The Old Matt Olson Is Back
On April 29, 2021, Matt Olson hit himself in the face with a baseball in the batting cage at Tropicana Field. A freak bounce off the L-screen left him with the kind of shiner an athlete can usually only acquire by going 12 rounds with Marvin Hagler, but fortunately no lasting damage. By May 2, Olson was well enough to return to the lineup, and he hasn’t missed a game since.
Olson’s consecutive games streak now stands at 820; not only is this the longest active run in baseball, he recently passed Nellie Fox for the 11th-longest streak in MLB history. Assuming he avoids any further batting practice mishaps, Olson will end the season with the eighth-longest streak ever. Only seven players in MLB history — and 10 in all of North American top-level sports — have ever played in 1,000 straight games. Olson is due to become the 11th before the All-Star break next year.
This is undeniably an impressive athletic feat. For the past five seasons — and really, close to a decade, dating back to his early days in Oakland — Olson has been good enough to demand a starting position in a big league lineup. And for good teams, more often than not. He’s taken good enough care of his body to withstand the (considerable, even for a first baseman) physical toll of a 162-game major league season, and avoided injury through impact as well as wear-and-tear. (Olson has been hit by 30 pitches during his streak, and escaped with his hamate bone intact.)
As much as I admire Olson’s commitment and dedication, I have a bit of a crank take on iron man streaks: If you literally never miss a game, you’re probably hurting the team.
Olson has been suiting up six days a week every season for five years, and while he’s not taking the beating of a catcher or middle infielder, he’s still exerting himself enough to require rest. Not a lot, but skipping the odd day game after a night game might help him save his strength for big moments later in the year.
Since Olson joined the Braves in 2022, Atlanta has won 100 regular-season games twice. But the Braves’ postseason record is 2-8, and they’ve failed to win a single playoff round since their World Series title in 2021. Olson is hitting .250/.357/.417 with two homers in those 10 games, which is just fine in a vacuum but below his normal standards.
In 2023, the Braves won 104 games with an unusually stable lineup: All nine starting position players played at least 100 games. Eight of them played at least 138 games, and in addition to the irreplaceable Olson, both Austin Riley and Ronald Acuña Jr. played 159 games apiece.
This is, from soup to nuts, one of the best regular-season teams I can remember. The Braves not only won a division that sent three teams to the playoffs, but they won it by 14 games. Olson was unbelievable, belting a career-high 54 home runs and hitting .283/.389/.604. This was one of those seasons that bears reaching back for the old-timey stats: Olson scored 127 runs and drove in 139. Had Acuña not scrambled away with the MVP trophy, Olson would’ve made a run at the award himself.
Olson followed that season up with back-to-back 29-homer campaigns. Acuña and Riley both battled injuries as Atlanta’s win total dropped by 15 from 2023 to 2024, and another 13 from 2024 to 2025.
The more tired the Braves looked, the more convinced I became that I had been right all along: Bossman gives you all that PTO for a reason, and you’re only hurting yourself if you don’t take it.
Six weeks into the 2026 season, I find myself… chastened. The Braves are 26-12, and Olson has, without exaggeration, been the best player in the National League. He’s hitting .301/.388/.671 with 13 home runs in 38 games, and if there are fluke indicators hiding in his stat line, they’re not especially troubling.
He is swinging the bat harder than in any previous season for which bat tracking data is available. And he’s making more contact than ever (both within and outside the zone) and striking out at his lowest rate since 2021.
As you might suspect from a hitter with a 50-homer season on his CV, Olson has always had terrific raw power. His long levers and looping, graceful swing have never evinced the raw strength or violence you’ll find among the true exit velo monsters — even graceful lefties like Shohei Ohtani. Olson hits the ball hard a lot, and he puts the ball in the air a lot, and so a lot of his fly balls carry out of the yard.
In 2023, Olson posted a HR/FB% of 27.8%, second behind Ohtani among qualified hitters. Last year, that number was down to 16.0%, which was 38th in the league. This year: 23.6%. Here’s one of the 55 fly balls Olson has hit this year.
Usually, when I plug a video into a post there’s some pedagogical value — I want you to see something specific to understand the point I’m making. Not so here. I just thought you might be interested to see a guy put a baseball on the roof of the Cumberland Mall.
I’m not entirely certain what’s changed. According to Baseball Savant, he’s standing with his feet a few inches closer together than last year, with a stance that’s a couple degrees more open. Comparing the home run from above with this one from last season, the difference is subtle at best.
Whatever the cause, Olson is making better swing decisions and meeting the ball more squarely than in previous seasons. Usually, when we say a hitter is “hot,” there’s an undercurrent of acknowledgment that he’s getting lucky. Hotness, often as not, has more to do with what happens after contact than before.
