Offseason progress in the NL East: the Atlanta Braves
We’ve looked at the Atlanta Braves’ rivals in the NL East and what they they’ve already done this Winter. Now it’s time to bring that home.
This series of posts on the NL East really would not be complete without also trying to remove the rose-colored glasses and taking a look at our Atlanta Braves.
First, here is a list of the prior posts in case you’d like to either catch up or review:
The braves were on the cusp of winning full respect around the league last year after catching the early front-running Phillies, then building and holding a lead as the Nationals were clawing their way back into contention after a terrible start.
But in this sport, it’s just as much about how you finish as how you start, and a banged-up Braves bunch were unable to mount enough consistent offense to overcome even a weak Cardinals club in the first round of the playoffs.
While that was happening, the Nationals seized the opportunity and won it all.
Atlanta did have their best season record since 2003 (97-65) and even had a real shot at getting to 100 wins when they shut things down over the last week of the season (1-5 record) to give starters extra rest.
Atlanta got a break-out performance from Ozzie Albies (.852 OPS, 24 homers, .295 average and a Gold Glove nomination) and had 3 players finish in the immediate neighborhood of 40 homers.
But then… everybody was hammering homer runs last year, right? We’ll get to that later.
Still, Atlanta leveraged a very strong and long lineup to score more runs than we’d seen since 2003 as well and fans responded with an extra 100,000 through the turnstiles to see an exciting club prove the experts wrong in 2019.
Now comes the hard part… busting through to that next level. Clearly, that will be made more difficult if their cleanup hitter – Josh Donaldson – isn’t wearing their colors once the team reports to North Port in another 6 weeks… yes, it’s coming that quickly!
As we did when reviewing the Nationals, we’ll make the assumption that the Atlanta Front Office is going to do something to replace that offense should Donaldson choose another home, but the difficulty here is that it may not be a position-for-position swap… that will impact the projections.
Meanwhile, let’s see what changed.