The Atlanta Braves Offensive Offense

The Atlanta Braves are really, really bad at doing anything that might lead to runs.

With the exception of Freddie Freeman, Mallex Smith, Ender Inciarte and the occasional flashback game from Nick Markakis, nobody in Atlanta’s everyday offense should really be involved in key plots. They are, to a man, a collection of has-been’s, never-were’s or not-ready’s and it shows on a nightly basis. Chase d’Arnaud is leading this team in fWAR, for God’s sake. Bad is not nearly a good enough descriptor.

But they could still work counts, and they absolutely did not Wednesday night. Albert Suarez, in his first MLB start, needed but eight pitches to dispatch Atlanta in the fifth inning, and the George Kontos–Javier Lopez combination needed only five in a crucial seventh inning. Atlanta is last in baseball in pitches per plate appearance (3.71), and it nearly torpedoed what ended up being a huge come-from-behind win.

Some of Atlanta’s other season-long offensive numbers jump from merely worst in baseball by a wide margin to some of the most historically, hysterically awful metrics this grand game has ever seen.

To wit:

wRAA – An accumulated stat like RBI, weighted runs above average details what a hitter (or collection of hitters) is contributing compared to the league average; above zero is above average, below zero is below average. And Atlanta, already at -78.7 wRAA, has a chance to be among the worst in baseball history.

With roughly two-thirds of a season remaining, the Braves are on pace for -240.5 wRAA (roughly -1.485 per game) for a full campaign. That would be the second-worst mark in the HISTORY OF BASEBALL, ahead of only the 1930 Red Sox (-249.0) and just behind the 1894 Louisville Colonels (-239.5); the Colonels folded in 1899, 15 years before the Model-T rolled off the assembly line.

ISO – Isolated power isn’t necessarily a stat that reveals whether or not you’re a mashing team, but it’s usually a pretty good barometer and the Braves, my Lord, are they bad. Their current ISO (.088 entering Friday) would be the worst since the 1988 Cardinals, featuring (wait for it)… Terry Pendleton himself. The man is disaster-adjacent, it would seem.

wOBA – If (as Fangraphs would have you believe), wOBA measures a hitter’s overall offensive value, then the Braves, as a whole, have been pretty worthless. Clocking in at a collective .269, spread over a full season that would surpass the 1972 Texas Rangers for the worst mark in baseball in the last 45 years. That Rangers team hit .217 as a group, for what it’s worth.

wRC+ — Weighted runs created, similar to the above wRAA, is a metric that tries to quantify the value of outcomes (singles, doubles, etc.) over treating each time reaching base separately, adjusted for park factors (I’m paraphrasing all this from FanGraphs; their definition reads like an SAT question). 100 is league-average, more is above average and less is below.

At 65 wRC+ through 53 games, Atlanta currently owns the seventh-worst mark in baseball history. None of the six teams ahead (behind?) them exist anymore and the most recent entries on that list played in 1884.

So we’re talking historical atrocity.

Next: Braves Starting an Image Rebuild

I encourage you to find your own relevant stats; those were just the first handful that jumped out at me. The 2016 Atlanta Braves may be the most terrible offensive team of its generation—unless they make a big move with Julio Teheran that nets them all their hopes and dreams, it’s fast becoming a certainty. What a time to be alive.