Jun 17, 2026; Cumberland, Georgia, USA; Atlanta Braves shortstop Mauricio Dubon (14) in the dugout during the game against the San Francisco Giants during the second inning at Truist Park. Mandatory Credit: Jordan Godfree-Imagn Images | Jordan Godfree-Imagn Images
No snappy post-colon headline here. I can’t think of a better way to describe the Braves over the last two weeks, or in June as a whole, other than awful. While I’ll get to the actual horrendous stats in a bit, I do want to indicate that things aren’t awful because the Braves lost a bunch of games, or because they basically destroyed their division lead.
No, the reason why this is awful is because it’s the second year in a row that we’ve basically seen how the combination of not pushing full bore to win every game and an entirely self-inflicted adverse change in offensive approach can absolutely destroy a team.
If the Braves had hit a run of poor outcomes in one-run games (part of 2025), or a massive xwOBA underperformance (part of 2024), then you could say, “Yeah, but look at the first two months” and write it off as a correction (there’s that word again). But that’s not really what happened. This isn’t the space for it, and I’ll cover their self-inflicted gaping wound later, but fundamentally, the Braves did this to themselves. Again. So they’ll need to stop doing it to themselves, or else this is literally just going to be 2025-except-for-two-months-without-an-0-7-start-before-it. In case you forgot, the Braves started 2025 0-7, but then went on a bit of a tear afterwards, looking like the team they were earlier in terms of offensive approach, albeit with some inconsistency. Then, the offensive approach clearly shifted towards walking and slapping at the ball, and though maybe they couldn’t have overcome the injuries and one-run game stuff, the combination of all of those things destroyed the season.
The 2026 season isn’t destroyed yet, but the Braves can’t stay passive at the plate for much longer and continue to reap the withered fruit (and losses) from doing so. Whatever the rationale for changing how they approach plate appearances from April and much of May, it needs to be identified and crossed off, or else 2026 will just be 2025 compressed into four months and not six. It doesn’t matter what the pitching does, it doesn’t matter what they do or don’t do at the Trade Deadline, it doesn’t really even matter who is or isn’t healthy (within a reasonable level of injury): what matters is some collectively group of bats hitting akin to their talent level (a la, a top ten in baseball unit) and not something worse. If they can do that, this will be a good season, If they can’t, prepare for pain.
Anyway, onto the actual biweekly stuff:
Past summaries:
So far, so good through mid-April
Even better in late April
May-be they’re just really good
Late May just good, rather than absurdly awesome
A June swoon so far
How did the Braves do recently?
Awful. At 3-9 in June’s second half, the Braves were definitively the worst team in baseball in that span. That two of those three wins came in a single series against the Brewers, of all teams, makes it worse, not better, as it means they went 1-8 against the Giants, Padres, and Cardinals. Though none of the games were these super-gigantic mismatches, the Braves should’ve gone something like 6-6 or maybe even 7-5 at the outside given the team talent levels and pitching matchups. They… did not.
The end result is that the Braves’ 9-14 June was their worst calendar month since last year’s 8-17 July… but the team was largely already dead by that point. The last time the Braves had a month with a sub-.400 winning percentage other than 2025 was August 2017, the last time it happened while they were relevant to the playoff picture was the September 2014 collapse that cost the Frank Wren regime their jobs and ushered in years of deliberate losing in Atlanta.
While some collapses are somewhat unjustified for various reasons, especially when concentrated in small samples, it’s hard to feel that way here:
In June’s second half, the Braves were dead last in position player value (below replacement) and 29th in xwOBA. This is also true for June as a whole. The fielding was top ten-ish, but they also tossed away an entire game with bad fielding, so that doesn’t do much in the way of consolation.
In June’s second half, the Braves were 23rd in pitching value (19th for the month). This breaks down into 27th in the rotation and 12th in the bullpen (26th and fourth for the month). The ERA-/FIP-/xFIP- ranks are 16th/19th/20th (and ninth/15th/17th for the month). This isn’t good, but it’s eminently survivable with good defense and actual hitting. The Braves… did not produce actual hitting.
So, put this together, and you have the Braves shedding, over the course of June:
Four wins off their projected end-of-season total;
About six percent in playoff odds (down to 92 percent);
About 28 percent in division odds (down to 61 percent); and
Going from the best record to the fourth-best record.
From June 16-on alone, they have shed:
Three of those four wins;
Even more in playoff odds (seven percent, over six); and
21 percent of the division odds.
How are the Braves doing overall?
This is a weird section / question to answer. On the season, the Braves look okay. But June was so aberrant and so problematic that things don’t feel okay, and they will quickly not be okay if any of June leaks into July. If June 2026 Braves was a virus, you’d need to quarantine it immediately, except that they went through all of June without doing it, so…
On the season, the Braves are now 19th in position player value and 14th in pitching value. They are underperforming their run differential by two games, but overperforming BaseRuns by two games. However, by WAR-wins, they have sunk down to a “should be a 42-41 team,” because their offensive performance has just been so unthinkably poor that it basically reverses the credit for all the good play they managed previously. Basically, it’s kind of an interesting thing, conceptually. The number of games suggests that one bad month will have a hard time counteracting two great ones, though I guess it’s technically possible if the bad month was horrendous. But, context-neutral performance without tallying wins and losses is a lot more granular.
I’ll just summarize it this way: if the Braves don’t start playing better now, they are already dead for the season, unless they luck into some kind of insane one-run game overperformance or something else that is unlikely to happen. They can’t play “the way they have been,” where that includes the season as a whole, because doing so will lead to them having a .500ish record at the end of the year.
How are the hitters doing?
What a psychotically stupid question to have as a standard biweekly recap section, past me.
The hitters died. Not literally, but figuratively. And also, if they had died literally, it’s not clear whether you’d be able to tell a difference in their results.
This chart probably says most of it here. The Braves only had two or three guys even play okay over the last two weeks. Mauricio Dubon is playing out of his mind, but no one else even played that well. On the season, this slide has transformed the team into one where they have five producers, and… nothing else. It’s basically half a lineup. Again, to be clear: the talent level is not “half a lineup.” But the overly-passive approach has killed any semblance of additional production that would push the roster into more than “half a lineup.” Drake Baldwin shed in two weeks basically a third of what he had accumulated in about two months.
Left side is last two weeks, right side is the season as a whole.
Mauricio Dubon deserves a medal for being the only guy really chugging in June, and Ozzie Albies basically stole a win from the Brewers with two cheap homers to right field that one time, but beyond those guys, Matt Olson, and Michael Harris II, the rest of the position players probably could’ve been submerged in a vat of acid and then brought back to the plate and I’m not sure June would’ve been any different.
How are the pitchers doing?
It’s kind of like the lineup…
Chris Sale is the only guy doing stuff, but he’s pitching like a normal-Cy Young-candidate-in-an-age-without-Jacob-Misiorowski. Everyone else, well… they didn’t help. Bryce Elder and Martin Perez have reasonable stats on the season as a whole, but got shelled recently — though Elder’s was largely HR/FB-related. The whole Grant Holmes saga and JR Ritchie failing to hit the ground running multiple times are additional, but nowhere near primary, reasons why June went as it did.
On the relief side, Dylan Lee, Didier Fuentes, and Robert Suarez all continued to be awesome, though it doesn’t really matter when they don’t get leads with which to pitch… or the team elects not to use them with said leads. Oh, and Robert Suarez got hurt. Lee in particular is having a ridiculous season: he has 1.4 fWAR already, and has already amassed a career-high 15 shutdowns.
Anyway, see you next month, if no one dips us all in a vat of acid. Which may be preferable at this point.