Atlanta Braves: Who is off to a hot start? Is it sustainable?

The Atlanta Braves look poised for a great season after a 5-1 stretch at home followed by a series win at Colorado.  Freddie Freeman and Ozzie Albies both played important roles in this stretch.  Can this continue?

The Atlanta Braves are lucky to have a guy like Freddie Freeman on the team.  He is a team first guy and seeing Freeman get off to such a hot start is fun to watch.  It was great to see him get his first, of hopefully many, home runs this season on Sunday afternoon.

Based on Freddie Freeman’s BA of .400 and OBP of .520 so far (Wednesday PM numbers), both are higher than we could’ve hoped for to this point of the season.

He is also tied with Ozzie Albies for most hits on the team with 16, which is very impressive considering he has already been walked 10 times, also most on the team.

Freddie Freeman always seems to do the little things to help the team win.

During the second game in the series against the Marlins he was stealing signs from… er… ‘observing’ the catcher in the bottom of the 9th inning to try and help his teammates while he was on base.

The next day, Freeman started the rally in the bottom of the 9th inning against the Marlins with an infield hit to eventually score the winning run to win the series.

It would be great to see Freddie Freeman sustain his .400 batting average for the entire season, but based off of his career BA of .293 that is unlikely to happen (never mind that it would be the highest seasonal average in the majors since Tony Gwynn’s .394 in 1994).

Still, Freeman has been more selective at the plate in 2019 than the previous two seasons, which is feeding his current hot streak:

• During his prior MLB seasons, he has typically kept his swings limited to balls in the strike zone… on those pitches, he’s been swinging at them roughly 80-85% of the time.
• However, he also had been swinging at pitches below the K zone nearly 50% of the time.
• This season, he is limiting those out-of-zone swings so far… down around a 40% clip.

Walks are great, but they don’t raise your batting average.  Of course getting on base at a .500 clip in front of Ronald Acuña isn’t a bad thing.  It does appear that the All-Star is making it a point to use the strike zone to his advantage, to this result:

• More walks (20% rate; nearly double of 2017-18)
• Fewer strikeouts (12% rate, down from 18%+ in 2017-18)
• Higher BA:  (.400)

With the amount of walks that Freeman is getting and his more selective approach at the plate I do expect him to beat his previous high BA of .319 from the 2013 season and finish with an average close to .330.

Ahhhhh-zzz

Another guy off to a very hot start is Ozzie Albies.  As noted, he’s tied with Freddie Freeman for the team lead with 16 hits (as of Wednesday night) and has looked more than comfortable at the plate.  Before the Mets’ series, Albies carried in a BA of .364 and an OBP of .429.  Not a bad start for the 22 year old.

It is nice to see Ozzie Albies not trying to do too much at the plate and being consistent.  11 of his 14 hits have been singles. We know he can go deep, too, but that’s really not necessary.

With the strong batting lineup that the Atlanta Braves have, consistent singles from Albies could help this team compete and win another division title.

There is a long way to go in the season and Ozzie Albies sustaining his .364 BA throughout the season will not happen in my opinion, and here’s why.

Albies is aggressive at the plate. With 10% walks (which is actually unusually high for him) and 8% strikeouts, there’s a lot of balls being put into play.

• He’s got a 20% whiff rate overall, which is excellent
• He’s got a .385 batting average on balls in play, which is well above average
• He ranks 118th in average exit velocity and 182nd in ‘hard hit’ average

The biggest difference being his aggressive approach against breaking balls this season. This aggressive approach works great if you are finding the gaps, but as we saw in the first game of the series against Colorado on Monday night, it can also work against you as Albies had an 0 for 5 night at the plate.

That also tends to work well when you’re driving the ball… and that’s not been what he’s been doing.

As a point of comparison, Freeman is 49th in the majors in ‘hard hit’ balls, which would tend to explain his high average better.

Freddie Freeman and Ozzie Albies have both proven that they are an important part of the 2019 Atlanta Braves team.

Watching them both get off to a hot start probably doesn’t come as a surprise to many people, but both of them have started off even better than we could’ve hoped for.