Braves Offense Unluckiest in MLB, Data Scientist Claims

The Atlanta Braves had a lot to live up to entering the 2024 season.

Last year's offense tied the MLB record with 307 homers, was the first team in history to have a collective slugging over .500, and easily paced all of baseball in runs with 947. This season, however, has been frustrating, with largely the same roster currently sitting at just 534 runs, twelve below the MLB average of 546.

Fans have mostly chalked it up to some sort of shenanigans with the baseballs early in the season, with many speculating that some sort of change by MLB was causing them to fly not as far, combined with the impact of injuries that have touched almost every single player in the batting order with the exception of Marcell Ozuna (who has been hot all year) and Matt Olson (who has not).

But what if there was another explanation?

Derek Grifka , a data scientist and baseball fan, has a Twitter/x account called MLB Deserve-To-Win-O-Meter where he dives into batted ball data and uses expected outcomes versus actual outcomes to simulate previous games. Know the xBA (expected batting average) metric on MLB Statcast, the one that looks at how hard a ball was hit and the launch angle and tells you what batting average that batted ball usually has? It's that, but for a whole game.

And he's high on the Atlanta Braves.

In a Sunday morning update to his "pot-o-gold" chart, which measures luck and the swings between expected and actual outcomes, he explains that based on inputs, the Braves are the unluckiest team in all of MLB.

The Braves, per his data, have had 23 more games where they were unlucky - that is, they underperformed their expected inputs. The next closest "unlucky" team is the New York Yankees, at -15, with only three additional teams even in double digits. The gap between Atlanta and 29th-place New York is the same as the gap from New York to the 24th-place Minnesota Twins.

Additionally, as he explains in later tweets, the team's average win probability has been 61%, the highest in baseball, with the favored team winning 69% of the time. Their actual winning percentage is just .528, so more than 8% lower than their win probability.

This is why the coaches didn't seem worried

Something that has been frustrating fans of the Atlanta Braves all season was how...nonchalant team officials have been about the struggling offense.

Looking at this chart, it's easy to see why - the most logical outcome was the offense beginning to improve due to just natural regression, based on the fact that they've continually been near the top at several offensive inputs like exit velocity, barrels per plate appearance, and hard-hit rate.

And that's exactly what happened.

Over the last thirty days, the Braves lead all of baseball in home runs with 53, a full five homers ahead of the next closest team, the New York Yankees. Several of Atlanta's other stats - OPS (.758, 7th), slugging (.445, 6th) - have also come up towards historic norms and closer to the inputs the Braves are producing.

But runs have still been at a premium at times, owing to Atlanta's struggles at getting base hits and runners on base for when those homers are hit. In that same time span, the Braves have the 11th-lowest batting average at .240 and the 13th-lowest on-base percentage at .313.

This is a team built to slug homers, not string together three or four consecutive hits to bring guys in.

Injuries have absolutely played a role - as Alex Anthopoulos said, "it's hard to replace an All-Star" - but it's not just the lack of certain stars in the lineup that has minimized Atlanta's offensive production this season.

But luckily, that also means that the Braves offense can get hot at any time. Braves legend and Hall of Famer John Smoltz told me this spring that a team only needs three things to win in the postseason: Three hot starters, three hot relievers, and three hot hitters.

All three position groups for the Atlanta Braves are capable of producing three members that could go en fuego in a playoff series.

Let's hope it happens.