The Braves may not be ready to pull back Austin Riley’s playing time yet, but the conversation is clearly there.
Right now, they don’t have many alternatives, and they haven’t made that move to this point. Riley also flashed enough in the middle of the season to make it look, for a brief stretch, like he might be turning things around. That hope has faded fast.
The latest stretch has been rough. Riley went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in the day game yesterday, then followed that with another 0-for-3, three-strikeout nightcap that also included a hit-by-pitch.
In the Orioles series, he posted a sub-.300 wOBA and a sub-.200 xwOBA. He had been productive in the three series around the All-Star Break, but in the two series since then, he’s slipped right back into the same struggles.
What changed during that better run was encouraging enough on paper: he was chasing less and swinging at more strikes. Since then, though, he’s gone back to swinging at just about everything.
That’s not ideal, even if it’s still preferable to sitting on strikes and expanding the zone on balls. The problem is that the contact hasn’t been there.
And the Braves aren’t getting much defensive value to offset it. Riley has been marginally below average or worse at third base in every year of his career by Statcast’s OAA-based measure, with the exception of his tiny handful of innings there in his debut season. So if the offense isn’t coming and the glove isn’t lifting the overall package, the only real argument for keeping him in the same role is the hope that he finally figures it out.
A couple of weeks ago, that looked possible. After the last week, the optimism has taken a serious hit.
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For a team trying to stay competitive while sorting through the usual midseason noise, that kind of message matters. Lindor has not produced at his usual level this year, but the Mets are signaling they value his long-term role more than any short-term temptation, at least through the 2026 season, even if the trade speculation around him is unlikely to disappear completely. [Read more 🡒]