JonathanF announced after the Braves clinched a playoff spot on Friday that Braves Journal would be going on cruise control for the remainder of the regular season. Well, I only know one speed. And fortunately, that speed is cruise control so this should be my time to shine.
I do feel, however, that I should mention that the Braves clinched the NL East today.
What’s better than a bloop and a blast? A walk and a chopper in front of them. Mike Yastrzemski‘s 3 run homer in the top of the 6th provided the 4th and final Braves run of both the inning and the game. Michael Harris II walked to start the inning and went to 3rd when Mauricio Dubon chopped a double down the 3rd base line. A bloop by Ozzie Albies scored Harris and set the stage for Yaz.
Starter Martin Perez only lasted 4 1/3 innings, but the bullpen was spectacular. Perez allowed only a single run on a Jose Altuve homer in the 4th but after loading the bases with one out in the 5th, Perez had to be rescued by Victor Mederos. Mederos struck out Altuve before retiring Jeremy Pena to end the threat. AJ Smith-Shawver pitched the 6th and 7th, allowing only 1 hit and striking out 4. Interesting.
The Astros got their final run off Ray Kerr in the 8th as Yainer Diaz added Houston’s 2nd solo homer. Then Dylan Dodd struck out the side in the 9th for his 2nd save of the season.
It’s a long way to October, the same as it has it has been for the past 150 seasons, but after all the ups and sometimes unnerving downs, the Braves clinch the division with 6 games to spare. Win, win, win.
Off Monday, Cincinnati comes to town on Tuesday for the first of the final 3 regular season home games. Somebody vs. Andrew Abbott partially scheduled.
![[Insert Overworn Phrase]: Braves 1, Fish 2](https://i0.wp.com/bravesjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/f2iaq37tjo3p13o5ezxf.jpeg?resize=440%2C264&ssl=1)
NL East Champs, can’t complain about that. I like how this team has played well against better opponents, bodes well for the playoffs, one hopes.
For what its worth, I’d go: Sale, Mahle, Holmes as the starters in the Wild-Card series. And lots of rest for the pen and regulars between now and the end of the year. We should get a Dom Smith and Kyle Farmer sighting.
I really hate that rosters can now only expand by 2. Maybe it used to be too many but I think 4 to 6 would be a lot better. It would be nice to see a few more prospects get a look over the next week. I do think the last 6 games are interesting from the manager’s point of view. You want to give players a rest after a long season but you still want to keep them loose and hungry. I will say that I’m glad we didn’t clinch the division 1 or 2 weeks ago.
I think JR Ritchie is scheduled to start Tuesday.
As hot as RAJ is, and since he’ll have days off tomorrow and the following Monday, I’m not sure I would give him more than one day off. Maybe have him DH more, but he’s hit .189/.259/.340 in 13 games as DH this year, so maybe not.
TD – I agree with you. I liked the full expanded rosters.
Who knows, if these smaller expanded rosters were around in the early 1990s – – we might not have seen Francisco Cabrera get The Hit.
It is really disappointing to see MLB make this adjustment and limit exposure & experience for some of the young folks.
I assume it was at the owner’s behest so there wasn’t an expectation to pay a bunch of guys to sit on the bench for all of September anymore.
AJSS now looks like a legit playoff weapon. Would love to see Ritchie be able to be a 2-inning guy. The “mapping 27 outs” comments by AA are taking shape a little bit.
Playoff pitching strategy will be really interesting. MLB site says even though Holmes allowed 2 runs over 6 innings in his last start, 12 of the 20 balls in play were over 95 mph. My guess is that would earn him a quick hook in the playoffs
Looks like Sale will get his tuneup Wednesday night vs. Cincy, which will give him 5+ days of rest before the WC opener on Tuesday, 9/29, depending on the start time. (I’ll guess we get the second afternoon game.)
Who do I want to play among SD, Chi or Pha? As much as I’d love to vanquish the Phillies with swift precision, I can’t say that any 2-of-3 matchup looks particularly appealing. (BTW, the Cubs have the tiebreaker over both Philly & SD, so we only play them if they finish all alone in 6th.)
