Why the Braves Lost
The Braves season ended with a three games to one series loss in the National League Division Series, Atlanta’s first postseason action of 2023.
The broad strokes of the series is that Atlanta’s historic offense stayed in the regular season, while Spencer Strider & AJ Minter tried to put the pitching staff on their back.
If you look closer, you’ll see that not only did Atlanta fail to score the runs needed to advance, they didn’t even put forth competitive at-bats.
Let’s unpack those at-bats.
First we need to establish the foundation upon which the rest of this article stands. Hitting a baseball is the single-hardest thing to do in sports. Timing is not only vital to hitting, it’s dependent on correct timing. The hitter has to swing their bat through the zone at a ball traveling through a finite opportunity-area from the pitcher’s hand in less time than it takes the average person to blink their eye. And that’s just to make contact, the margins become straight-razor thin when you try to make contact in the correct part of the zone with your bat traveling at the correct speed & trajectory needed to make solid contact or even hard contact. Timing is handicapped by repetition, routine, & familiarity.