Having a good season as a Major League Baseball team is hard. No other professional sports league lets fewer teams (10) into the playoffs, and the unforgiving division format can mean that even good teams get left out of the postseason. There are all sorts of ways to fail in baseball, from massive problems with whole franchises to small mistakes at just the wrong moment. All of them leave fans asking “why?”
The Atlanta Braves have officially been eliminated from postseason contention in 2015, and it took more than a few things to go wrong for them to do so. Some of the reasons are pretty obvious – after all, few picked the Braves to win the NL East this year – but others are a bit more surprising. Let’s take a moment to grieve the Braves season and examine the reasons for their failures.
Team: Atlanta Braves
Date eliminated: September 10
Record when eliminated: 56-85, .397
Games back when eliminated: 23.5 in NL East, 25.5 in Wild Card
What went wrong?
The Braves weren’t exactly supposed to be world-beaters this year. They started their rebuilding project last year, when they shipped every high-priced guy on their team out of town and started restocking their farm system for a future run. They signed Nick Markakis last year, presumably because there has to be at least one guy on the team that fans actually want to see play, but this was just not a good roster by any stretch of the imagination.
Still, this season was a failure even by the Braves’ low 2015 standards. Some of the Braves young players have struggled, including Julio Teheran who has an ERA over four this year after having one under three last year. That’s really bad news for a team that is supposedly all about the future of these young guys.
Not only did Atlanta's young starting rotation struggle, but their bullpen full of inexperience and spare parts have been hard to watch on a day-to-day basis. As an entire staff, the Braves hold the 27th worst team ERA of 4.59. When looking at the bullpen it's even worse, as they hold an ERA of 4.80, which is the worst in the among all 30 teams.
Did anything go right?
To be honest, not really. The Braves were mediocre instead of bad for the first half of the year, which was nice, but any memory of that has been displaced by the stench of their dismal second half. The only Braves playing in the postseason will be the ones they traded – including Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe, who they sent to their rival the New York Mets. Ouch.
Will they get ‘em next year?
A total optimist would like to say yes, because Braves fans have really paid for this year’s rebuilding effort in the form of an absolutely putrid season on the field. But there are a few things that are really confusing about this “rebuilding” project. The Braves have shed some payroll over the last two years, but they’ve also picked up salary commitments for older players (Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn) that don’t really mesh with their penny-pinching goals.
We already mentioned Nick Markakis, but it’s not clear why the Atlanta Braves thought it was a good idea to drop $44 million on a player the offseason after they unloaded all of their best and most expensive players. Markakis has three years left on his deal. Will the Braves be good in any of those three years, and if not, why are they paying for Markakis? The Braves are moving into a new stadium in 2017, and they probably feel some pressure to acquire a big name or two and rush the process, but a rebuilding project requires commitment. It was in the same division that saw the Mets try to pay guys like Jason Bay (four-year, $66 million) to salvage a lousy team as they moved into a new stadium, and it has taken New York years to recover.
Combined with a few disappointing performances from prospects like catcher Christian Bethancourt this year and a farm system that isn’t quite up to snuff yet, the lack of direction spells doom for the Braves in 2016. It would be hard to duplicate a season like 2015 for Atlanta, but it'll be another year of rebuilding for the Braves.