Is All Hope Lost for the Atlanta Braves?

For the Atlanta Braves, the 2025 season is a disasterpiece. Last season had its share of disappointments, but the long stretches of middling play still left the Braves in a playoff spot by the tiniest of margins. After 2024, it was reasonable to stay the course; no need to smash the red panic button like an unsupervised child in an elevator. This time around, however, the Braves are likely to finish the season with somewhere around 90 losses, making simply battening down the hatches and waiting for sunnier weather a lot riskier of a strategy. I cranked up ZiPS to see how much tinkering the computer thinks Atlanta needs to do in order to compete in 2026.

The Good

On the plus side, the Braves aren’t trying to build a winning team out of nothing. Much of the offensive core remains intact and is actually functioning quite well. Ronald Acuña Jr. has made a successful return from a second torn ACL and has been playing at a 7-WAR pace. Of course, he’s out at the moment with another Achilles injury, but this appears to be a minor issue, relatively speaking, and given his history and Atlanta’s position in the standings, there’s no real reason not to be conservative with his recovery. ZiPS is understandably down on his injury risk, but he still gets his usual dynamite projection for 2026, even if it’s a little diminished from a playing time perspective:

Braves fans have understandably mixed feelings about seeing Freddie Freeman aging well in another uniform, but Matt Olson has been much better this season than he was in his down 2024, to the point he’s actually edging out Freeman in WAR for the year! A repeat of 2023 likely isn’t in the cards for Olson, but he should continue to be roughly the same player he’s been outside of that boom season, albeit with gradual decline expected in his 30s:

Austin Riley is more of a question mark, as he’s had both of the last two seasons marred by injuries: first a fractured hand that ended his 2024 prematurely, and then multiple abdomen injuries that have reduced his 2025 attendance. He’s still on the right side of 30, and while we can expect him to mostly bounce back, after two underwhelming seasons, you can’t pen him down for the 5 or 6 WAR he put up annually from 2021 to 2023:

The catching position has been a strength of the Braves, with Sean Murphy making a solid, albeit low-batting average, bounce back from an injury-laden 2024 season. Drake Baldwin has had a terrific rookie campaign, and while I’ll refrain from making any predictions about his Rookie of the Year chances — I’m a voter this year — I don’t think it’s out of bounds to suggest that every voter is going to have to take his case very seriously. Plus, I appreciate that his name sounds like a soap opera character, far better than mine did. While Murphy and Baldwin make for a terrific tandem, each is capable of being a full-time starter in his own right; a more effective use of Murphy in 2026 may be a trade to bring in talent the team needs elsewhere. ZiPS has generally been pretty conservative with Baldwin, but he seems to have hit a tipping point the last two months; his projections have improved rapidly month-by-month:

The Bad

Seeing Spencer Strider healthy has been great. Seeing Spencer Strider actually pitch has been less fun, especially since memories of his first year and a half in the majors are fresh. His fastball isn’t as explosive as it once was, and unlike in 2022 and 2023, hitters have been able to get at it early enough to pull it a long way. While he throws a curveball and changeup, he’s basically a two-pitch pitcher, which is a problem when one of those pitches goes south. He looks like he needs to seriously adjust his repertoire this offseason. ZiPS is hopeful he’ll be better in his second year back from Tommy John surgery [errr…internal brace surgery -DS], but it’s a big drop from his previous projections, which had him up with the best pitchers in the league:

On the plus side, Michael Harris II has been quite solid since the start of July, with a .317/.337/.577 triple-slash over 36 games. But he was so abysmal for the first three months of the season that this run has merely served to get his stats up to something halfway approaching respectability. He isn’t a 33-year-old veteran trying to hold off decline; he’s a 24-year-old who you’d hope to see rounding out his game and taking a step forward, not just trying to salvage a lousy year. ZiPS had big hopes for Harris breaking out in 2025 — that’s one projection that isn’t looking especially prescient — and it still gives him a solid projection for 2026, but it has lost some of its verve:

