Takeaways from Atlanta's series loss to the Tampa Bay Rays

The Atlanta Braves dropped two out of three to the Tampa Bay Rays this weekend. What did we learn?

The Atlanta Braves won only one of three contests against the Tampa Bay Rays this weekend, falling to 4-10. Playing in George M. Steinbrenner Field, the spring training home of the New York Yankees and the regular season home of their Single-A affiliate the Tampa Tarpons¹, the Braves took advantage of the smaller dimensions at times over the weekend but ultimately couldn’t complete the drill.

Let’s break down the good, the bad, and the ugly from the weekend series.

We are going to start a pitching dialogue

I’m going to be honest - the starting pitching is officially a problem.

The trio of Bryce Elder, AJ Smith-Shawver, and Chris Sale covered just 15.1 innings in this series with ten earned runs allowed, striking out eighteen while walking five. The math comes out to a 5.96 ERA and a 1.722 WHIP.

You can directly trace a throughline between the outings and Atlanta’s struggles to win the series, too.

Elder wasn’t bad through five innings on Friday - three runs on five hits, including a two-run homer from catcher Danny Jansen. You can win a game with that kind of performance from your #5/spot starter.

But Atlanta, being cognizant of the extra inning and rain-delayed marathon from the night before against Philadelphia, got greedy and tried to get one more inning out of the sinkerballer.

It backfired. Elder allowed two runs on three hits in the additional frame, pushing the Tampa Bay lead to four runs. Even though one of them was an impressive piece of hitting on an inside changeup by Christopher Morel, it still put the Braves in a hole that they couldn’t dig back out of.

Atlanta attempted to prevent that same thing from happening on Saturday, pulling AJ Smith-Shawver after just five innings. They then used four relievers, including closer Raisel Iglesias, in the back-and-forth 5-4 victory.

Which set up Sunday’s series finale. Needing to replace Chris Sale after just 4.1 innings with four runs allowed (three earned), the Braves asked Pierce Johnson to clean up the fifth inning and then go back out there for the 6th after a long top half of the inning. He allowed two runners to reach before eventually being replaced by Enyel De Los Santos, who gave up the three-run homer to Junior Caminero that pushed the Tampa Bay advantage to 8-3.

This isn’t even counting the pitch selection from Enyel De Los Santos in Sunday’s sixth inning - he threw seven fastballs in eight pitches to Jonathan Aranda, including all of the final four pitches being in the strike zone despite only having two balls in the at-bat. Consequently, Junior Caminero had the game plan to ambush a fastball for a strike and got one on the first pitch, hitting the decisive three-run homer.

There have been two issues with Atlanta’s staff so far this season that both manifested in this series:

ISSUE #1: Atlanta’s starters aren’t going deep enough in games.

With the exception of Spencer Schwellenbach, who has outings of six, eight and six (rain-shortened) innings in his first three starts, Braves starters are not providing Atlanta enough length in their outings. Here’s the average innings in each starter’s outings:

Chris Sale: 4.2+ innings (19 innings across four starts)
Reynaldo López: 5.0 innings (one start)
Grant Holmes: 4.0 innings (eight innings across two starts)
AJ Smith-Shawver: 4.2 innings (13.2 innings across three starts)
Bryce Elder: 5.0 innings (10 innings across two starts)

A lot of this comes down to pitch counts, with Braves starters being pretty inefficient in their outings (again, with the exception of Schwellenbach).

The frustrating there here is that while it’s entirely possible that several of these players are going to continue stretching out as the season progresses, there are players who are pitching normal-length outings, both for Atlanta (Schwellenbach) and outside the organization. This isn’t exclusively a Braves problem, but it’s significantly impacting Atlanta.

Chris Sale’s the one that’s hurting the Braves the most right now. While his strikeouts have maintained (24 in 19 innings) and his velocity has returned after some brief concern during his outing against the Phillies, he’s also not providing the type of top-of-the-rotation stability that allows the Braves to construct a pitching staff around him.

And this is out of character for Sale, based off of what he did in 2024’s Cy Young year. In his first four starts last year, Sale went 2-1 across 24.2 innings, striking out 27 with just six walks and three homers.

This season? 0-2 across 19 innings with 24 strikeouts against only four walks and three homers.

The area where it really hurts Atlanta is in the workload questions that the Braves need to answer this year. I’m a believer that Spencer Schwellenbach will be fine for a full-season workload; he threw 168.2 innings when you include his minor-league time last season. The same can’t be said for everyone else: Spencer Strider is coming off of a lost season due to elbow surgery, while Smith-Shawver covered just 93.2 between the regular season and playoffs (thanks to an oblique injury) and the converted reliever Holmes barely broke 100 between the minors and majors combined, finishing with 109.1.

The assignment for the Braves this winter was to find a way to replace Charlie Morton and Max Fried, who combined for 339.2 innings last season for Atlanta.

Chris Sale being able to repeat last year’s 177.2 innings, along with Reynaldo López ramping up from his 135.2 to more of a standard workload, was going to be a significant portion of Atlanta’s plan to replace the two departed veterans. Schwellebach pitching all of last year’s innings in the bigs was another big part of this.

The López part of the plan is already shot to hell. While Schwellenbach looks the part so far, Sale doesn’t as of now.

ISSUE #2: Atlanta’s relievers don’t have defined roles

Going into the year, we expected the primary setup men to replace Joe Jiménez (knee) and AJ Minter (Mets) to be the combination of lefty Dylan Lee and righty Pierce Johnson.

That’s not what Johnson’s done so far.

The curveballer has pitched four times in the sixth inning, once in the eighth inning of a loss, and he replaced Sale in the fifth inning on Sunday.

