No MLB team has gone from 0-7 to the playoffs, but the Braves insisted they are different. Those other 27 teams to start 0-7 were bad. The Braves were a good team playing badly, and help was on the way.
Two weeks later, the Braves are even further away from a break-even record. No 5-13 team has ever gone on to make the playoffs, either. Spencer Strider, a major part of the calvary, couldn’t save them Wednesday. Now, it’s time to wonder if the Braves are a fatally flawed team that can’t overcome that 0-7 start.
They seem to be contemplating that possibility, too.
The Braves have 144 games to play, but they “can’t do this ... forever,” first baseman Matt Olson said after the loss to the Jays on Wednesday. Any changes will have to come from within, manager Brian Snitker said, because the team is “not gonna replace (players) — I mean, there’s nobody to go out and get.”
This is the state of the Braves as they return to Truist Park for a six-game homestand starting Friday. Searching for answers. Hoping for results. Falling further behind in the National League. A five-game deficit in the wild-card standings on April 16 wouldn’t matter so much if not for the ghosts of the 30 teams that started 5-13 during the wild-card era and didn’t make the postseason (per Baseball Reference).
To buck that trend, the Braves need to start winning a lot more games, now. They play the Twins this weekend. Minnesota just won two of three games against the Mets, who lead the National League East. The Braves have lost six of their past seven games while facing opponents (Rays and Jays) that aren’t expected to make the playoffs. The Braves are in danger of joining that category.
The FanGraphs playoff odds give the Braves a 57% chance of making the postseason (Thursday’s MLB games not included in the projection). That’s down from 93% before the season, which was higher than every NL team except the Dodgers. Five teams now have better playoffs odds than the Braves, according to FanGraphs. There are six NL playoff spots available.
FanGraphs projects the Braves to finish with 87 victories. They’ll have to win 57% of the rest of their games to do that. That seems plausible considering the track records of the players on the roster, if not their recent results. Also, the FanGraphs projection is pessimistic in some ways.
For example, it predicts Ronald Acuña Jr. will produce 4.5 WAR over 114 games once he returns from knee surgery. That performance would be a bit above his career norm on a per-game basis but well below what Acuña produced during his 2023 MVP year. The Braves are taking it slow with Acuña’s recovery so he can be healthy like he was that year and not limited like he was when returning from knee surgery in 2022.
But if the FanGraphs projection is too low on Acuña, it’s too optimistic about some other Braves players.
It predicts center fielder Michael Harris will recover from his awful start at the plate (.179 average) and deliver the kind of numbers he hasn’t duplicated since he was NL Rookie of the Year in 2022. The projection believes Chris Sale will get back to being dominant, but last we heard from Sale, he didn’t seem to know how he could do that. The FanGraphs forecast has outfielders Jarred Kelenic and Alex Verdugo producing average offense when neither player has accomplished that recently.
The FanGraphs projections are based on statistical analysis. That’s in my wheelhouse, but the overachieving 2021 Braves showed me that vibes can be important. They’ve been off from the start for the 2025 Braves. The vibes haven’t gotten better even with some positive developments.
The Braves were swept in four games in San Diego to begin the season with two shutouts. Then, MLB banned Braves outfielder Jurickson Profar 80 games for a banned substance on the same day that right-hander Reynaldo Lopez was placed on the injured list. Marcell Ozuna was the only lineup regular hitting to his standard.
The vibes should have improved since then. Olson, Austin Riley and Ozzie Albies have joined Ozuna as productive hitters. Catcher Sean Murphy came off the IL last week and immediately hit much better than he did last season. Strider pitched in an official MLB game for the first time in more than a year and allowed two runs over five innings.
But when things go right for the Braves, too many other things go wrong. Strider’s triumphant return was undone by a franchise-tying 19 strikeouts by Braves batters. Right-hander Spencer Schwellenbach’s second MLB season started great, but his first bad start ended with a loss Tuesday. Ozuna didn’t make the trip from Tampa Bay to Toronto because he returned to Atlanta to get an MRI on his sore hip.
I’ve covered a lot of bad teams in multiple places. One thing they all had in common is that when they managed to fix one thing, another thing went wrong. It becomes a never-ending cycle of fires started, extinguished and rekindled. Eventually, the season becomes engulfed in an inferno of defeats until everyone accepts the team just isn’t good.
It’s hard to believe the Braves aren’t good. That view is incongruent with the talented players on the roster. Maybe they really are a good team playing poorly. It’s getting to the point where that won’t matter. No team in their position has ever made the playoffs.
The Braves won’t be the first if they don’t start winning a lot more games starting now.
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