Braves Analytics: Austin Riley’s Adjustment to Breaking Pitches Key Difference

Through the month of September we will start diving into the analytics of each Atlanta Braves player to see where they’re excelling or failing.

There is no question that we’re moving into a more analytical age of baseball. And as Atlanta Braves fans, we might as well learn together what this means for our favorite players.

I’ll admit as an old school fan I was hesitant to learn all these analytical stats — and I still consider some to be pointless — but I have found a lot of use and interest in some.

Austin Riley is the perfect player to dive into the analytics on right now as he’s currently heating up and you can see why if you look at the numbers.

Really all season you could tell Riley was making good adjustments at the plate from 2019 even though he wasn’t getting the desired results.

One of the biggest adjustments he’s made is on breaking pitches.

As we all know, he really struggled against the slider in 2019. So much so that he hit a miserable .195 against all breaking pitches last year, according to Baseball Savant.

He’s completely turned that around this season hitting .323 against breaking balls with 5 of his 6 home runs coming against those types of pitches.

And despite being more conscious of those breaking pitches, it hasn’t really hurt him against fastballs. Riley actually has a higher average against fastballs this year at .245 than he did last year at .234.

I think you can attribute the success he’s having to his recognition of those pitches and laying off the ones outside the zone. His chase percentage has dropped from 37.7 percent in 2019 to 30.7 percent this year.

He’s also making more contact on pitches that he swings at in the zone and whiffing a lot less, which is great to see.

It’s not all rainbows and sunshine though, he’s still striking out almost 30 percent of the time.

Another concerning thing the analytics tell me is that he’s pulling the ball too much this year (38.4 percent of the time) and he’s hitting too many groundballs (49.3 percent of the time).

His groundball and flyball percentages have pretty much switched from last year, and Riley is a guy you want to see get some lift on the baseball.

As good as he’s been lately, there is still plenty of room for improvement for Riley. I’d love to see the flyball percentage go up and the strikeout percentage continue to go down when we look at his analytics again after the season.