Lee has entered in the sixth inning twice, the seventh inning four times, and the eighth inning once.

But more concerningly, they and other relievers have been asked to bridge between multiple innings a lot more often than last season. While Johnson did it just once, on Sunday to clean up for Sale, Lee’s entered in the middle of an inning multiple times already.

It’s because Atlanta’s coaching staff isn’t confident in the bullpen mix - these relievers are being asked to sit down and get back up because they went into the game earlier than the pitching plan probably dictated, complicated by the fact that there is not enough arms that are trusted to cover every game.

To put it simply: the bullpen’s being asked to cover more innings with less talent. And it’s not worked out so far.

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The baseball gods are not happy with Matt Olson

Baseball, like many other sports, is a game of inches.

A cutter breaking one more inch to the glove side might be the difference in a whiff and a foul ball. An attempted base stealer might just get the hand in ahead of the tag if they get an extra inch.

And, as Matt Olson learned this weekend, an inch might be the difference between a home run and a single.

Atlanta’s first baseman, who played his 500th game for the franchise over the weekend, absolutely blasted some baseballs against the Tampa Bay Rays. The slugger put eight balls into play in the final two games and eleven for the entire series, averaging 97.4 mph on his exit velocity and launching seven at over 100 mph.

He finished with just three hits, all singles.

Was this just poor batted-ball luck that is going to normalize, or is there something more here?

My first observation was that the launch angles were poor on several of these - three of the four on Saturday had negative launch angles so all of them were ground balls, with one ending in a single and two resulting in double plays. While he elevated all four on Sunday above 0°, one was still just 5° and resulted in a groundout.

While he’s almost always been below-average at getting optimal launch angles on his batted balls - believe it or not, 2023 isn’t the exception, it’s 2024 - it’s been taken to the extremes this year with a 20% Launch Angle Sweet Spot rate, just 7th percentile in the entire league.

(LA Sweet Spot is defined as getting the ball out between 8 and 32 degrees, while Hard Hit Rate is your percentage of batted balls at 95 mph exit velocity or higher. When you combine both of those, it’s usually a Barrel and those disproportionately end up as home runs.)

While I’m not the best at analyzing and breaking down swings, I did notice in the data that Matt Olson’s setup at the plate is slightly different this year. He’s set up slightly deeper in the box, farther away from the plate, and has his legs set farther apart. While it’s not a huge difference in the raw numbers as far as inches (and he’s still exactly 8° open in his stance, same as last year), it’s something interesting.

Ultimately, I do think that most of his struggles are down to underperformance on the batted ball numbers, though. His expected batting average versus actual batting average spread² is 46 points in batting average, 197 points of slug, and 78 points in wOBA. Things like this weekend - getting a single out of a ball hit off the very top of the wall in left-center - are the result of being stuck in a stretch of bad batted ball luck.

Questions about the corner outfield

Jarred Kelenic has drawn a lot of walks in the last week, picking up five free passes in the last seven games alone (a stretch where he’s batting .231), but it doesn’t outweigh the negatives.

The outfielder has a slash of .162/.262/.270 with one homer and those five walks opposite sixteen strikeouts. To make matters worse, his situational hitting is even worse: he’s hitless in nine opportunities with runners in scoring position and has four strikeouts in five at-bats in what MLB calls “late or close” situations³ - the final three innings of the game and the score within striking distance.

And unlike Olson, this average is earned, as well. His .162 average is actually an overperformance of his .147 xBA and his actual slugging is 51 points higher this his expected.

Combine that with his defensive issues on Sunday - he made a throwing error on an attempted backpick that gave the runner on first two additional bases (he would go on to score, unearned) and then declined to throw home on a shallow fly ball that fell in front of him in right field despite first baseman Yandy Díaz being the runner trying to score from second base.⁴

With outfielder Alex Verdugo having hit two homers in his first week in Gwinnett (although still batting just .182 after his first seven games), it feels increasingly likely that Kelenic, not Bryan De La Cruz, might be the first corner outfielder sent down to Gwinnett this season.

Not that De La Cruz is doing much better, mind you. While he is sitting on a slight underperformance of his batted ball profile, he’s also struck out sixteen times against just three walks, has no hits with runners in scoring position (in eight attempts) and doesn’t possess the defensive chops to cover center like Kelenic does.

While Verdugo’s removal from Gwinnett’s finale on Sunday supposedly wasn’t call-up related - David O’Brien of The Athletic relayed on Sunday night that Verdugo was given the rest of the game off after playing all fourteen innings of a doubleheader the day earlier - it certainly looks like only a matter of time before Verdugo joins the Braves and one of those two outfielders, likely Kelenic, becomes a member of the Stripers.

What’s next for the Braves?

Atlanta takes on the Toronto Blue Jays to wrap their road trip before heading home. While the Braves haven’t officially announced Spencer Strider as the starter for Wednesday’s “TBD” slot, team officials indicated today that he’d be making his 2024 debut barring an unexpected setback over the next day or two. Grant Holmes (vs Easton Lucas) and Spencer Schwellenbach (versus old friend Kevin Gausman) will get the ball in the first two days of the series, while Strider will match up with veteran Chris Bassitt.

1. A tarpon is a saltwater fish that is a popular game fish in Florida.

2. Entering Sunday’s action - Statcast updates overnight and I’m writing this during Sunday Night Baseball

3. Officially, this is the batter’s team trailing by three runs or fewer, tied, or ahead by only one run. To add on to this, if the bases are loaded and the score’s within four, it’s called a “late-inning pressure situation” or “LIPS” and that’s in this data, too.

4. 24.4 ft/sec for Yandy this season, 8th percentile is all of baseball.