That’s not really the case here. Olson is hot because he’s seeing the ball well, and he’s getting appropriate results. This is a hitter for whom a down year involves 30-odd home runs and a wRC+ in the 120s; when he gets the “NBA Jam” fireball streak going, this is what it looks like.
It’s also worth noting that Olson and the Braves have also had pretty easy competition. Atlanta has played 11 different opponents so far this season; none of them currently (as of Thursday afternoon) has a winning record. The Braves played six games against the Phillies while they were in their dead parrot phase. Olson also has four homers in seven total games at Coors Field and Chase Field, the two highest-elevation ballparks in the league.
Still, Olson has the second-highest ISO in the National League. He’s killing the ball right now, to an extent that would be noteworthy even if the Braves had only played the Westish College Harpooners all year.
In conclusion: If Olson is hitting like this, the iron man streak will take care of itself. No sane manager would take this bat out of the lineup, even for one game.
Michael is a writer at FanGraphs. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Ringer and D1Baseball, and his work has appeared at Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, The Atlantic, ESPN.com, and various ill-remembered Phillies blogs. Follow him on Twitter, if you must, @MichaelBaumann.
Olson has been extraordinarily locked in at the plate this year.
He’s seeing the ball incredibly well and is not showing obvious holes in his swing. He’s never been a high-average guy like Freddie Freeman, but right now he’s batting .300 and even when he’s making outs he’s making the pitcher throw a ton of high-pressure pitches. What a hitter.
On MLB Network, Mark DeRosa and Sean Casey did an admiring 10-minute segment, and they touched on a subtle change in his stance, but what impressed me most was the breakdown of his at-bat against Tarik Skubal a week ago – left on left, facing the best pitcher in the game, he repeatedly managed to spit on pitches out of the zone and foul off pitcher’s pitches.
In the first, he grounded out on the ninth pitch, then singled on the eighth pitch in the eighth. He struck out in his third at-bat against Skubal, but two innings later he hit a walk-off homer against Kenley Jansen.
What a year he’s having. What a hitter.
https://www.mlb.com/video/breaking-down-matt-olson-s-hitting-approach
(Oops, the single was in the 4th.)
The “Braves have had an easy schedule” line is getting old and is only borne out by cherry-picked measures. I mean, it’s May and they still haven’t had the pleasure of playing the Mets yet. How easy could it have been?
The Braves would have played multiple teams with winning records (as of Thursday afternoon) if it weren’t for the losses those teams suffered to the Braves. Their strength of schedule is better than the Dodgers.
and now they took 2 of 3 from the trolley dodgers with +8 run dif over the whole weekend
Freddie Freeman had back to back career years after joining the Dodgers, so he’s been ~5 WAR better than Olson from 2022-25. But Freddie is 4.5 years older than Olson so the expectation was that Olson would be better in the long term.
Olson was almost 1 WAR ahead of Freddie last season and is currently 1.7 WAR ahead *this year*. Looks like the long term has arrived.
True, although the Braves had to give up some good trade capital (Shea Langeliers, actualy-still-a-prospect Cristian Pache) to get Olson that they could’ve kept if they had re-signed Freeman
fair point. Wild how many excellent catchers have emerged from ATL – William Contreras, Shea Langoliers and now Drake Baldwin.
I don’t really get the concept of “rest” asa day off for position players other than catchers. Baseball is a game of agility, not exertion. If you had them wear a Fitbit during the gane, it would show far less than a routine daily gym workout; heck, it would probably show less than I would walking from my car and back and forth from my seats in the upper deck. There are warm-ups and BP but those usually include all the players, not just starters because some of them may need to sub in. There may be some demands from concentration but it’s not continuous, lots of breaks in between.at If there’s value to giving a player a day off, it would seem primarily to keep them from getting injured during play but that isn’t “rest”
No offense man, but you seem to have forgotten that mental fatigue exists. These are *extremely* competitive people. Focus is a form of exertion. There’s also travel fatigue (which is mental and physical).
Not to mention you’re wrong about how much exertion is in say, a single swing, or single throw from the OF. Which they do a lot of prior to the games.
Heck, many players work out after the game.
Thoughts on whether he’ll be a HoFer by the time he hangs it up? It feels like if he stays healthy and productive for another few years he’ll get at least a look.
Edit: I just noticed whether you judge him on bWAR vs fWAR affects the answer to this question. About 10 WAR difference at the moment.
I’ll agree with B-Ref’s 3 wins on the Positional Adjustment side (even if I’d call it 2.5), but not the 6 wins DRS gives him over FRV or the 1 win of baserunning.
That puts him around 6 WAR behind where Freddie was at the same age…although it’s 9 if you give Freddie the same Positional boost.