Luckiest/Unluckiest Braves by xwOBA

A week into the season and we finally have some stats to look at. The sample size is small, but who cares.

Here are the 8 Braves hitters with 15+ PAs ranked by wOBA - xwOBA:

1 Ozzie Albies 0.531 - 0.457 0.074
2 Dansby Swanson 0.488 - 0.418 0.070
3 Freddie Freeman 0.488 - 0.460 0.028
4 Ender Inciarte 0.297 - 0.286 0.011
5 Josh Donaldson 0.258 - 0.316 -0.058
6 Nick Markakis 0.400 - 0.459 -0.059
7 Ronald Acuna Jr. 0.305 - 0.417 -0.112
8 Brian McCann 0.294 - 0.407 -0.113

Ozzie (.500 BABIP) and Swanson (66.7% HR/FB) are clearly getting pretty lucky early on, but both guys are legitimately hitting well according to xwOBA.

Freeman is doing Freeman things. I hate to take it for granted, but he's a tremendous hitter who is performing tremendously.

Inciarte is truly struggling early. Pulling the ball too much (76.5% Pull%), as was his problem early last year. He needs to be spraying the ball around to be effective as a punch and judy hitter.

JD isn't getting results, but xwOBA suggest he is hitting like an average hitter rather than a terrible hitter. He hasn't really hit the ball in the air yet, and when he does I expect to see the HRs follow.

Markakis is simply hitting line drives everywhere (45% LD%). He is legitimately going well right now.

Ronald is, simply put, getting screwed early in the season. He is walking twice as much as he's striking out, he's hitting the ball hard, but his BABIP is currently an absurd .125. Expect that to change.

Mac has similar BB/K numbers as Acuna, but is pounding grounders into the shift.

Ronald really has been getting incredibly unlucky so far this season. I expect those hard hit balls to start finding holes soon. I still firmly believe that he's going to be one of the top 10 hitters in baseball this season.

Donaldson is scaring me just a bit, but I'm sure its just a matter of him taking time to get back into a groove.

Donaldson hasnt been great hitting but his defense has been A1 so far.

And to add on with Acuna, he is SCORCHING balls right at people, rotten luck.

Sav, please change his name to MASTER OF STATISTICS.

Actually pretty happy to see McCann looking good here.

A return to 2017 form at the plate for him would make him an overall upgrade to Suzuki. Particularly since his splits play better in tandem with Flowers.

That ball was gone off Macs bat last night. Except the CF caught it. Man I was sure it was out.

Correlates pretty well with what I’ve been seeing.

As a group, our hitters are off to a very good start. I think the offense is going to be strong this year. We're third in the NL in wOBA right now (to the fillies and dodgers). We have had some BABIP luck. Currently 3rd in BABIP in the NL to the metropolitans and cubs.

I've been down on AA for not upgrading the OF and have doubted that Markakis can keep holding off father time but man, he's been on everything so far this year. Just bullets all over the diamond.

He's not going to hit at this pace for the rest of the year but he's also shown no signs of slowing down.

That being said, I do wish we had a legit RH OF we could platoon with him a bit, especially against tough lefties. If nothing else it would keep Markakis fresh.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by striker42

I've been down on AA for not upgrading the OF and have doubted that Markakis can keep holding off father time but man, he's been on everything so far this year. Just bullets all over the diamond.

He's not going to hit at this pace for the rest of the year but he's also shown no signs of slowing down.

That being said, I do wish we had a legit RH OF we could platoon with him a bit, especially against tough lefties. If nothing else it would keep Markakis fresh.

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The thing with Markakis is Snitker is going to have to go to him and tell him that he's sitting once every two weeks or so. He faded badly in 2018 and I wouldn't expect him to have an OPS over .800 in 2019, but to be effective all season long, he is going to need a break every now and then. I agree that he is totally in the zone right now. He was all rips last night.