It’s belt-tightening time for the Atlanta Braves with 2 weeks remaining in the regular season. What concerns do we have? Pretty much everything.
The Atlanta Braves finally figured out how to outscore the San Francisco Giants on Sunday, the finale of their season series with the NL West leaders: they had to shut them out to do it.
Normally, teams don’t go cold all at once, but that’s exactly what’s happened this week as the Braves…
- Lost 4 games in a row (while mercifully being rained out of their Colorado finale)
- Played 6 games in a row that were all decided by 2 runs or less.
- Scored no more than 5 times in all six of those games.
- Saw their NL East lead dwindle to a single game.
How bad have things been?
- Dansby Swanson’s bat has vaporized. He’s hitting .130 in September after a .320 August.
- Ozzie Albies: .211 in September despite hitting 5 homers.
- Teams seem more concerned about Austin Riley now that he was dubbed an “MVP Candidate”… he’s at .241 this month.
- Travis d’Arnaud? Had the key blast (in vain) this weekend, but .222 overall this month.
Those bats were the ones that have been allowing the “new guys” to do their thing without issues, but without them, players like Rosario, Soler, and Pederson can’t seem to do enough on their own.
Even Adam Duvall’s 6 homers, 15 RBI and .291 average this month isn’t sufficient in a vacuum.
Then there’s the pitching: after Morton, Fried, and Anderson it’s difficult to find a reliable 4th or 5th starter as Touki Toussaint and Huascar Ynoa have fallen back to Earth.
And don’t even get me started on Will Smith. Happily, somebody figured out that throwing the fastball might be a way to get hitters to stop sitting on his slider… at least for a while.
So this podcast is all about our collective hand-wringing. While we still expect that the Braves are going to hang on to the NL East… we are definitely less confident about that than we were just 2 weeks ago.
That’s especially true since our belief in the prediction is more about the failures of the Phillies than the successes of our Atlanta Braves.
So with two weeks to go… here’s this week’s podcast with the details:
- You can download it directly from here.
- You can catch it from your favorite subscription site.
- You can mash on the ‘play’ button below.
Regardless of how you choose to listen to us… thank you for doing so, and let’s collectively will this Braves team to some momentum this week — in San Diego and Arizona.