What Went Wrong in 2024 for the Atlanta Braves

15 comments

1. Here’s to 2025🎉

2. Presupposing that what happened in 2023 would repeat itself. Nothing happen to the Braves that didn’t happen to other teams. There’s NO reasoning to explain. All one can ask for is opportunities. Sometimes failure rears it’s ugly head, sometimes not.

3. 2023 was the most fun I have ever had watching Braves baseball. 2024 was the complete opposite. I never turned the TV off more than i did this year. Almost every game was stressful and frustrating.

4. Ronald Acuña Jr will fade away like many other Venezuelan players ( Ender Inciarte, Carlos Gonzalez, Cesar Hernandez, etc )

5. Love to keep whit ass a veteran utility for another injury mishap instead of going out and finding people late

6. Need a new coach.

7. Here is what went right… our pitching (scouting, development, gameplan all excellent). Lose your cy young guy… cool we brought in 2 guys in the off-season 1 will win it and the other would have if he had enough innings. Pitchers keep getting injured… cool we will bring up a 10 year milb vet and he will kill it in the pen and spot starts plus we bring up a dude with less than 100 innings in college and pro ball and he will solidify the 5th starter role. Best era in MLB with all of the different arms… our gameplan was on point.
   What went wrong… everything else.

8. Unpopular opinion snit was better in 24 than in 23. Everything went right in 23 but this year was the opposite and darn near every guy who came in this lineup, many who were dfa’d, contributed immediately. That says a lot about culture and coaching. With all of the bad luck and terrible results no one pouted, loafed, threw tantrums, or allowed any bs to spill over with fighting amongst ourselves. Again that says a lot about coaching and culture.

9. injuries, especially to not just key, but superstar-level players, were at a level I've not experienced with a team in my 25 years of following sports, but it was far more than that. We talked about an obvious expected regression from a historic offensive year, but this was almost as extreme the other way. Apart from one of the greatest lineups the sport ever saw becoming one saturated with other team's DFA'd players that were heavily relied upon, all the other players that didn't get hurt except Ozuna had massive slumps. While kept slightly above water by good, often great, pitching, there were pockets of the season where the offense would randomly explode for 1/2 or 2/3 of a week and somehow that just happened to coincide perfectly with pitching implosions (many examples, but everyone remembers that mind-boggling rockies series). On top of that and a myriad of other frustrations, we saw this team be historic in another way – how objectively unlucky it was. Having it culminate in that last Fried start where there was comical infield hit after infield hit… it just felt cursed. It was a minor miracle that they were able to get a playoff spot with everything, so I consider it a sucess.

   That said, while fans can be excited to start with a blank canvas and return a potentially lethal lineup featuring a healthy Acuna, Riley, Olson, Ozuna, Albies at the top, MH2 finally over the last 6 weeks looking like he's busted open that door into stardom, hopeful returns to the mean for Murphy and Arcia, and Soler lurking somewhere in the order, we really need to be convinced for almost all of them that 2024 was the outlier and 2023 was closer to the expected.

   Strider, I think, comes back around mid-season so even with Fried's likely departure a rotation featuring the Spencer bros. and Chris Sale is as formidable as any in the league. Who they add as a starter could make it one of the scariest rotations in MLB. I think the bullpen, as good as it was overall, could use some work. I don't think Pierce Johnson is a high leverage guy (maybe Daysbel takes that leap?) but Rasiel is one of the best out there so filling in around the fringes of the spots under him gives you, on paper, one of most complete teams in modern baseball.

10. Even for a team like the Braves, there’s only so much you can do when all of your core players are out for extended periods of time across the season

11. AA needs to take a good hard look at what is going on around him. I am tired of hearing about this locked up core of young players. While yes we do have a decent core but let's take a deep dive. Acuna may never be the same again after his second ACL tear, Albies as documented in this video has a hard time staying healthy and really does have a lot of swing an miss in his bat even with plus defense. Riley is a stud but we have yet to see him cary this team in the month of October, The Murphy and Kelenic trades are starting to really look bad and who knows from year to year how the pitching staff is going to look. Pitching is one of the hardest things to predict. There was a time when Ian Anderson, Shelby Miller and Mike Folty looked like they were gonna carry the bravest to another 13 straight. The point is the Dodgers just seem like they are going to have an entire team of Hall of Famers soon, the Mets are going to spend until they bankrupt New York to have a playoff team and the Braves have yet to prove they can go win in Philly in October. Not to mention the Padres just have players that have the Joc Pederson attitude in October. AA needs to realize we are no longer the favorites. We need to get hungry again. We need to start going after top tier talent that can win in October.

12. i dont even remember arcia's tooth injury 💀💀

13. Thanks Jake for saying just because Ronald had a slow start didn’t mean he was going to stay that way. Geez it was only 49 games! Everyone in media when talking about his injury throws in that he wasn’t doing much! Come on! Check out Lindor. I live in NY and the fan base was screaming about how terrible he was to start the season. Well, we all know how that turned, MVP caliber year. Ronald is a great hitter and I had no worries that he wouldn’t be able to have a very good season if he had stayed healthy. So, thanks for being a voice of reason.

14. As lackluster as Acuna was, he still produced a 1.0 fWAR in just 49 games, all other right fielders combined (Soler, Laureano, Martinez, Wall, Kelenic, White, Anderson, and Duvall) in the remaining 113 games produced a combined 0.2 fWAR. So even if Acuna were to have never had gotten going at all this year, his productioned over that 113 game span would have been 2.3 fWAR, which would have been 2.1 fWAR higher than the combined production the rest of the team produced in right field. That's sad, and if Acuna would have gotten going eventually, just like Riley and Olson, even Harris eventually did, that gap could have been way bigger. Also it was stated that Braves players combined to miss a total of 1,162 days, that's just unreal, and equates to having over 6 players missing the full season (187 day season).

15. FIRE 🔥 SNITKER! HIRE A.J. PIERZYNSKI FORMER BRAVES CATCHER! NOT LAID BACK LIKE SNIT! FIRED UP ALL THE TIME! BRING THE FIRE 🔥 BACK! CATCHER'S MAKE THE BEST MANAGERS!