Braves offense looking to make jump in Tim Hyers’ second season

NORTH PORT, Fla. — The Braves’ first season with Tim Hyers as their hitting coach provided some mixed results.

Among all MLB teams, the Braves ranked 13th in runs scored (724), RBIs (701) and OPS (.719), 15th in hits (1,349), 24th in doubles (243), 14th in home runs (190) and 18th in hitting (.245). The numbers, of course, never tell the whole story, but still paint a glum picture of a less-than-menacing offense.

Injuries, it must be noted, to many of the Braves regulars shuffled and jumbled the lineup time and time again. First baseman Matt Olson and center fielder Michael Harris II were the only Braves to play at least 160 games. Second baseman Ozzie Albies and former designated hitter Marcell Ozuna joined Olson and Harris as the only Braves to have more than 500 plate appearances.

The last two months of the Braves’ 2025 season, however, might provide a token of hope that the 2026 numbers could continue to trend in a much better direction.

“It’s more of me getting accustomed to them. I think it’s more of a coach adapting to your players,” Hyers told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about how his relationship with Braves hitters evolved last year. “They’ve been very successful and kind of adapted to their ways and how they handle failure, how they handle success and how they prepare. It’s giving them your tidbits here and there, and philosophy, and then getting those two to mesh.”

In the final two months of the 2025 season, the Braves’ team batting average jumped 10 points. The club drove in 143 runs in August and hit 37 home runs that month, both season highs for any month of the 2025 campaign.

And individually, Harris caught fire in August, Albies drove in 18 runs in August and hit .282 in September and October, and Ronald Acuña Jr. hit .294 with 11 RBIs and six homers in his final 40 games. Smaller sample sizes, yes, but maybe an indication that some things began clicking.

“We sat on the plane together last year and we both just love to talk about swings,” Braves manager Walt Weiss said of Hyers. “We had a lot of good hitting conversations. He’s got a couple (championship) rings, and there’s a reason he’s had that success. Of course, you have to have good hitters first.”

One Braves regular that could be poised for a return to All-Star form is Austin Riley, the veteran third baseman who has seen his offensive production falter over the past two seasons. Some of that drop-off was because of a fractured hand in 2024 and an abdominal strain in 2025, but Riley is not one to make excuses.

He said doing a deep dive on his past successes and failures with Hyers this offseason should pay dividends.

“Working with Tim has been unbelievable,” Riley said. “He dove into ’21, ’22, ’23 when I was really good. The big issue was the hip slide and losing ground. We worked on that, and obviously there are other things to work on, but really excited about where I’m at.”

Hyers was one of the few holdovers retained by Weiss on the Braves coaching staff for the 2026 season. He said being in a sort of limbo state — between when former Braves manager Brian Snitker announced in October that he was retiring and when the club promoted Weiss to manager a month later — was just something he let play out, falling back on a familiar mantra he tells players of trying to control only the things they can control.