Man, the AL race is nuts. The Astros just got swept, they’re 2 games under .500 w/ 6 to play… and they’re 1 game out of the division lead (with the tiebreaker in hand). Win the pennant, guys…
if you haven’t already seen it, here’s another way to look at the hitting issue:
https://www.batterypower.com/atlanta-braves-analysis/140092/this-is-the-weirdest-braves-team-ive-seen
I mentioned before the season that I expected the Braves pitching to muster 15 WAR, so the offense needed something like 35 WAR to win the division over a strong Phillies team. Well, the pitching did exactly as I expected, but the offense missed the target by almost 20 WAR. So we should’ve been a .500 team and the Phillies should’ve crushed us. Except none of that happened because baseball.
Wow, what a piece. I asked Gemini to summarize for me to understand it:
Overview: Despite high preseason expectations (projected around 90 wins and a division title by FanGraphs), the Atlanta Braves put together a remarkably bizarre 92-win season, clinching the NL East in late September.
The Statistical Disconnect: The Braves’ final record placed them fourth in MLB for wins, yet they ranked a mediocre 21st in position player fWAR and ninth in pitching fWAR. This created one of the largest discrepancies between actual wins and fWAR/BaseRuns in modern franchise history.
Position Player Struggles: Almost every key projected position player underperformed or missed significant time (including notable struggles or injuries from Austin Riley, Ronald Acuña Jr., Ha-Seong Kim, Sean Murphy, and Dominic Smith), leaving the offense largely carried by unexpected performances rather than depth.
Pitching & Bullpen Dynamics: While the rotation suffered major injuries and regressions (such as with Spencer Strider and Reynaldo López), Chris Sale had a stellar season, and acquisitions like Martín Pérez and Tyler Mahle helped stabilize the team. The bullpen and strong high-leverage home-run suppression ultimately fueled the Braves’ success despite the underlying metrics.
Conclusion: The author highlights how the 2026 Braves defied statistical models through weird sequencing, clutch performance, and luck—leaving fans with a successful yet deeply eccentric division-winning campaign.
Thanks, Roger. Very interesting. I think part of why the team’s record seems better than warranted by the combined performance of the players is that the team has hit and pitched well in the clutch. In what BRef calls high-leverage situations, the team has both pitched and hit better than its average, and it’s #2 in MLB in BRef’s clutch indicator (2nd best in clutch hitting and 4th best in clutch pitching, behind only the Reds overall).
The team has MLB’s 5th best run differential and 4th best record, so it has turned runs scored & allowed into wins at about the expected rate (though it would help if I could find the team’s records in 1-run, 2-run, etc., games). My guess is that it’s more that the team has scored more runs & allowed fewer than its hits/walks/power would predict.
Just ask, JamesD
wl W L
diff
1 26.0 20.0
2 17.0 12.0
3 14.0 9.0
4 10.0 5.0
5 9.0 7.0
6 4.0 4.0
7 1.0 3.0
8 4.0 2.0
9 2.0 0.0
10 1.0 0.0
11 1.0 1.0
12 1.0 1.0
14 1.0 0.0
15 1.0 0.0
What I took from this is we should try to make the margin 4 or 8 runs.
Thanks Jonathan. If I’m remembering my Bill James correctly, a good team should expect to have a record above .500 but below its overall winning percentage in close games and should expect to have a record well above its overall winning percentage in blowouts (because it’s more likely that an underdog will win a game by a little than by a lot; another way of looking at it is that luck matters more in close games than in blowouts).
Per your info, the team’s overall WP is .590 and its record & WP in games with different margins are:
1 26-20, .565
2 17-12, .586
3 14-9, .596
4 10-5, .667
5+ 25-18, .581
The slightly poorer than expected record when the margin was 5 or more suggests that they got a little bit lucky in how their runs scored & allowed resulted in wins, maybe by a game or two, which seems consistent with having the 5th best run differential but the 4th best record.
Could some of the differential noted in the article be explained by the ever elusive team chemistry? I’m not sure what it is but it seems like Atlanta has it. They also seem to have a manager who understands advanced metrics and has made some really good decisions- especially related to pulling starting pitchers at the right time.
