The Atlanta Braves got plenty of comments throughout the NLDS against the Dodgers for the walks the pitching staff allowed. Were the walks truly the killer they were portrayed to be?
The Atlanta Braves have a moment today to look back on 2018, and then it’s time to really look forward to 2019. When looking back at the National League Division Series, one of the things that became a constant discussion was the walk rate of the Atlanta Braves pitching staff.
This wasn’t a discussion that was out of place completely. Since the Wild Card era came to be, and divisional series was introduced with the best-of-five format, the 27 walks that the Atlanta Braves allowed in their series against the Dodgers was the 4th-most ever allowed. It’s the most since the Washington Nationals allowed 29 in 2012. For historical perspective, the Seattle Mariners allowed 32 walks in 1995 for the most in a divisional series.
The narrative from announcers throughout the series was that the Atlanta Braves were screwing themselves with the walks allowed, and that is what cost them the games that they lost (and allowed the Dodgers to come back in game 3). Is that narrative true, though?
The numbers on walks
The team allowed 27 walks. Of those 27 walks, 7 of those walks scored. Three were put out on the bases as part of a double play or caught stealing. That means that of the 27 walks, 17 were stranded. That is a 63% strand rate, which is lower than the average strand rate of any player on base in general, but it’s still not the narrative that was heard throughout the series.
The Atlanta Braves walked 635 players in the 2018 season in 162 games, facing 6,155 hitters. That breaks down to 3.9 walks per game and 10.32% of hitters that come to the plate walk to first base. In this series, those rates were 6.75 walks per game and 18% of hitters reaching first via walk. These rates were high, yes, but the Braves were high as a team in both stats in the regular season, so this was something the team expected to some degree.
Walks certainly didn’t help, but the Atlanta Braves scored a total of 8 runs in the entire series. Outside of one inning against Walker Buehler in game 3, the Braves scored 3 runs over 4 games. This is an offense that averaged 4.69 runs per game in the regular season, 9th in the league. They averaged 2 per game in this series.
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The numbers on homers
SunTrust Park is known for allowing home runs in its two years of existence, but one thing the Atlanta Braves did exceptionally well in 2018 was to limit home runs. The team allowed 153 home runs on the season, which is an average of 0.94 HR/G as a team. The Braves allowed the third least home runs in the entire major leagues.
In the series, the Los Angeles Dodgers hit 8 home runs, which means that just the runs scored by the person hitting the home run alone equaled the total runs that the Atlanta Braves scored in the entire series. The narrative that the walks were daggers through home runs didn’t pan out, either.
The home runs that the Dodgers hit broke down as follows: 4 solo, 4 non-solo. In those non-solo home runs, the Dodgers drove in 6 additional runners total. Of those six, 3 were from walks, one was from hit by pitch, and two had reached base via a hit.
To call back to earlier, that means of the 7 players that scored via walk, less than half scored due to the thing that was really out of whack with the Braves’ 2018 production. When looking at what truly derailed the Atlanta Braves in this series, looking at the unexpected struggles (home runs, offensive struggles) is more productive than hammering on the expected one (walks).