Back before the season began, we surveyed you – our readers – about your thoughts entering the 2019 Atlanta Braves campaign. Let’s see how things turned out.
Our Atlanta Braves finished the regular season with a 97-65 record, the club’s best result since 2003’s 101-61 mark.
In doing so, they defied odds, Las Vegas, and many of us… though in the process, we had mostly figured on a more robust NL East as competition.
How that breaks down for the 2020 season… we’ll wait for another day to consider that as 2 of the other clubs don’t even have managers right now, never mind any knowledge about who will be on the rosters.
So for today, let’s review the Q&A for the year and see how we did overall.
We asked 15 over/under-style questions and had 3 bonuses at the end. The 15 were broken down in team, hitting, and pitching categories.
Turns out we’re doing this a little early, but we’ll make a couple of assumptions for the answers that are not yet known.
Team Questions:
T1: How many games will the Atlanta Braves win in the 2019 regular season?
- 85 OR FEWER: 26.5%
- 86 OR MORE: 73.5%
Those of you who were correct could have made a little money on this question from your favorite sports book: this 85.5 was the over/under figure that Las Vegas had generally set for the Braves when the season started. Beating that by 11.5 wins is actually remarkable.
T2: How many players will the Atlanta Braves have on their 25 man roster on August 1st that were not in the entire organization on April 1st?
- 1 OR FEWER: 24%
- 2 OR MORE: 76%
This question spoke to how active Alex Anthopoulos might be on the trade market in the Summer. This probably should have been set at 1 player higher (3 or more), since getting 2 players to fill gaps is hardly uncommon.
But by August 1st, the Atlanta Braves had added…
5 is a huge number to have added… that’s 20% of the active roster.
T3: How will the Atlanta Braves finish in the NL East division this year?
- 1ST OR 2ND PLACE: 75.9%
- 3RD PLACE OR WORSE: 24.1%
You get the feeling that the same people were answering the questions either “all optimistically” or “all pessimistically”.
T4: The best finish in the National League MVP voting for a Braves player will be…
- 4TH PLACE OR BETTER: 83.6%
- 5TH PLACE OR WORSE 16.4%
This is the question that we won’t definitely have an answer for until another month has passed, but it’s likely to be close… and there could be a split vote that’s involved.
Certainly, it appears right now that Yelich, Bellinger, and Rendon are the front-runners. After that, things get muddied.
If you’re looking strictly at player WAR values, here’s the next group:
- Ketel Marte (better than Rendon, actually)
- Nolan Arenado or Trevor Story (depending on whose numbers you use)
The rest of the Top 12 – in some order:
- JT Realmuto
- Ronald Acuna Jr./li>
- Yasmani Grandal
- Josh Donaldson
- Peter Alonso
- Juan Soto
Freddie Freeman faded to 22nd; Ozzie Albies was actually 15th. Either way, it’s going to be difficult to see a Braves player get into that Top 4 this year.
T5: In 2018, the Braves were 12th in average announced home attendance (31,552 by ESPN’s chart). In 2019, the average will be…
- LOWER THAN 31,552: 27.8%
- HIGHER THAN 31,552: 72.2%
The readers are right again… that smaller SunTrust Park venue still netted an average of 32,776 fans this season… up to 12th overall and a total of 2,654,920 fans for 81 dates.
As a fun fact, the Braves drew the 15th most on the road, but do understand that the Marlins would have brought this number down a bit: they averaged 10,016 per game.