He started out slow and started to look like himself again before the injury bug claimed one of its biggest victims of the 2024 Braves season.
Over the three seasons leading up to 2024, Austin Riley had established himself as a true star in an infield that was full of them for the Atlanta Braves. It sure seemed like it was supposed to be full speed ahead — both for Riley and the Braves as a whole. Then we got, well, the season that we got and Austin Riley was not immune to the ghosts that haunted this team in 2024. Riley gave it an incredible effort but sometimes, it’s hard to avoid something hurtling towards you at near-100 mph.
How acquired?
The Braves drafted Austin Riley with the 41st overall pick of the 2015 MLB Draft. Riley has clearly emerged as the gem of Atlanta’s 2015 draft class. Riley eventually made his debut with the big league team (as a left fielder, no less) in 2019, bursting out of the gates before eventually coming down to Earth once big league pitchers got used to him. He continued to show flashes of greatness in 2020 before eventually putting it all together for a breakout season in 2021. While putting on an even better encore performance in 2022, Austin Riley signed a 10-year, $212 million contract extension with the Braves, which includes a club option that could see it go up to $232 million over 11 years.
What were the expectations?
Austin Riley rolled into the 2024 season off the strength of three-straight 5 fWAR seasons, which included at least 30 homers, a wOBA that was above .360 (and in 2021 and 2022’s cases, a wOBA North of .370) and wRC+ numbers that went like 136 in 2021, 144 in 2022 and 128 in 2023. Riley had become the picture of consistency — and excellent consistency, at that. He’d fully established himself as one of the top third basemen in baseball and there was little reason to suspect that we’d see anything less than that. Again, this had been three seasons of fantastic production from Riley so the expectations were pretty high.
2024 results
The story of the 2024 Atlanta Braves was a story of a team that somehow still made the Postseason (for only two games, but I digress) despite being bogged down by injuries and underperformance. Poor Austin Riley was a victim of both, as he was on his way to having a down season before a 97-mph heater from Jack Kochanowicz ended his season on August 18.
Now granted, a down season for Austin Riley still qualifies as a pretty good season for a lot of big league players. I’d imagine that there are a bunch of baseball players who would be lining up to gladly accept a season where they hit nearly 20 homers with a .338 wOBA and 116 wRC+ on the year. He was still on pace to just about get over the line for another 30-homer season had he not suffered the heater smacking him on the wrist and for all we know, he could’ve gone on a heater to end the season and help give the Braves more of a fighting chance once they eventually fell into the Postseason.
After all, if you take a quick mosey over to his Baseball Savant page, you’ll see that a lot of his hitting metrics ended up looking pretty similar to how they were over the previous three seasons of excellence from Riley.
baseballsavant.mlb.com
A lot of this was propped up by the fact that Riley had finally started to look like himself at the plate through June and July after sputtering about for the first two months of the season. From March through May, Austin Riley only hit at a .228/.295/.353 clip with just 3 home runs, a very rough-looking .287 wOBA and a wRC+ of just 82. However, Riley found himself again once the Summer rolled around and proceeded to hit .284/.349/.532 with a wOBA of .375, a wRC+ of 141 and 11 home runs from June 1 through July 31. Riley kept that up going into August, as he added five more dingers on his way to putting up a slash line of .250/.311/.529 with .358 wOBA and 130 wRC+ right up until his season ended.
So when it came to his bat, it was pretty obvious that Austin Riley was starting to really figure it out again and it would’ve been huge for the Braves to have him down the stretch. With that being said, he definitely appeared to stagnate when it came to his defense. While Riley was still good for making a highlight reel play with his glove every now and then, the consistency that he was starting to show at the hot corner in 2023 started to fall off a bit here in 2024. His DRS went down from 9 in 2023 to 0 in 2024 and his OAA went down from 0 in 2023 to -4 in 2024. You’d like to hope that he’ll be able to bounce back in 2024 but for now, it was an up-and-down campaign — not just defensively but overall for Riley.
What went right?
As I mentioned earlier, it took a while but Austin Riley eventually started to really cook at the plate. According to wRC+, four of RIley’s best five games at the plate took place during an 7-day span in June. For seven games over June 14 through June 21, Austin Riley gave the Rays, Tigers and Yankees a very tough time. The Rays in particular were probably very happy to be done seeing Riley once he got done with them, as he homered in all three games the Braves played against the Rays.
Here’s the Friday homer:
Here’s what he did to Tampa on Saturday:
Now, here’s his grand finale on Sunday:
June was Austin Riley’s month and that series against Tampa (and the next few days after that as well) was his peak.
What went wrong?
Riley completely stumbled out of the gates and it didn’t help that he suffered an oblique injury in May. He eventually recovered and started to hit his stride again but the broken wrist he suffered in August was just a brutal way for his season to end and another brutal blow to what was a very frustrating season for the team overall. The fact that Austin Riley even suffered those injuries threw a major wrench in everybody’s plans — Riley played 160 games in 2021, 159 in 2022 and 159 again in 2023. 110 games is still a nice number of games but it was clear that the Braves would’ve much rather preferred to have him healthy down the stretch. While Gio Urshela and Whit Merrifield at times did admirably in the efforts to man the hot corner, there’s a clear difference between a healthy Austin Riley and whatever his replacement is capable of.
2025 Outlook
Obviously, we’re all hoping that 2024 will go down as just a blip on the radar as far as Austin Riley’s career goes. He’s still pretty young and as far as projection models go, they’re still pretty bullish on RIiey bouncing back. ZiPS is protecting Riley to finish with 5.0 fWAR and another big season at the plate. Considering what Riley looked like before he got bitten by the injury bug, I would definitely bet on Riley coming back healthy and returning to the form that made him one of the premier third basemen in all of baseball.