The Atlanta Braves and Austin Riley’s amazing run of unsustainability

Austin Riley’s start to the 2019 season was no doubt impressive, but there have been signs all along pointing to a drop off in performance.

I’m not a pessimist – far from it.  And I’m just as excited as anyone about the overall season Austin Riley is having with the Atlanta Braves.

However, there are vivid red flags that have repeatedly popped up during Riley’s torrid stretch that are just impossible to overlook.

First, a back story is required.

In case you’ve been asleep all season, third baseman-turned-left fielder, Austin Riley, broke out this season and put up such ridiculous numbers in Gwinnett that the Braves had no choice but to call him up to the majors, even with third base blocked by a $23 million former MVP.

Before his promotion to the big leagues, Riley went on power surge in Gwinnett, hitting a home run basically every 11 plate-appearances.

The run didn’t last long (obviously, he was called up), but in just 37 games with the Stripers, he amassed 15 home runs and 10 doubles. He hit three home runs more in that 37-game span than he did in 75 games last year with Gwinnett.

It wasn’t just the power, though. Riley had completely turned around his poor K/BB rates while in Triple-A, posting a career-high walk-rate of 11.1% and a career-best strikeout-rate of 19.1%.

To put those figures in perspective, Riley has a career 4.4 BB%, as well as a 31.4 K% as a pro. That stretch of roughly 40 games was the best sample of games so far in his pro career, hence the big league call-up.

Now we know what he’s done since being added to the Atlanta Braves lineup. On May 15, in the middle of a series with the St. Louis Cardinals, Riley made his much-anticipated MLB debut for the Atlanta Braves.

He made fans at SunTrust Park go nuts when he homered in that inaugural game, beginning one of the most impressive big league starts to a career in recent history.

Riley hit seven home runs in his first 14 games with Atlanta, knocking in 20 runs to boot. From that May 15th debut to May 29, the numbers are staggering:

• 14 games
• 21-for-56
• .375/.407/.786
• 1.192 OPS
• 7 home runs
• 20 RBI

Riley was on a tear. He wasn’t afraid to attack, and attack is exactly what he did.

Opposing pitchers couldn’t catch a break, and if they left a pitch anywhere near the zone, Riley would quickly and powerfully deposit that pitch several rows deep behind the left-center wall.

At first, watching all of this unfold was super exciting, not to mention addictively fun. But after awhile it began to get ridiculous. Seemingly every game, Riley would do something awesome and sometimes it didn’t even seem real.

While all of this craziness was happening, I will admit, I started snooping around. I noticed that the guy almost never took a pitch.

I mean, why take a pitch when you can regularly hit it 425 feet? But, I started looking at some of his plate discipline figures and found it was even more dramatic than I thought.

The Underlying Problem

In those first 14 games, Riley came to bat 56 times. Amazingly, he had exactly two walks during that span.  Two! That’s a whopping 3.5% walk-rate.

Riley also had 20 strikeouts, which computes to a 35.7 K%. Both rates were vastly trending in bad directions.

So that brings us to a more recent span of games.

Riley’s results have fallen a bit as of late, and from that 14th game to this past Tuesday versus the NY Mets (a total of19 games), he’s came back to reality.

Don’t get me wrong, Riley is still having an unreal season, but his ultra-aggressiveness at the plate is beginning to catch up with him.

In that stretch of 19 games — May 29 to June 18 (Tuesday night) — Riley is hitting just .227 and has five home runs (which is still a nice homer total). But the K/BB rates are still not where they need to be. Riley has improved them just a tiny bit — 32 K%, 5.3 BB%.

Still Time for Change

Sustainability is a popular word in baseball. With the era of statistics and analysis that we find ourselves currently in, the sport is loaded with all kinds of complicated observations and exercises to try and determine how a player’s season will play out.

There are so many intelligent people in the baseball industry, most of them much smarter than me. But this one is easy. Riley cannot keep this up, or he’ll find himself back in Gwinnett.

He’s shown that he’s capable of reversing this type of thing, as he just did it this season in Triple-A. The reversal of his poor plate discipline is what got him to the big leagues in the first place.

This piece isn’t meant to crash the party, as I know this write-up comes off as quite negative. But I’m just trying to make sure that we’re aware of what’s going on. The season is still somewhat young and there’s plenty of time to correct such things.

2 hits during the finale with the Mets could be a sign in the right direction.

No matter how sustainable Riley’s play is this season (good or bad), and regardless of his weaknesses, the 2019 season will be remembered for quite a long time.

This was the season that a young Austin Riley broke out, turned around a bad approach at the plate, earned his major league debut, and set Braves Country on fire with excitement.

Hopefully when it’s all said and done, this isn’t the year that he also reverts back.