What to remember from another Braves loss to the Nationals

A disappointing and frustrating streak for the Atlanta Braves continued Sunday with an 8-5 loss to the Washington Nationals. Atlanta is now 35-28 for the season and is now 9.0 games behind 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, mainly because “haha, everyone else sucks too” isn’t really a feeling of well-being to hang your hat on. While all metrics point to a lot of noise and underperformance, this just isn’t a good baseball team right now. There are a lot of things the Braves are doing right, but they can’t seem to translate that into winning because they seem to be doing a lot more wrong things that hurt their chances of winning. Honestly, it’s pretty much the same story for any team that’s having a bad run: you find ways to lose, regardless of the underlying devices. This is where this club is currently located. It’s a far cry from the successful runs this team has had over the past five years, where certain aspects of the team (generally offensive, usually via a home run) have taken over everything else (rotation, bullpen, game tactics, defense, luck, etc.) was in difficulty at that precise moment.

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

NL East Struggles

During the Braves’ run of six consecutive division titles, they 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 won two of the Phillies’ three games in 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 two four-game series in the last two weeks.

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

There are beginners beginners

Hurston Waldrep was the last Braves prospect to debut this season. Waldrep made it through the first three rounds on Sunday before collapsing in the fourth round. 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 outside of the three-run home run he allowed. Waldrep could very well figure into the picture later, but on Sunday he looked like a pitcher who needs more time.

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

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

The opportune shots evaporated

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

While Atlanta still ranks in the top 10 in 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. It was the third-worst mark in the league ahead of only the Angels and Cubs over that span. They are massively underestimating their xBA and xwOBA over this period, but again, even if they have time to mess around and eat up this underperformance right now, they will eventually run out of runway because it doesn’t doesn’t really matter.

Comforting or not, most of the time everyone is terrible

Despite the struggles, the Braves have the eighth-best record in MLB, and they’ve been there for a while now, although the Mariners are vaguely closing in on them. Most of the league is below .500, and with the Padres trailing at the time of writing, it appears the NL will continue to have just four of ten teams above .500 in MLB at the moment.

We don’t really know what the Braves can do, what they are willing to do to turn things around. The good news is that they can probably wait out some of the things that are tormenting them. But they probably can’t wait for them all, and you wonder when you might start to feel more of a sense of urgency in terms of, well, anything.

Part of the problem is that the Braves can’t seem to, or aren’t interested in, trying to maintain potential component gains. For example, Matt Olson started the season with a healthy .372 xwOBA in April, but underachieved by .070. In May, his xwOBA fell to .350, but he stopped underachieving. In June, his xwOBA fell to a horrible .230, and while that’s not too noticeable because it’s now over him by a ton, it’s not a particularly good sign for the future. The Braves have only four months of player at this point, where wOBA and xwOBA have exceeded .350 – Ozuna’s three and Travis d’Arnaud’s April one. They’ve had four more where the xwOBA hit the target, but the wOBA failed – and only one month with an unsupported wOBA above .350.

In another case, the Braves have three of the league’s top 30 pitchers according to fWAR, but have given them plenty of extra rest, so those guys have made just over half of the team’s starts well that they are three-fifths of the rotation. Likewise, the expensive relief system pitched just over half of the team’s relief innings.

Basically: we have plenty of time to figure things out because most of the others are terrible. But one day there might not be any more, especially if everyone stops being terrible. The Braves are still ninth in net wOBA, and more importantly, fifth in net xwOBA…for now…but there will eventually be a point where the rankings inertia, if playing the Braves, will be too much strong to be overcome. At least, so far, it’s in the Braves’ favor.