It’s been a weird start for the 2024 Braves. They won two of three games in Philadelphia, and the one they lost wasn’t Max Fried’s career-worst start. The Braves lost a game to the White Sox despite Reynaldo Lopez shining during his first start since 2022. Bad weather in Chicago cut short the first game of the series and wiped out the finale.
Now the Braves return home with a chance to find a rhythm and gain early control in the National League. That’s not essential, of course. Two or three bad weeks to start the season won’t change the outlook. But a hot start to the season would allow the Braves (3-2) to surge to the front of the NL pack and never look back.
The Diamondbacks are at Truist Park this weekend. They began Thursday in a virtual tie with the Braves, who have better hitting. The Mets are in town for a four-game series to begin next week. They lost their first four games because their expensive lineup squandered surprisingly good pitching.
The Braves can create breathing room with a strong homestand against the D-Backs and Mets before a challenging road trip. I say they are primed to go on a tear at Truist. I never draw conclusions from small sample sizes, but based on track records, it’s reasonable to expect the good things the Braves have done so far to stay that way and for improvement in sluggish areas.
There have been few worries about the hitting. The Braves rank second to the Pirates with 7.2 runs scored per game (statistics before Thursday’s games). That’s unsustainable, but the Braves led the majors with 5.85 runs per game in 2023 with essentially the same lineup. They’ll pound out runs on most days.
The pitching is always going to be the bigger question for this team. The starting rotation is relying on a converted reliever (Reynaldo Lopez), MLB’s second-oldest pitcher (Charlie Morton) and a 35-year-old lefty (Chris Sale) who hasn’t made more than 25 starts since 2019. Those three pitchers all had good-to-great results in their first turns of the season.
Lopez’s Braves debut especially was encouraging. Good change-ups and curveballs were part of his repertoire when Lopez he was an effective, young starter for the White Sox. Lopez didn’t throw many breaking balls in Chicago (eight out of 82 pitches) yet still held them to a run over six innings. Lopez will be a valuable addition if he can hone his off-speed pitches to complement a good fastball.
Throwing out Fried’s awful season debut (three runs allowed in two-thirds of an inning) is easy enough to do. Fried has posted bad outings in back-to-back games just once since becoming a frontline starter in 2020. He’ll be good so long as he’s healthy. Spencer Strider looked like you’d expect in the season opener. He struck out eight Phillies hitters and made one mistake – a fat fastball that Brandon Marsh hit for a two-run homer – that downgraded a great outing to just good.
Already, Braves pitchers are getting good run support. No one in the lineup is scuffling. It’s true that four Braves hitters are off to hot starts that can’t possibly last: Orlando Arcia, Ozzie Albies, Michael Harris II and Jarred Kelenic. And the lineup lost some pop when catcher Sean Murphy went to the injured list after just three plate appearances.
But we can expect Ronald Acuña Jr., Matt Olson and Austin Riley to pick up the slack when others come back down to earth. They haven’t produced like they usually do yet. Travis d’Arnaud is a solid lineup replacement for Murphy. The Braves will find an offensive equilibrium that settles at or near the top of the majors in runs scored.
The D-Backs aren’t built to match that. FanGraphs projects that they’ll score 4.5 runs per game this season compared with an MLB-best 5.35 for the Braves. The Mets still have big names in their lineup, but the star-studded rotation is a memory. New York signed ex-Brave Julio Teheran after Tylor Megill joined All-Star Kodai Senga on the injured list.
After the seven-game homestand, the Braves go back on the road to face the Marlins and Astros. Strange things tend to happen when the Braves are in Miami. The Astros are World Series contenders again. When the Braves return from that trip they’ll face the Rangers, who beat Houston for the 2023 pennant on the way to the Series title. After that come home series versus the Marlins and Guardians.
No one should panic if the Braves continue to hover around break even over the next three weeks. Everyone knows that they and the Dodgers are on the elite tier in the NL. The only real intrigue is whether the Braves will win a seventh consecutive NL East title or if they’ll settle for a wild-card bid. Then it could come down to getting through the Phillies.
Those questions won’t be settled for months. One beautiful thing about baseball is the 162-game season decides who’s really legit. Still, a good start means something for a team like the Braves because there’s no way it would be a fluke. After the weird road trip to begin the season, the Braves are coming home with a chance to surge to the front of the NL and stay there.
