard double into the right-center gap. A couple plate appearances later, he got another outer-half pitch and rolled it into a hard groundout to second.
He also turned around a similar pitch from Alex McFarlane and chopped it into an infield single.
Game Two gave more of the same. Acuña opened by pulling an outer-edge fastball from Zack Wheeler for a hard single, then homered off a Wheeler splitter that sat low and on the outer half.
Later, he knocked a knuckle curve from Aaron Nola into right field for a double after it caught the outer part of the plate, then followed that with a weak sac fly to right on a hanging changeup down the middle. He finished by homering off McFarlane again.
In the finale, Jesús Luzardo didn’t really give him much to work with away, and even the one fly ball he sent to right came on something close to an inside-out swing on an inside pitch.
So no, Acuña isn’t the easy answer here. He’s at least capable of wrapping the bat around pitches away from him and making contact that matters.
But the larger pattern still lingers. Since the start of August, he has a .320 wOBA and .227 xwOBA on balls in the air the other way.
On pulled balls in the air over that same span, those numbers jump to an absurd 1.053 wOBA and .877 xwOBA. That gap says plenty on its own.
And then there was Sunday’s homer, which was something else entirely. Acuña turned on a four-seamer that nearly bisected the outer edge of the zone and came in at 100.5 mph, then launched it to left for a huge home run in both distance and impact.
Among right-handed batters this season, the hardest outer-edge pitch homered on was 98.6 mph, hit by Pete Alonso. In the Statcast era, only one right-handed hitter had previously homered on a harder pitch on the outer edge: Avisail Garcia, who took a 100.7 mph offering from Ryne Stanek in 2017 and hit it the other way.
Acuña did it by pulling a harder pitch. That’s the kind of swing that stands out even in a series full of oddities.
The bigger picture, though, is that Atlanta kept doing what it does best in this series: hanging around, surviving weird outcomes, and splitting games it wasn’t expected to win. The Braves weren’t favored in any of the four, and the two losses came in the games with some of their lowest pregame odds of the season.
By the end of it, the run-production numbers almost looked balanced in a way that didn’t quite match the feel of the games. Atlanta finished the series with a .260 wOBA and .260 xwOBA.
Philadelphia came in at .284 wOBA and .327 xwOBA, with poor fortune and good defense shaping some of that gap. That doesn’t mean a split was some kind of neat mathematical outcome - it just means the games played out in a way that fit the Braves’ season.
Game 1 was a win for Atlanta, with the Braves at .303 wOBA and .269 xwOBA and the Phillies at .266 wOBA and .281 xwOBA. Some mix of defense and luck helped the Braves get through it.
Game 2 was a straightforward loss: Braves .248/.266, Phillies .352/.355.
Game 3 was the comeback win, with Atlanta at .350/.326 and Philadelphia at .278/.334. It was Game 1 again, only this time the Braves’ offense actually showed up.
Game 4 was almost absurdly low-scoring, with the Braves at .107/.160 and the Phillies at .224/.334 in a 1-0 game.
It’s a little funny that the Phillies finished with 0.7 more fWAR than the Braves over the four games and both teams still walked away with two wins. But that sort of thing has been a theme.
Atlanta is 85-59 and has 73 WAR-wins based on fWAR, and the gap keeps widening instead of settling in. At this point, there’s not enough season left for any of it to be “fixed” unless the Braves completely fall apart in September, and that doesn’t seem likely.
The team is fine. The results are just weird.
And somehow, even with the offense getting itself into some very strange places after July, the Braves still avoided the bottom falling out and left Philadelphia with a split.
In Other News...
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There are signs the slump is not simply about missing pitches, either. Olsons walk rate has dipped from last season, his damage against fastballs has gone down, and even with fewer strikeouts than before, the overall quality of his at-bats has not been there. Atlanta does not need a wholesale overhaul, but it does need Olson to get back to the swing adjustments and plate discipline that once made him so dependable, because the longer this drags on, the more it changes the shape of the lineup around him. [Read more 🡒]
Braves Ugly At Bats Put Tim Hyers Back Under Fire
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Luzardo took full advantage of that approach by getting Braves hitters to offer at pitches they should have let go, then turning those swings into weak contact. For a lineup built to punish mistakes, the bigger issue is how often it is helping pitchers escape trouble instead. The lack of plate discipline has followed Atlanta through regular-season slumps and postseason frustrations alike, and it keeps putting Hyers back in the spotlight whenever the bats go quiet again. [Read more 🡒]
Braves Rotation Gets A Huge Test As Reynaldo Lopez Returns
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The move also gives the Braves some flexibility with Bryce Elder, who will shift to the bullpen for the moment while he works through a minor knee issue. Elder is not expected to land on the injured list, but Atlanta is clearly juggling its rotation carefully as it tries to manage innings and stay healthy while Lopez gets back into the mix. [Read more 🡒]