I agree. I know it is hard to evaluate the effectiveness of a manager. But the Braves results this year given non-dominant inputs plus the eye test (watching key decisions, game after game) suggest that Walt Weiss has contributed a lot this year. Not just one of these cases of not getting in the way. He has been doing, consistently, the right thing at the right time. He has gotten as much out of this team as it has to give.
In past years, I’ve complained that the team didn’t have enough depth to cover when the injury bug inevitably struck. This year, that simply wasn’t the case. Obviously, Dubon really is the story of the year – the supersub who became a starter multiple times at multiple positions – but Martin Perez is frankly not far behind him, and Bryce Elder deserves more credit than I’m typically willing to give him, and we caught the hot hand a few times with guys like Dom Smith, Jorge Mateo, Jim Jarvis, and Brewer Hicklen. To my mind, Weiss has done a particularly good job of riding their hot streaks and cutting the cord when the magic runs out.
Remarkably, the summer offensive outage seems like it mostly hit after we got our studs back off the IL, after Drake Baldwin and Michael Harris II and Ha-Seong Kim and Ronald Acuña all returned. It’s frustrating how often that seems to happen to this club – like they all got bitten by the same snake at the same time. But, all in all, it’s a roster chock full of stars, and even while many of those stars underperformed, the record ended up looking the way it was supposed to. AA gets a lot of credit for providing a deeper-than-usual bench and finding gold in Dubey, and WW gets a tremendous amount of credit for pushing the right buttons and holding everybody together.
OK, I found a little more support for my speculation that the team has scored more runs than the total of its hitting inputs would usually suggest. Using the technical formula for Runs Created (as shown on Wikipedia), the Braves have “created” 691 runs through AB, H, BB, HBP, IBB, TB, SB, CS, GIDP, SH, and SF, the same as the MLB average. But they’ve scored 722, or 21 more than the MLB average. That looks like about a two-win difference.
So it looks like the team has scored more runs than expected from its batting actions and won slightly more games than expected from the number of runs it’s scored. If that’s all just luck (or the result of WW pushing the right buttons, though I assume his button-pushing would affect the hits/BB/TB/etc. inputs, which isn’t what I’m looking at), I hope it continues.
What a great discussion!!! I personally think our lesser record in blowouts is that WW knows when to pull the plug on a game. I also think if you broke the WAR down by inning, our WAR in the first few would be miserable but in the last few would be better than average. That may be the difference or even define “clutch”.
That’s the chemistry thing. When the pitchers keep it close the hitters eventually come through and the bullpen closes it out. I suggested a chemistry issue earlier in the year when folks came back off of IL. I also think this is what was missing last year when the pitching was good enough to keep us near .500 through about May or June but the hitting never came around and the pitchers gave up.
It doesn’t appear to be a coincidence that the top 5 bullpen teams and 6 of the 7 best are going to the playoffs. Red Sox, Yankees, Braves, Brewers, and Padres all have great bullpens.
JRR looking good tonight so far.
Ronald… Please.
I’m at the park. I couldnt clearly tell what happened to Ronald. What are they saying on tv?
They aren’t saying much yet… but to me it looked like a typical non-critical injury for Ronald — something like a bone bruise just above the padding on the shin
And now they’ve come back and I should be given a medical degree.
Yes, a bruise. He is day-to-day. X-rays negative.
Paging Dr. Jonathan.
So that’s good. Today I toured the Hillerich & Bradsby Museum in Louisville, and got to handle some future bat blanks (and finished bat) designated for Ronald. I also posed for a photo with an RAJ game-used bat — no complaints except I’d overlooked one of Hammerin’ Hank’s bats in the same display. That would have been even better! The guide said, I believe, that the most popular choice was Babe Ruth, but our Hank was second.
Also, and I hope I have this right, Hank Aaron’s bat model was also used by Johnny Bench and Andre Dawson, pretty impressive!
The place is worth a visit for baseball fan if you’re in the vicinity.
Recapped