On Sunday morning, Brian Snitker went out to his car as he readied for his drive to Truist Park – the same one he makes dozens of times a year.
This one came with a different feeling.
“Disappointed, kind of (mad),” the Braves manager said on a Sunday Zoom call with local media. “Just remembering what we went through last year and expecting to do it again, I think, is the biggest thing. There’s like unfinished business-type stuff.”
He would much rather have driven to the ballpark for Game 5.
Instead, the Braves’ season is over. They are processing this while trying to move forward and look ahead. This, of course, can be difficult. They didn’t expect to be done at this point.
“It’s been a while,” president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos said, “since we’ve been out so early.”
Still, you might ask: What went so wrong for the Braves in the National League Division Series against Philadelphia?
‘We didn’t play good’
Many times, there is a certain play or moment, or even a game, that haunts teams and fans when they reflect on it. This can make for a long winter.
There is not much of that this time around.
“We didn’t play good,” Snitker said. “We didn’t play good enough to win that last series. We got beat. And, you know, we didn’t do a lot of things well. We’re a better team than what we played like in this division series, but that’s the whole idea of the playoffs. You know, you want to get in because you just never know where you might be.”
The Braves only led after four innings of this series: The sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth innings of Game 2. They scored three runs in the sixth and held on for what became their only victory of the NLDS.
The Phillies jumped on the Braves in Games 1, 3 and 4. In their two losses on the road, the Braves lost to the Phillies by a combined 13 runs.
The series was not particularly close, if you view it through that prism.
The starting rotation fell apart
Max Fried came down with the flu, and it seemed to affect him in his postseason start. Spencer Strider, coming off an oblique strain, was not fully stretched out. Charlie Morton served up a three-run homer after a line drive hit him on his pitching elbow.
“We’ve never been one to make excuses,” Anthopoulos said. “And during the season, we’ve lost guys and have challenges and this and that, and it’s ‘next man up’ and try to find a way, and our job is to try to find a way.”
The numbers are staggering: Fried, Strider and Morton combined to allow 12 earned runs over 7 ⅔ innings. Meanwhile, four Philadelphia starting pitchers held the Braves to five earned runs over 18 ⅓ innings.
Fried posted a 2.48 ERA in the regular season, Strider a 2.67 ERA. Morton has a history of dominating in elimination games.
Winning the division – and avoiding the Wild Card Series – allowed the Braves to line up their pitching how they wanted. This seemed to be a big advantage.
The Braves’ plan blew up in a way they couldn’t have expected, as only Kyle Wright (six shutout innings) registered a quality start.
The timely hitting disappeared
Over the 162-game regular season, the Braves ranked third in baseball with a .797 OPS with runners in scoring position. Their .268 average in those spots was sixth in the sport, while they hit the third-most homers (55) in those spots.
In four postseason games, the Braves went 6-for-22 with runners in scoring position and left 22 men on base. An important note: Three of those six hits with men in scoring position came in the Game 2 victory.
And of those three hits, one was Matt Olson’s run-scoring single on a play that should have been made (but was ruled a single) and another was Austin Riley’s dribbler into no man’s land.
Two of the Braves’ losses were not close. Had they collected a few more timely hits, they might have been able to stay in games and swing the momentum.
Many of the Braves’ regulars didn’t show up
After the season-ending loss, Travis d’Arnaud summed up everything like this: “I don’t really like looking at what could’ve happened. They just were all ready to hit, didn’t miss any of their pitches, did damage, played small ball when they needed to, moved runners over when they needed to, got the big hits when they needed to with runners on. They had a tremendous series, and they beat us.”
D’Arnaud was one of a few Braves regulars who performed well. In the NLDS, he went 6-for-16 with three doubles, two home runs and five RBIs. Many of his teammates didn’t come close to matching that performance.
Dansby Swanson: 2-for-16 with seven strikeouts.
Riley: 1-for-15 with five strikeouts.
Michael Harris: 1-for-14, though his one hit was a run-scoring single.
It’s unfair to single them out – know that many other Braves hardly contributed offensively – but their struggles loomed large because the Braves needed big contributions from more than a few players to win this series.
The five-day layoff
This is a common storyline this postseason. We might hear a lot about it during the offseason.
As of this writing, the Braves and Dodgers have been eliminated. Both received five-day breaks, and both played far under their potential in their postseason series. Plus, the Braves chased the Mets, and expended a lot of energy doing so, before earning that break.
“I worried about that going in,” Snitker said of the five-day layoff. “I think I said earlier, I’d say three days is plenty, five days, six days is probably too much.”
“I definitely liked not having as many days off, just because, you know, the game is about repetitions and getting in your groove and your routine,” Riley said after Saturday’s loss. “When you’re off five days and then you got to face aces, it’s tough, but you can make excuses all you want at the end of the day. For me, personally, I didn’t show.”
The Phillies’ momentum
After Saturday’s loss, the Braves tried to explain something no one can quantify.
Momentum.
Sometimes, teams get hot. The Phillies are one of them.
“All these teams have gotten to the postseason are really good teams with really good players, and you need things to come together and break right,” Anthopoulos said.
The Phillies fought to even make the postseason. They took advantage of the expanded field. They needed to win a series in St. Louis to even pencil in a date with the Braves.
The Braves, Anthopoulos said, received a reminder of how difficult it is to win it all. They did it in 2021, when they were that club with all the momentum. Everything clicked. But that won’t happen every year. That’s the beauty of baseball.
This season, the Braves found themselves on the other side of this.
“There’s like an emptiness here,” Snitker said. “ I expected this team, I expected us, to go a long way in this whole tournament.”
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