Braves: Austin Riley Deserves the Third Base Job to Start 2021

As the Atlanta Braves continue to look for a power bat this offseason to replace Marcell Ozuna, they may already have one in place.

There is no question that the Atlanta Braves need to add a couple of big bats this offseason, and I think they will certainly do that, but they already have one bat who could be ready to move to the middle of the order in 2021.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I was never high on Austin Riley when he was coming up. When he was mentioned as a possible trade target for the Marlins when they were shopping J.T. Realmuto I was all for shipping him out.

And then he got off to a hot start in 2019 and continued that in his debut for the Braves that season. I was suddenly eating all the words I had written about trading him off.

Then he turned into the hitter I was afraid he would be — someone with a lot of swing-and-miss and not much in between.

But I was really impressed with the improvements he made in 2020 and think with another offseason and more playing time there is still room for him to become a middle of the order bat.

And I get it, the numbers in 2020 don’t look much better on paper than his 2019 numbers, but what I saw with my eyes tells me this was a guy who was making adjustments to be a better hitter at the big league level.

His plate discipline in 2020 was worlds better than what it was at the end of 2019. That’s evident by the fact that his K% was 13 points lower — even it was still high for most hitters at 23.8 percent, but I think that’s what you can expect from him throughout his career as that’s what it was in the minors.

Riley’s BB% also improved, but just slightly at 7.8 percent. He needs to get that up to around 10 percent, which is where it was at Triple-A in 2019 when he was tearing it up.

You certainly would love to see him hit for more average — he hist just .239 in 2020 — and I think he could certainly be a .260-.270 hitter.

His batted ball numbers from 2020 are all over the place and don’t really paint a clear picture. We also have to keep in mind with all 2020 numbers that it was a VERY small sample size — barley one-quarter of a full season.

Riley had a hard-hit percentage of just 33.6 percent, but his medium-hit percentage was over 50 and he made soft contact just 15.7 percent of the time.

He also pulled the ball a lot more in 2020, but also hit the ball to the oppositive field more … 2020 is weird, right?

My biggest complaint with Riley in 2020 was that he put the ball on the ground far too much for someone with his power. His groundball percentage of 41.7 percent was nearly double what it was in 2019.

I don’t know if that was part of his new approach or what, but he needs to get the ball in the air more.

With that medium contact he was making, and with how often he put the ball on the ground, he had a ton of easy groundouts in 2020.

His line drive percentage was still close to where it was in 2019 and what it’s been throughout his career (around 25 percent). But he has to get back to getting the ball in the air around 40 percent of the time.

What impressed me the most was his plate discipline and the pitches he was swinging at in 2020. He dropped the percentage of pitches he swung at outside of the zone from 41.3 percent to 37.1 percent and he made contact with pitches he swung at inside the zone 83.3 percent of the time (compared to just 73.7 percent in 2019).

That tells me he was doing a better job of laying off pitches outside the zone and making contact with good pitches in the zone.

As far as his defense goes at third base, FanGraphs had him with -8 DRS in 2020 and a URZ of -2.9. That’s certainly not what my eyes told me as I thought he played pretty solid defense at the hot corner, but there’s certainly room for improvement there.

Again, I saw something in this kid in 2020 that makes me a believer. He got embarrassed at the end of 2019, put in the work in the offseason, and the improvements were there even if the old-school numbers don’t show them.

I’m excited to see what Riley can do for the Braves in 2021 if given the starting job for a full season. At his best, I think Riley can hit .270 with 30-plus home runs in the middle of a lineup. That’s worth waiting for.