Behind a playoff-worthy start by Bryce Elder and an MVP-worthy night by Ronald Acuña, Jr., the Braves crushed the Pirates 8-2. Because the Phillies lost to the Marlins, the division lead is 15 and the magic number is 8. Things are going pretty well.
RAJ hit homer number 35, his 6th homer in the last eight games, and had two other hits. Orlanda Arcia also had three hits, and Eddie Rosario had two, including a two run dinger himself. Matt Olson also contributed a couple of hits, although believe it or not neither of them left the yard. In other words, a typical offensive night for this team—8 runs and 12 hits.
We’ve gotten used to that kind of offense. To me, the most impressive performance, and one which holds promise for October baseball, was by Elder. He went seven innings, striking out nine, giving up just four hits. The only runs he surrendered came on a two run homer in the sixth after the Braves had already built a commanding lead.
I have a good friend who lives in another state. He’s a huge baseball fan, but he doesn’t watch the Braves on a regular basis. He is very serious about his fantasy team. Early this season, after Elder had gotten off to a good start, my buddy called me and asked if he should pick up Elder for this team. I told him that although I admired the guy for getting as far as he had, I didn’t expect his success to continue. His stuff was nothing special, and he needed to rely on pinpoint command. Basically, there was very little margin for error with the guy, and I was skeptical that he could keep it up.
I’m pleased to say I was wrong about that.Elder’s stuff is actually pretty impressive, even though he doesn’t throw in the mid-nineties. I was watching last night on a big screen TV and I could see his pitches much better than on my home TV. His slider has great downward movement, and he consistently threw it at the bottom of the zone. Bucs batters swung over it all night long. His other main pitch is a two seamer that also has excellent movement. It darts in the opposite direction as the slider, of course, and when he keeps it on the edges of the plate it is also very tough to hit. Several times he threw it inside to lefty batters and it jumped at the last minute to the inside corner. I’m not comparing him to Greg Maddux, but that pitch at least is very reminiscent of Mad Dog. Of course Elder needs to have good command (who doesn’t?), but when he does he can miss bats, and more importantly induce weak contact. I know this was only the Pirates, but I believe we can feel OK with Elder as a fourth starter in the playoffs.
As to the offense, there was one atypical inning. Mitch Keller, Pittsburgh’s all star hurler, held the Hammers scoreless in the first two. He faced the Braves order for the second time beginning in the third. Here was the sequence: Ronald 94 mph liner to center, Ozzie strikeout, Olson 70 mph bloop, Ozuna broken bat 78 mph liner to right, Eddie 75 mph bloop to left, TDA 71 mph bloop to left, MHII 86 mph routine fly to right ,Arcia 83 mph soft liner to left. If you had known that sequence would happen, you would have said, man, that Keller is really fooling the Braves—they can’t make solid contact against this guy. You’d figure he was probably still shutting them out through five innings. But as it turns out, the Braves were lucky; every one of those soft bloops fell for hits. They batted around in the third, with six singles and four runs scored. It was fun to see, after so many other games (like against the Cardinals) that our guys hit 110 mph screamers right at fielders. After the soft contact third inning, Ronald resorted to form in the fourth. His leadoff homer that inning traveled 455 feet.
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This team is so good that I have a desire to wax poetic. I’m going to resist that impulse, as JonathanF has already done that, in a superior way to anything I could pull off. If you haven’t read it, you must see his post earlier this week, Your Team: Your Team – Braves Journal. Jonathan F apparently shares a birthday with Elton John, which inspired him to take the Turpin/John song and make it even better as a tribute to this Braves team. I share a birthday with Madonna, so I thought about adapting Like a Virgin as an homage to the Braves, but thought better of it.
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A few weeks ago I stated boldly that this Braves offense is as good top to bottom as any team I remember, except possibly the mid-seventies Big Red Machine. (That’s not exactly a hot take, I realize.) I decided this week to emulate JonathanF in a different way. Using Stathead, I looked to see what teams had the highest team OPS+ for a season. Before I looked it up, I thought of a couple of offensive powerhouses and wondered if they might rank higher than this Braves team by this measure. My guess was that the 1995 Indians or the 1982 Brewers (Harvey’s Wallbangers) may be close in team OPS+ to the 2023 Braves.
Here is what I found: The 2023 Braves have a higher team OPS+ than any team in the 20th Century that did not have Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, or that did not cheat by banging on trash can lids. Yes, the current Braves’ team OPS+ of 122 is higher than any team’s since WWII, other than the 2017 Astros, whose OPS+ was 123. The 1982 Milwaukee club was in third place at 121. The 1995 Indians were not as high as I had guessed. Their 116, while still excellent, was brought down by very weak offensive seasons by Omar Vizquel and Tony Peña. The key to those Brewers and Braves was that everyone had an OPS+ greater than 100.