There’s been no such salvaging of the season when it comes to Ozzie Albies. Picking up his $7 million club option for next year is still obviously the right call, but his projections have taken a very serious hit. Unlike Harris, Albies also underperformed in 2024, and while he’s rather young for an established player to just disappear absent an injury, it has happened (see Carlos Baerga or, arguably, Edgar Renteria). The fractured wrist that cost him time in 2024 is an insufficient explanation for his continued decline:

What’s more, the team’s depth projects to be absolutely atrocious. ZiPS is still fairly optimistic about Nacho Alvarez Jr., but it sees little chance of any other help coming from the farm in the near future. The best 2026 projection for a Braves minor league hitter at the moment is Eddys Leonard at 0.9 WAR, and he was signed after being released from Detroit’s Triple-A affiliate. That means that without a more aggressive approach to their Plan B and Plan C talent, every injury in Atlanta will again have a massive impact beyond the lost player himself. Marcell Ozuna is a free agent and in decline, and losing his bat, which has been surprisingly potent the last few years, leaves another hole in a lineup the Braves have had trouble filling out.

The Ugly

Atlanta was one of the most injured teams in baseball in 2024, which served to partially explain the team’s middling season. But while the Braves have lost a lot of pitchers to injury again this year, the offense has generally been healthy, and the team is so far back that the injuries needed to explain their 2025 performance would almost have to include an Ebola outbreak.

There are good reasons to think that Chris Sale, Spencer Schwellenbach, Reynaldo López, and Grant Holmes could form a pretty nice rotation with Strider, but all are currently out with injury, along with the Braves prospect ZiPS has liked the best, AJ Smith-Shawver. And Smith-Shawver’s not going to be back any time soon, as he went the Tommy John route a couple of months ago. The other four could all be pluses in 2026, but there are serious risks. Sale’s injury isn’t arm related, but he also has a long injury history, which means you can’t just depend on getting 150 innings from him in any given season. López has missed the season with shoulder surgery, and while the team appears to be hopeful, shoulder injuries don’t have the same record of recovery that elbows do. Holmes is trying to rehab a partial UCL tear, and I don’t think I have to tell you those associated risks. ZiPS loves Schwellenbach — as it did before the season — but an elbow fracture is nothing to scoff at for a pitcher.

What’s Next?

If I do a very early 2026 projected standings for the NL East, with all the teams only having the players under contract for next season on their respective rosters, the Braves project for just an 79-83 record, third in the division and well behind the Phillies and Mets. While the front-end talent is still there, ZiPS cares about the team’s depth and injury status, and the uncertain pitching coupled with the holes in the lineup put a damper on the team’s win total in most of the simulations. Injuries will happen, and the current roster is ill-equipped to weather them.

The Braves aren’t cheap in the sense of the Rays and Marlins, but they do strive to spend as efficiently as possible. I don’t think they can get away with that any longer; the times call for inefficiency, not thrift. While the rotation could be good, the team needs more certainty. And if they end up with too much starting pitching? Well, no team has ever had that be an actual problem. There are plenty of interesting pitchers out there, from Dylan Cease to Framber Valdez to Ranger Suárez, and Michael King is likely to join them. There are also a lot of fascinating maybes, like Brandon Woodruff, Shane Bieber, and Zac Gallen, but the Braves aren’t in a position where they should be chasing maybes. They have sufficient supply of those.

Similarly, hanging around all winter to see which free agents are left unsigned in March, and then bringing in a couple to fill out the roster, is not going to work. The Braves don’t necessarily need to sign a superstar, though one is always welcome. Instead, this is a roster that just screams for a robust corps of veteran role players, even if Atlanta has to pay a bit more for them.

So are the Atlanta Braves doomed? No. But something has to change in the team’s approach for it to return to being a top-tier contender in 2026.