This story was excerpted from Mark Bowman’s Braves Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
If you think you’ve figured out baseball, then you have watched little of this great, unpredictable sport.
Once it was learned last week the Braves will spend these next couple months without Max Fried and Kyle Wright, it may have been easy to predict a losing streak was coming. But the odd thing about the current four-game skid is starting pitching hasn’t been the issue.
Yeah, the Braves went with a bullpen game in two of their past four games. But when you get to the ninth inning with a lead like they did in Sunday’s loss to the Blue Jays, you have successfully navigated the challenge. A bullpen game becomes just another game once you get to the late-inning, high-leverage relievers with a lead or the game tied.
This is certainly not a good time for closer Raisel Iglesias to be struggling. But he has allowed six hits and issued a walk in his past two appearances (1 1/3 innings). Nor is it a good time for A.J. Minter to be going through another rough stretch. But after Saturday’s rough outing, he has now allowed opponents to produce a .955 OPS while he has posted a 13.50 ERA over his past 11 appearances.
Nor is it a good time for both Austin Riley and Matt Olson to be scuffling. But over the past 22 games, Riley has a .606 OPS, and Olson has a .700 OPS. The good thing is the Braves have always depended on Marcell Ozuna, who has a 1.186 OPS through his first 41 plate appearances this month.
See. The unpredictable turns of a baseball season aren’t all bad.
With the Braves 25-15 through this season’s first 40 games, here are three interesting numbers to digest:
25: This is the 17th time the Braves have won at least 25 of their first 40 games and first time since 2018. The 1958, 1996 and 1999 clubs were all 25-15 long before they reached the World Series.
79: Spencer Strider has set a Braves record with 79 strikeouts through his first eight starts. There are just 19 pitchers in AL/NL history to reach this total through eight starts. Randy Johnson sits at the top of this list with the 92 strikeouts he notched while throwing 60 2/3 innings within his first eight starts of 2001. Strider has thrown just 46 2/3 innings.
Strider will also hold the club record for most strikeouts through the first nine starts of a season. John Smoltz currently holds the mark with 74 (1996) and Javier Vazquez ranks second with 73 (2009)
1.014: Ronald Acuña Jr.'s NL-leading 1.014 OPS is the highest mark by a Braves player since Freddie Freeman posted a 1.185 through this span of games in 2017. Acuña actually had a higher OPS (1.037) through his first 40 games of the 2020 season.