Why does the Atlanta Braves offense struggle on the road?
The Braves offense has performed significantly worse outside of Truist Park
“There’s no place like Truist Park.” - Atlanta’s offense (probably).
I noticed this yesterday, prompted by premium subscriber Mike’s comment on the game recap for Tuesday night. The Braves have been significantly worse on the road versus at home, to the tune of 50 less points of batting average and 69 points of slug. Entering Wednesday night’s game:
Home: 20 games, .266/.331/.419, 4.3 runs per game
Away: 22 games, .216/.295/.350, 3.6 runs per game
But why?
Let’s talk about it.
Is this a valid sample?
The team’s played 42 games, almost evenly split between home and away. They’ve now had 753 plate appearances in Truist Park and 831 on the road.
Yes, that’s statistically significant for the team as a whole, but maybe not individual players.
General guidelines for stability in several common metrics is 320 at-bats for slugging and 460 plate appearances for on-base percentage. While individual batting average typically needs 910 at-bats for certainty, several other useful stats require much smaller samples - ISO power is 160 ABs, while strikeout rate is around 80 ABs.
On the whole, we should feel good that this actually means something, although obviously a larger sample would be more illuminating in this situation.
Is it the quality of opponents?
This was my very first thought - is it possible that Atlanta’s just faced tougher teams on the road versus at home?
The accumulated road schedule, using Wednesday’s win-loss percentages, is .470.
The accumulated home schedule, using Wednesday’s win-loss percentages, is .515.
I know that the road schedule being a lower winning percentage seems a bit implausible when they went to LA to take on the Dodgers and San Diego to take on the Padres in the first week of the season, but you have to remember that they also faced the Colorado Rockies and their .167 winning percentage for three games. Also, two sub-.500 teams from the AL East in Tampa Bay (.463) and Toronto (.488).
The home strength of schedule is also helped with the recent winning streaks of both the Cardinals (9-1 in their last ten games) and the Twins (10-0 in their last ten games).
So, clearly this doesn’t explain the discrepancy in performance. What else can we look to as a potential explainer?
Is it the park factors?
Maybe, but not in the way you expect.
You see, there’s a difference in the one-year park factors, which are just 2025 to date, and the three-year factors, which are more stable but also include the summer where the higher heat makes batted balls fly farther.
Under the one-year factors, required if you want to include Tampa’s Steinbrenner Field, the Braves have played in an aggregate 101.7 park factor, slightly more offense-friendly than a neutral park.
Meanwhile, Truist Park is playing to a slightly-pitching-friendly 99 so far this year. So it’s not that.
What could it be?
Something off the field, maybe?
It’s possible, and it might be self-imposed too.
Several of Atlanta’s road trips have had the unfortunate fate of starting after a night game in Atlanta the day before, wth the Braves losing both openers. Their first game in Tampa was a 6-3 loss coming after a night finale versus the Phillies that took eleven innings to complete. Their first game in Pittsburgh was a 3-2 loss, coming a night after going to eleven innings against Cincinnati in Truist Park.
We’ve seen this in the past - remember when the Braves lost two out of three to the then-Oakland Athletics in 2023? The night before the series, they played on Sunday Night Baseball and reportedly didn’t get to their hotel until the wee hours of the morning (Pacific time) on Monday.
While I understand the gate is important and so the team scheduled as many series finale games in the evening while school is in, that’s something that could be actively hurting the team competitively and needs to be fixed.
How much of this is just luck?
Ah, that old chestnut. This is something that eventually normalizes, but a smaller sample like this can still be susceptible to being skewed one way or the other.
There is something here, though. Using wOBA versus xwOBA, Atlanta has underperformed their inputs on the road by 27 points. At home, it’s been exactly even at .331 between the expected and the actual.
But this is illuminating as well. At home, Atlanta’s .331 mark is 14 points better than the road xwOBA of .317 and 41 points better than their actual .290 wOBA mark.
(To be clear, most teams do better at home than on the road, with the league average xwOBA mark when teams are in their own ballparks being .329 and .324 when they’re traveling.)
There’s also some batting average on balls in play luck here, too, with Atlanta’s home BABIP being .319 and their road BBIP being .262.
But I’ve got a theory, though, using wOBA and xwOBA that I want to test.
What if you take out the 0-7 start?
Yep, there we go.
Atlanta’s road wOBA starting after the season-opening road trip is .315 and the xwOBA is .328. Still a 13-point difference, but just barely lower than their home xwOBA of .331. If you take away that road trip from Atlanta’s splits, the team’s road batting average rises from .216 to .243.
The season-opening road trip was just so bad that it’s still skewing the team’s total stats.
While this offense isn’t the 2023 offense (and likely won’t ever be), it hasn’t been as bad as we think overall on the road this season. They just had a generational slump to open the season (while playing two very good teams) and then rebounded to be more of a .600 ball club since then.
And if they’ve been a .600 team since that road trip without Ronald Acuña Jr. at all and with only five innings from Spencer Strider, imagine what they’ll look like next week when both guys are back.