Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports
The Phillies are crazy hot and the Braves have already lost two of their best players for the season. This won’t be an easy run to the Postseason for Atlanta.
Let’s just roll out of the gate here with some basic numbers. In 2023, Ronald Acuña Jr. and Austin Riley played 159 games for the Atlanta Braves. Ozzie Albies played 148 games. Sean Murphy played 108 games. Spencer Strider pitched the most innings of any Braves pitcher at 186.2 innings pitched. The Braves were a juggernaut last season and they were a healthy juggernaut, at that.
This season, times have changed and not in a good way for Atlanta at all. Sean Murphy opened up the season with an oblique injury that caused him to miss nearly the entire first two months of the season. Ozzie Albies fractured his toe and was forced to go on the IL as a result. Spencer Strider pitched a grand total of nine innings over two starts before he suffered a season-ending elbow injury and now Ronald Acuña Jr. is set to miss the rest of this season after suffering a torn ACL in his left knee — just three years after tearing the ACL in his right knee.
Needless to say, the injury bug has finally caught up with the Braves and is currently enjoying a gluttonous feast. The clear hope for Atlanta is that this is as bad as it’s going to get and that the worst is not yet to come. If this is, in fact, the worst of it then the Braves still figure to be in good shape in the big picture. Heading into action on Memorial Day, FanGraphs is still very bullish on the Braves — they’re currently being given a 97 percent chance to make the Postseason in some way and they still have the third-best odds (11.5 percent, only behind the Dodgers and Yankees) of eventually being crowned World Series champions in the end.
With that being said, the road to October has suddenly gotten a tiny bit more complicated for the Braves. They’re probably not going to cruise to 100 wins anymore and what’s even more important is that they are no longer the clear favorites to win the division. As I mentioned in this space last week, the Phillies have gotten off to an incredible start and FanGraphs has tabbed Philadelphia as the current favorites to win the division at a 60 percent chance. The Braves are still being given a 40 percent chance, which means that it’s likely to be a two-horse race, but that’s the operative word here: It’s going to be a race and a serious one, at that.
That’s just about the only good news that there is for the Braves at the moment. Even without Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr., this is still a very, very good baseball team and should still have their eyes on the Postseason and going far in the Postseason, at that. Regardless, it has to be very frustrating to lose arguably their best pitcher and indisputably their best player for the rest of the season. They still have a strong pitching staff, as evidenced by the fact that the staff currently has the fifth-best ERA- in baseball (83) and the fifth-best FIP- (93) as well. While the lineup has been in a bit of a boom-or-bust mode recently, it’s still been enough for them to be comfortably in the top 10 of baseball when it comes to team wRC+ (109).
Photo by Kevin D. Liles/Atlanta Braves/Getty Images
Atlanta’s lineup still has plenty of thump in it without Ronald Acuña Jr.
It also helps that things should get easier for the Braves when it comes to the schedule. There’s been a lot of talk about how Philadelphia’s schedule has been very amenable for the first couple of months of the season. While the Braves haven’t been dealing with a nightmarish schedule by any means, they also have their fair share of relative cupcakes left on the schedule. Heading into Memorial Day, the Braves have the eleventh-easiest schedule left and that includes 20 games against the likes of the White Sox, Marlins, Angels and A’s. That also includes 10 more games against the Phillies, as the two presumptive favorites in the NL East haven’t seen each other since the Braves took two out of three in Philadelphia to kick off the season.
Those 30 games might end up being crucial towards deciding who wins the division and who doesn’t and so far, the Phillies have a leg up when it comes to beating up on the bad teams in baseball. The Braves will either have to be just as good as the Phillies have been against bad teams or they need to continue to being a major thorn in Philadelphia’s side when it comes to head-to-head matchups this season. Both figure to be tough tasks for Atlanta — Philadelphia has been absolutely lethal against the weaker teams on their schedule and the Braves will have to face Philadelphia without having Strider or Acuña as active players going forward this year. It’s pretty easy to see why the Phillies are now the favorites since the Braves now have a very large task on their hands to make it seven-straight divisional titles.
With that in mind, if any team in baseball seems to relish a challenge in the regular season, it’s the Braves. They famously won the World Series as an 88-win team in 2021 and did so after Ronald Acuña Jr. tore his ACL in his right knee in the middle of July. Their next act in 2022 was to overcome a 10.5 game deficit to the New York Mets in order to win the last great divisional pennant chase of the previous Postseason format’s era and they won 104 games in 2023 while basically only having three reliable starting pitchers for the majority of the season. While it’s certainly fair to question the Braves when it comes to the Postseason after the inglorious exits that they suffered at the hands of the Phillies for the past two seasons, this is a team that’s shown a masterful grasp of how to win in the regular season — no matter what comes their way.
The injury issues of 2024 figure to be the next major challenge for the Braves. They definitely have the talent to overcome these woes and they should still be a factor in the Postseason once October rolls around. Whether they’ll be NL East champions once again or a Wild Card team for the first time in a long while is certainly up for debate at this point. Either way, it’s not all going to go Atlanta’s way this season and most importantly, here’s hoping that Ronald Acuña Jr. can make another successful recovery from knee surgery. He’s done it before and it’s time for both the Braves and the sport of baseball to hope that one of the biggest stars in the game can return to form in the future once again.
