Atlanta Braves minors: End of season recap for 2019 Mississippi Braves

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(Photo by Peter Aiken/Getty Images) /

An end-of-season recap covering all seven Atlanta Braves minor league teams from the 2019 season: Mississippi Braves.

In this series, I’m covering each of the seven Atlanta Braves minor league levels, evaluating each club and its top performers.

If you’re interested in jumping to previous recaps:

We’ve now crossed into the high-minors territory, where some of the most talented Atlanta Braves prospects reside. Today’s recap will cover the organization’s Double-A club, the 2019 Mississippi Braves, who completed their regular season on September 2.

The team

The Mississippi Braves were an exciting team in 2019, though the team’s position in the South division of Double-A’s Southern League didn’t exactly demonstrate that. Blessed with a loaded roster for most of the first half of the season, the M-Braves still finished just 33-36.

Prospect breakthroughs and promotions were exciting for us Braves’ fans, but such positive changes resulted in a tough second-half for Mississippi.

When it was all said and done, the M-Braves were understandably worse by the end of the 2019 campaign, illustrated by a 31-39 second-half record and a 64-75 overall mark — good for 4th place in a five-team division and 10.5 games behind the leader.

But thankfully the success of a major league organization isn’t measured by the winning percentage of its various minor league teams.

Don’t let Mississippi’s poor win/loss record full you. This team had some very talented players… at least for half of the year.

While the Triple-A class was busy enjoying its new homer-friendly baseball, Double-A (at least the Southern League) was not so fortunate. As a league, runs and home runs fell from 2018 to 2019, to the tune of 0.26 runs per game and 122 total home runs.

Mississippi’s yearly drop in runs-per-game fell by almost half a run (0.45) while its home run total dropped by a count of 13. I don’t know if anyone knows why yet, but I think it’s interesting that every minor league level has seen a drop in its run environment in 2019.

Well, every level except for Triple-A… and we already know why that is.

Mississippi finished as an average to below-average offensive club amongst its Southern League foes (10 teams). The M-Braves didn’t really excel in any particular facet of the game, yet they also weren’t the very worst.

At 3.47 runs per game, Mississippi was the second-worst team when it came to scoring runs in the league, but their 87 home runs were good for just 5th-worst.

Mississippi finished below the league-average in OPS while also striking out the most, ending their season with a .661 OPS (4th-worst) and 1,274 strikeouts. Their 399 walks weren’t quite enough either (2nd-fewest), as Mississippi wrapped up the year with a .305 OBP — a mark also better than just one other team in the league.

Mississippi’s ability to avoid the double-play ball and hit triples were two things the team shined at. The M-Braves grounded into 86 double-plays (4th-fewest) and tallied 38 three-baggers (2nd-most), two very random stats to excel in.

If you followed Mississippi any in 2019, you probably would have guessed that they had a strong pitching group… and they did.

Mississippi finished the year with the league’s best ERA (3.22). Surprisingly, the M-Braves were average in strikeouts (1,146 total / 8.7 K/9), finishing with the sixth-best strikeout total and 5th-best K-rate.

Preventing home runs was another strength for Mississippi, as they allowed 78 all season — the 3rd-fewest in the league. Also, only one other team finished the season with more complete-games, as the M-Braves achieved four 9-inning starts.

Overall, besides the offense finishing the year worse than I anticipated, Mississippi’s end-of-season numbers lined up pretty well with what was expected.

The problem was that promotions and call-ups basically tore apart most of the team’s key players. But this is a good thing!

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