AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
Now that that’s out of the system, welcome to Atlanta. The Seattle Mariners enter today in playoff position, while the long-formidable Braves ballclub is dejectedly trudging to their first miss of the playoffs since 2017. In spite of that, several of their most important players are healthy or returning to the field, making this club less-than-pushover for a M’s ballclub that would see a get-right series go down smooth to close out their final East Coast trip of the regular season.
Atlanta’s troubles stem from a little bit of everything. They’re just… mediocre, with stars underperforming besides Matt Olson and injuries crushing their lineup and rotation for much of the season. The result has been a stars and scrubs experience that’s light on stars, though at least a few seem in better stead as the season rounds the final corner.
Scary and snoozy. The name recognition in this lineup swings like a pendulum, with some of the biggest stars in the sport accompanying a bevy of also-rans. “When healthy” is the defining phrase for this lineup, which has missed Ronald Acuña Jr. for chunks of this season and now is without 3B Austin Riley for the remainder as well. Atlanta is trying out Ha-Seong Kim for a potential 2026 return, while attempting to suss out whether their 2022 Rookie of the Year can recover from a staggeringly slow open to his season. If that sounds familiar to M’s fans, yes, Julio Rodríguez has had some ebbs and flows, but Michael Harris II’s steady decline has seen him lose 17-21 points of wRC+ each consecutive season.
Chris Sale won his first Cy Young award last year, rebounding from a number of significant injuries with a sterling campaign in his first season in Atlanta. He’s been just as effective on the mound this year, but the injury bug has struck again. This time, it was a freak injury suffered in mid-June while fielding a weak comebacker that resulted in a fractured rib cage. He returned from the IL last week looking no worse for wear, though his absence almost certainly contributed to the Braves’ demise this year. He’s essentially the same pitcher he’s always been, leaning heavily on a fastball/slider combo that comes from an extreme horizontal arm slot. He’s nearly impossible for left-handed batters to hit, though that handedness split (7 points of wOBA) is a lot smaller this year than it has been in the past (42 points of wOBA for his career).
Hurston Waldrep made his major league debut last year, less than a year after he was drafted in the first round of the 2023 draft. His very brief cup of coffee did not go very well for him; he was knocked around in two starts and then was sidelined with some elbow inflammation. With some additional seasoning in Triple-A to start this year, the Braves recalled Waldrep in August after their rotation was depleted by injuries. He’s been a revelation in his second stint in the big leagues, allowing no more than a single run in any of his five starts and one bulk relief appearance. His best pitch is a nasty splitter that generates a whiff nearly half the time batters offer at it. His fastball is mediocre at best so he’s ditched that four-seamer in favor of a hard cutter and sinker. Those two new pitches have been hit around a bit but his split is so good, that he’s been able to mitigate the damage allowed off the other pitches in his arsenal.
Spencer Strider is one of the latest, more extreme examples of a pitcher returning from a significant injury in diminished form. He was absolutely electric during his first two full seasons in Atlanta, finishing second in Rookie of the Year voting in 2022 and fourth in Cy Young award voting in ‘23. An elbow injury cost him nearly all of last year and he opted to have internal brace surgery instead of a full Tommy John ligament replacement. He returned to the mound in mid-April and immediately went back on the IL with a hamstring strain. He was back for good a month later, but his season has been an up-and-down affair. The key metric for him has been his fastball velocity; it started off pretty low, he regained some strength as the season wore on, but it dipped again over his last two starts. His results had been looking pretty good until the calendar flipped to August; across five starts since the beginning of last month, his ERA is a whopping 9.13.
If the rest of the league had their acts together, the Mariners might be in real trouble. Thankfully, that is not the case. Houston dropped two out of three against the Yankees, and now heads out for a three-city road trip that begins in Arlington with the Rangers. That will both pressure and aid Seattle from the Wild Card or AL West race, depending on outcome. Meanwhile, the Guardians and Rays continue their showdown of clubs Seattle has the tiebreaker on despite their damndest efforts in the past week. Kansas City takes on the moribund Twins, who were just mopped by the White Sox, while a Roman Anthony-less Red Sox team attempts to regroup in Arizona. Back atop the Wild Card standings, the Bronx Bombers host the AL East-leading Toronto Blue Jays.