What about the Big Red Machine? Like the current Braves, every regular had an OPS+ over 100, even the defense-first guys, shortstop Concepcion and center fielder Geronimo. Their OPS+ was 120, placing them fourth behind the 2017 Cheaters, the 2023 Hammers, and the 1982 Wallbangers.
Does that mean the Braves are better top to bottom than the Big Red Machine? Not so fast. Don’t forget that the Reds did not get the benefit of the designated hitter. Nearly ten percent of their plate appearances were by pitchers. I haven’t figured out how to do it, but I bet if you took the pitchers out of the team OPS+ theirs would be higher than any other team since the Ruth/Gehrig Yankees. By the way, the 1927 Yankees had a team OPS+ of 127, thanks to 225 from Ruth and 220 from Gehrig.
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Dylan Dodd goes for the Braves this evening. He hasn’t been particularly effective in AAA this year, but no harm in giving him a chance and giving extra rest to the top line starters that we will rely on in October.
Blushing thanks…
Adjusting team stats to the DH is, to my mind, impossible for a number of reasons. Taking out DH at-bats is of course possible, with some work, but then what do you replace them with? And what do you do with all the pinch hitting at-bats? Who would have made them if there had been a DH? And there are subsidiary questions of both lineup construction and team construction, and tertiary questions of defensive prowess of Greg Luzinskis and the like who would never been on the field in a DH game.
If you have to do something, I think about the best you can do is take AL-NL splits on some stat during the split-rule era and then try, artfully, to adjust the same stats upwards on a percentage basis for non-DH teams. Then wave your hands vigorously to distract from the issues involved.
One very crude option for comparing the 76 Reds with the 23 Braves might be to take out all pitcher ABs for the Reds, and add in Dan Driessen’s OPS+ of 116, weighted for 600 plate appearances, as he would have been the regular DH. Then see if the team OPS+ would be over 122. You’d still have to wave hands vigorously, but wouldn’t that give you a close approximation?
Loved this, tfloyd! This offense is jaw-dropping. And Ronald is on another planet right now. Watching him hit one laser beam 450 feet to dead center after another is just… awe-inspiring.
Acknowledging that cross-era comparisons are difficult and the DH makes a lot of this moot, it sounds like it’s reasonable to say that the Braves are somewhere up there on the list of the top offensive clubs of the century, after the 1927 Yankees and the Big Red Machine.
JonathanF, if you put your methodological hat on, how would you design a process to answer the question of which were the best offensive clubs in the World Series era, and where the 2023 Braves rank on the list?
Certainly, OPS+ is a good start. But maybe wRC+ or oWAR would be better? You’d want to adjust, somehow, for the DH, and I’m not sure what all else. (A certain number of unearned extra-inning Manfred Man runs might need to be handwaved, or it might be entirely not worth it.)
I’d love to read an off day deep dive from you!
That kinda works, except that then all of Driessen’s actual at-bats (except those when he pinch hit for a pitcher) have to be subtracted out, and who bats for him on those days he did tke the field? That’s the problem with team numbers… anything you extrapolate one way requires other sorts of adjustments.
This is the problem with lots of statistical analysis where you use adjustments to figure out if A is “really” bigger than B. If they’re close, you simply turn a debate about the merits into a debate about the adjustments. If they’re not close, it raises the question of why you even tried in the first place. Don’t get me wrong… I do stuff like this a lot, but determining whether the Big Red Machine were “better” than the Homerin’ Hammers on any objective scale is in the “just for fun” category. You state a methodology, you make a calculation. If you did the calculation correctly, you have managed to turn an interesting debate about two baseball teams into an exhausting debate about adjustment methodologies. That’s why I just count RAJ’s steals instead of trying some half-assed adjustment accounting for the size of the bases or the new pickoff rule.
So my take on this is that the Big Red Machine, playing under a different set of rules in a different run era, fell short (for the moment) of the 2023 Braves in OPS+. Under a different set of rules and in a different run milieu, the results were close enough to suggest that the two teams were clearly comparable…. both with historically great top-to-bottom lineups. (OPS+ is sort of a special stat in that it is already calibrated to try and take account of the run milieu, which ought to make adjustments somewhat less necessary anyway.)
[To elaborate slightly, my preferred method, which I think I’m pretty consistent about using, is to list the top 5 or 10 in anything I do and then just let people argue about the differences between them, Then, if you want to make the case that something at slot #37 really should be be in the top 10, show me the adjustments you’d have to make to make it so and redo the entire analysis with those adjustments made.]
Nice recap. This team is truly a force to be reckoned with.
