Why have the Atlanta Braves been so bad on the road?
Atlanta's winning percentage for home versus away is way worse than what random variance would explain. Why do they struggle so bad away from Truist Park?
The 2025 season for the Atlanta Braves is a tale of two different teams.
No, I’m not talking about “the terrible 0-7 start” versus “everything that came after”, or “pre-Ronald Acuña Jr.” versus “after Ronald’s return.”
No, I’m talking about home versus away. Going into Monday night’s series opener in Citi Field against the New York Mets, Atlanta’s 22-15 at home, but only 13-26 on the road.
I had multiple requests for a deep dive into why the Atlanta Braves are a much more formidable opponent in Truist Park than on the road. Let’s talk about it.
The winning percentage on the road is an outlier
One of the first times I recall reading about this specific topic, winning at home versus on the road, is a 2012 book called “Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won” by behavioral economist Tobias Moskowitz and noted veteran sportswriter L. Jon Wertheim.1
In the book, they broke down the then-current winning percentages for each of the four major sports and found that baseball’s around a .541 winning percentage in your own ballpark. Interestingly, Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan was similar to MLB, at .533 and within the margin of error.2
But for the 2025 Atlanta Braves, their results have been a bit more…extreme. Try a .595 winning percentage at home, coupled with an atrocious .333 on the road. The run differential belies that this is somewhat statistically noisy, however, as Atlanta’s at +27 at home and -2 on the road.
Let’s dive into why and see if we can figure out why Atlanta’s been particularly bad on the road.
How much of this is the schedule?
My first thought is the 0-7 start, entirely on the road on the West Coast, was impacting these standings a bit. But believe it or not, the cold start is actually helping the Braves from a run differential perspective.
If you subtract that 0-7 start, Atlanta’s 13-19 on the road and that -2 run differential changes to +16 (144/128), meaning that their Pythagorean win/loss should be 18-14.
Hmm.
I also looked at the winning percentage of each, to see if it’s just a function of exceptionally tough opponents on the road.
It’s not.
Atlanta’s road strength of schedule is a .463, while it’s been tougher at home with a .495.
Another hmm, but louder and more emphatic.
Is there something skewing the results?
Let’s look for outliers here.
The first thing I dove into was looking for blowouts3, as they would have an oversized impact on the run differential and skew any sort of attempted measure of the team’s quality using that.
Atlanta’s road blowouts have a run differential of +22, while the home blowouts have a run differential of +13. Looking at the results so far, Atlanta’s more likely to win in a blowout than lose in a blowout with a 12-7 record in games decided by five or more runs.
I do think the one-run games could be skewing this a bit - Atlanta’s been monumentally terrible in one-run games this season, going just 10-19 and losing ten consecutive at one point.
And for the season as a whole, that’s absolutely an explanation for the macro performance: Atlanta’s +25 in run differential, a Pythagorean of 41-35, but they’re actually just 35-41. We’ve talked about this before - being so bad in one-run games can skew your actual record based off of the projection based on runs scored and prevented.
But that’s not satisfying. Is the actual performance of the team different on the road versus in Truist Park?
The Braves are worse hitters on the road
And it’s surprising how drastic it is.
Home: .257/.325/.398
Away: .233/.312/.372
Despite the lower slugging, it’s not a homer problem - the Braves have 38 Truist Park homers in 37 games and 42 road homers in 39 games.
Atlanta’s inputs show that there’s a bit of poor luck here - they have a home wOBA of .318 against an expected of .326 (-.008), but a road .304 against an expected of .328 (-.024).
That road underperformance is the 7th-largest in baseball; the Pittsburgh Pirates lead MLB with a -.036 difference on the road, although their xwOBA is just .305, 26th in baseball.
When you break Atlanta’s xwOBA struggles down by individual hitters, it’s a lot of underperformances and very few overachievers.
The only Braves hitters that are noticeably positive are Acuña (.081), Sean Murphy (.050), and Jurickson Profar (.045), with both Acuña and Profar representing small samples of a combined 59 at-bats.
But several Braves have been hit HARD by some underperformance:
It is pretty hard to be good on the road when so many of your power hitters like Matt Olson and Marcell Ozuna are plagued by significant underperformance.
(On the other side - wild to think that Ronald’s numbers could somehow get better, isn’t it?)
What about the pitching?
I ran this same exact search, but for pitching - what’s the actual wOBA given up versus the xwOBA?
Braves pitchers have been pretty close to their deserved stats on the road, as a whole: .316 wOBA versus a .325 xwOBA.
At home? .295 wOBA versus .315 xwOBA, a slightly larger difference but still not egregious.
But both the actual and expected numbers show that Atlanta’s pitchers just haven’t been as good on the road as they have been at home. The conventional stats bear this out, with a 3.24 home ERA and a 4.12 road ERA.
And who that underperformance has impacted is notable, as well - the three worst underperformances and four of the top five are all relievers, with Pierce Johnson allowing an actual .423 wOBA against an expected .347 to pace the bullpen at +.076.4 Scott Blewett, who was the designated extra innings man for a while there, firenan Aaron Bummer, and setup man Daysbel Hernández were the other notable relievers back here in the “underperformance” category.5
It’s a frustrating sequence - Atlanta’s starters, minus Chris Sale and his +.026 difference, are virtually all overperforming their xwOBA on the road, but then they hand it over to a bullpen that has a backend struggling with bad luck.
So, what’s the final tally here?
Here’s the TL;DR:
Despite facing an easier road schedule than home schedule, Atlanta’s both hit worse and pitched worse when not in Truist Park. A good portion of it can be chalked up to ‘bad luck’, and it seems to be clustered in the team’s power hitters and the team’s relievers, which has an outsized impact on the final results of games. But they’ve also inexplicably been worse overall on the road than at home, and we still don’t know why.
I also have a theory that playing several night games for series finales is manifesting in a negative way on the next road series, although it’s virtually impossible to quantify that without more info than we have as the sample size is so small. There might be something there from a league perspective, but not just Atlanta.
This poor road performance feels like something that will slowly start to correct itself, although whether or not the team can still be in contention when it does remains to be seen.
I’m a big fan of books written by economists, especially when they’re not about the economy.
Full context, I don’t know if this has been updated for the modern game after various rule changes, but it’s an interesting proposal I may work on this offseason and take to SABR.
Baseball Reference defines a blowout as a win or loss with a margin of five or more runs.
That’s a top-20 mark in all of baseball, BTW, minimum 100 pitches thrown.
Raisel Iglesias has just been bad, even with the overperformance of the inputs - .409 wOBA versus an .442 xwOBA
Easy. Refs/umpires "cheat" for the home team in all sports.
I'm 72. I realized this many decades ago.