The Braves had a down year last year, but there was more in play than injuries. Some players are primed for serious bounce backs when we look at their underlying numbers.
There is no sugar coating it, the Atlanta Braves did not reach the win total that many had hoped for last season. Of course, injuries played a major role in offensive performance with many key players missing significant time.
Sean Murphy injured his oblique day one and when he returned it was clear he never fully recovered. Ronald Acuña Jr. tore his ACL in May, and Austin Riley had an oblique injury in May, and then a broken wrist in August. Ozzie Albies also missed significant time due to his wrist injury in July, and Michael Harris had a hamstring injury in June that resulted in missing a large chunk of games. These are just the major injuries. There were quite a few other minor injuries as well.
That being said, it is always fun to look beyond poor injury luck, and see if there are any players that just had poor luck when actually on the field. Typically, over a long period of time, players have a positive regression to the mean.
Bad luck can be measured
In a nutshell, anomalies exist from a statistical standpoint, and through trend analysis we can see if these anomalies are bad luck, or if they are potentially the start of a trend downward.
A good example was when the Braves signed Marcell Ozuna before the 2020 season. In 2019 he had a slightly above average offensive season, but his underlying metrics showed that he was extremely unlucky. In 2020, his bad luck ran out and he had positive regression to the mean and he had MVP votes.
This is not unique to hitters. This line of logic also applies to pitchers. Let’s take a look at the returning players from the 2024 roster and see if there are some bounce back candidates.
We took a deep look at Sean Murphy earlier in the season as a bounce back candidate, so we won’t spend too much time on him. But just the fact that he should be fully healthy again should help him be able to hit breaking pitches again.
When looking at the roster one player really stands out as a player who had bad luck outside of just injuries, and he happened to be the other player with the oblique injury. Austin Riley still had an above average offensive campaign with a wRC+ of 116, but it was much lower than his previous three seasons.
Yes, he had injuries which could have absolutely played a role in a lower offensive output, but it appears to be deeper than that. He had poor batting average of balls in play (BABIP) luck. If we look at BABIP in a vacuum it can be deceiving. We can see that his .310 BABIP is right around the league average every year, so that does not scream bad luck. However, the last three seasons he never had a BABIP below .315.
Beyond BABIP we can look at his Statcast profile and see a huge gap between his weighted on base average (wOBA) and his expected weighted on base average (xwOBA). His wOBA was .338 and his xwOBA was a much higher .361. Whenever you see this in a player, this is an indicator to dig deeper because there is probably some data to support a bounce back.
If we look at his expected slugging percentage (xSLG) he had some terrible luck. He ranked in the top 7.0 of MLB in xSLG with .505, but his actual slugging percentage was much lower at .461. This is largely due to fastballs not falling for hits when most of the time they would based on exit velocity and launch angle.
He had an xSLG of .515 on fastballs last season and only had an actual slugging percentage on fastballs of .428. Factor in him seeing fastballs 61.1 of the time, it is no wonder why his XSTATS are so far off from his on field output.
His average exit velocity of 94.2 MPH on fastballs was the best of his career, and his average launch angle of fourteen degrees would net him a much higher slugging percentage over an extended period of time.
Look for Austin Riley to be crushing the ball in 2025.
Michael Harris had a somewhat similar story to Austin Riley. He missed a decent chunk of time, but unlike Sean Murphy it does not appear to be a lingering injury that resulted a drop-off in on field production.
Harris ended the season with a slightly below league average year offensively in terms of wRC+ with a 99. Given he defensive ability, the Braves can live with that output. That being said, he showed signs an uptick was incoming.
Much like we explored earlier, Harris is another player who’s wOBA was much lower than his xwOBA. He had an xwOBA of .344 to only a .312 wOBA. This is notable difference.
Harris has power, but his bread and better is hitting for average. His average took a hit last year with only being .264, but his xBA shows a much prettier picture with being .284, which was in the top 6.0 percent of MLB hitters.
Harris’ BABIP of .300 was much lower than his .334 in 2023 and .361 in 2022. To be fair, .361 was never sustainable, but the fact that .300 is clearly his career low, it shows he may have some positive regression to the mean in 2025.
Harris also had poor luck on fastballs. His xwOBA on the pitch type was .353 while his on field wOBA was only .301. That is the second largest xwOBA to wOBA gap in his career on any pitch type in any direction (positive or negative). He saw a fastball 58.0 percent of time. He could swing the bat the exact same way next year, and odds heavily favor him having better on-field numbers.
Lastly, lets look at a pitcher. Aaron Bummer had some terrible luck last year. In fact, you could argue he has been one of the unluckiest pitchers in MLB over the past two seasons.
This past season he had a palatable ERA of 3.58, but his fielding independent pitching (FIP) was an elite 2.23. His FIP was better than Chris Sale, Reynaldo López, and Raisel Iglesias.
He also had an expected ERA (xERA) of 2.80, largely in part to his elite groundball rate of 61.3 percent (top 2.0 percent in MLB), and player not able to make hard solid contact. He led MLB in the best barrel percentage at a measly 1.3 percent, and hitters struggled to an average exit velocity of 86.6 MPH, which ranks Bummer in the best 9.0 percent of MLB pitchers.
Hitters were fortunate against him in the BABIP department this past season with a .386 against him. That will ruin any reliever’s ERA since they pitch much fewer innings than a starter.
Even if you account for this past season, his career BABIP against him is .317, showing the terrible luck he had. If Bummer were to pitch the exact same pitches to the exact same hitters over a longer period of time, odds heavily favor his ERA taking a nose dive, and getting much closer to what his FIP was. Look for Aaron Bummer to eventually be the guy that is turned to when high leverage situations emerge.
In Summary
There is more to bad luck than injuries, and the Braves certainly had their share of those. Aaron Bummer, Michael Harris II, and Austin Riley are showing serious signs that last season they were unlucky statistically, and that 2025 could be much better for them even if they cloned exactly how they played last season.