For instance, here’s a wild fact: The Braves now have 454 barrels this season. The next closest teams aren’t even anywhere in the vicinity of that number (the Twins and the Dodgers are tied for 2nd place with 348).
But what’s even more amazing is that this number is ALREADY the highest single-season barrel total by any team in the Statcast era. I mean, it’s only September 9th. They could possibly end up with like 500+ barrels this year.
I have no idea how this year’s Braves team would compare to the Big Red Machine or other teams from other eras, but I’m pretty sure this is the most formidable team I’ve ever seen in my 20+ years of watching baseball.
By the way, I chose OPS+ just because it was easy. I was perusing the bref pages for different teams’ seasons and noted how rare it is for all 9 regulars to have an OPS+ over 100 (or 8 for non-dh teams). In fact, this year’s Braves and the 1976 Reds are the only two I’ve spotted. There are probably others but I’m not sure who they are. Even the 1927 Yankees had a couple of regulars with OPS+ under 100.
(I had said above that the 1982 Brew Crew qualified, but that was a mistake. Charlie Moore, who manned right field most of the time, was below 100.)
EDIT: right after I posted this comment I looked at the 2003 Braves. That team came very close to “the every regular over 100 OPS+ club.” Robert Fick at first base was 95, but combined with Julio Franco’s ABs at first, that position was over 100. Vinny Castilla had a 97, for the lowest of any regular.
The 2009 Angels, 1931 Yankees, 1950 Red Sox,
I could have had 1000 guesses and not come up with the 2009 Angels. Their team OPS+ was only 108. No superstars, but everyone above average.
That’s why you pay me the big bucks.
As Jonathan and others have pointed out, the changes in the game over the last 47 years make it impossible to precisely differentiate between two teams that are pretty close. That said, until convinced otherwise, I’m going to think the 1976 Reds had an even better non-pitching lineup than the 2023 Braves. I made the more-Hall-of-Famers point a week or so ago, but another argument is that the Braves almost certainly won’t win many more games than the 108 those Reds won, and are on pace to win a couple fewer. That’s with pitching that is much better than that of the Reds, so either the Reds were much luckier than the Braves in turning performance into wins, or the Reds’ non-pitchers were better than the Braves’. The latter seems more likely to me.
It’s similar to having every regular over 100 OPS+, but I looked at BRef’s tables ranking each team’s WAR by position as another way to examine team breadth. This might be a little misleading because the gap between 3rd and 4th at one position may be bigger than the gap between 2nd and 6th at another, but it also incorporates the contributions of all batters not just starters, includes their fielding and base running contributions, and rewards those who produced for 160 games more than those who produced at the same rate for 140 games. Going C, 1B, 2B, etc., the 1976 Reds ranked 1st, 4th (1B), 1st, 2nd, 1st, 1st, 5th (CF), and 2nd in the league in WAR. So they were either best or second in the league at 6 of the 8 positions and 4th and 5th at the other two. That’s across-the-board value. Oh, and their pinch-hitters were 1st as well. The league is 3 teams larger now, and the Braves rank 1st, 2nd, 6th (2B), 1st, 11th (SS), 10th (LF), 3rd, 1st, and 1st at DH, as well as 10th in the now-less-important category of pinch-hitters.
I think that’s a reasonable method, though it should be oWAR only if you’re trying to judge offensive prowess only.
I do think that teams that bludgeon people will have W-L records not as dependent onpitching prowess, so there’s going to be a lot of luck in W-L records. The 1975 Reds were 3rd in NL ERA, so to argue that their pitching staff was completely unworthy is unfair.
The way I look at it, I’d rather have have Bench and Morgan than Murphy and Albies, and I’d rather have Acuna and Harris and Olson than Griffey and Geronimo and Perez. I think Rose/Riley and Concepcion/Arcia and Foster/Rosario are all somewhat debatable. Frankly, they’re all somewhat debatable other than Albies/Morgan and Acuna/Griffey. In both of those cases, a great player having a great season stands out as an obvious choice.
Agree completely that you can’t draw definitive comparisons across eras. It really is mainly for fun. Having said that, it is clear that the 23 Braves are one of the very best offensive teams across the lineup as any team in history.
Total WAR is a much better measure of total player value at each position, but I was mainly just interested in offensive contributions. If you only count offensive WAR, I think the Braves’ league rank by position compares even more favorably to the big red machine. Those Reds were a great fielding team; the Braves are not by any stretch.
By the way, it was the 1975 Reds that won 108. The 76 team won 102, even though team OPS+ was a good deal higher in 76 than 75.
The 1975 Reds gave up fewer runs and may have been a better team. But the shortstop and center fielder were below 100 in OPS+ in 1975. Either way, those teams were the best I ever saw.
Game thread: