Walt Weiss Outpolled the Five Behind Him Combined, and Lost by 38

Eighty-six points, and the interesting number is not 86.

The Manager of the Year ballot pays 5-3-1 — five points for a first-place vote, three for a second, one for a third — across thirty writers, two from each league city. Walt Weiss collected seven firsts, sixteen seconds and three thirds, which comes to 86 points and second place in the National League, announced Tuesday night on MLB Network.

Behind him: Don Mattingly 25, Craig Stammen 24, Dave Roberts seven, Craig Counsell three, Don Kelly one. Sixty points split five ways, one of those ways a man who won 100 games in Los Angeles.

Weiss outpolled that entire field by 26 points. He still lost by 38.

The table closes, which is worth saying out loud, because they do not always. Thirty ballots at nine points apiece makes 270 points available. Pat Murphy's 124 plus Weiss's 86 plus the sixty behind them is 270 exactly. Each of the three vote columns sums to thirty. Every voter is accounted for. This is, statistically speaking, how it is supposed to work, and it is still pleasant when it does.

The ten who declined

ESPN's Bradford Doolittle, writing before the reveal, said he "would be surprised if Murphy isn't a unanimous selection to win this award for a third straight season." He went further: "I just don't know how you can make a case for any other NL manager." He had the winner right and the room wrong.

Pat Murphy appeared on all thirty ballots. He did not take all thirty first-place votes. He took twenty. Ten writers looked at Milwaukee's 103 wins, the best record in baseball, and wrote a different name on the top line. Seven of those ten wrote Walt Weiss.

Those are two different facts. Appearing on every ballot measures consensus; taking two-thirds of the firsts measures how much of that consensus was enthusiastic. A third of the electorate had somebody else first, and most of that third had Atlanta's manager.

None of which makes Pat Murphy's award soft. He is the first manager in the award's history to win it three years running, and the tenth to win at least three. He is 67, had back surgery in June, and took the call from MLB Network from a hospital bed after a hip replacement. "I'm really grateful," he said. "I don't necessarily think I'm deserving, to be quite honest with you." A 103-win season does not need the benefit of any doubt.

What a manager vote is actually measuring

Here is the turn.

Seven firsts, sixteen seconds and three thirds means Weiss's name appears somewhere on 26 of the 30 ballots. Four writers left him off entirely. Twenty-six did not, and that is the number to sit with, because a Manager of the Year vote is not a compliment paid to a baseball team. Structurally it is close to the opposite.

Nobody votes for the manager of a club that won exactly as many games as its roster suggested. There is no argument in that and no award. Voters reward the gap — what a team had in March against where it finished in September.

So read the ballot plainly: 26 of 30 writers concluded that 94 wins was more than the 2026 Braves had any business producing.

The evidence they were working from is Mark Bowman's attrition ledger at MLB.com — four starting pitchers lost in Spring Training, Jurickson Profar's 162-game PED suspension handed down before a pitch was thrown, Ronald Acuña Jr. missing nearly two months across two separate left hamstring strains, Robert Suarez gone for most of the final three months with an elbow. Atlanta sat on top of the division from April 8 to the finish anyway. It entered June nine games clear and went 9-14 in it, then won fifteen of its first twenty out of the All-Star break, swept three from the Dodgers in late August and took four of seven from Philadelphia in September. The final line was 94-68, first in the East by six over the Phillies, third-best record in the league.

Read that as praise for the manager and you are reading it correctly. Read it as a verdict on the roster and you are also reading it correctly. The ballot does not offer you one without the other.

And then, Tuesday afternoon

Which brings us to Las Vegas, where the hole the voters just finished admiring him for covering is still, as of this afternoon, a hole.

Alex Anthopoulos said Tuesday that Spencer Strider is expected to be ready for spring training. That is the good sentence. Strider never made it back last season after an elbow-inflammation stint that began in June, though no surgery was required. He has lost about three miles an hour off his peak velocity and gotten homer-prone in roughly that proportion, and he is entering the fifth year of the six-year, $75 million extension he signed after 2022. "Ready for spring training" is the floor of a good outcome, not the ceiling.

Nobody is saying anything that firm about Spencer Schwellenbach. Monday's reporting, the day before the meetings opened, relayed Grant McAuley: Atlanta is not counting on him to begin the season in the rotation, has not ruled out his pitching at some point, and regards the 26-year-old's long-term future as very much in doubt. He pitched through elbow pain for a year while rehabbing an earlier surgery, then had a screw placed in the fracture. McAuley's line stays with you: "This is a procedure that very few pitchers have returned from."

And the rotation is not even the stated priority. Bowman's framing going into the week puts a right-handed bat ahead of the starting pitcher Atlanta also needs. The club finished 26th of 30 in OPS from the right side at .679 and sixth from the left at .751 — a split Bowman traces to the declines of Austin Riley and Sean Murphy and to Profar's long absences. Profar is not on the 40-man roster. The hole he left is a 2027 problem; he is not a 2027 solution.

The long arc

Two men have won this award while managing the Braves, and after Tuesday night Weiss is still not one of them. Bobby Cox took it in 1991, 2004 and 2005; Brian Snitker in 2017. Cox's career total is four, the first of them in 1985 in Toronto; it was the 1991 award in Atlanta that made him the first manager to take it in both leagues.

Weiss played shortstop for Cox from 1998 to 2000 and spent eight seasons as Snitker's bench coach. He waited nearly a month after Snitker's tenure ended to learn the job was his, and at 62 came up one line short of becoming the 21st man named Manager of the Year in his first season with a club — his first with Atlanta, not his first anywhere, since four years in Colorado came first. Winning would also have put him with Frank Robinson, Lou Piniella and Ozzie Guillen as the only men to hold both this and a Rookie of the Year, which Weiss won in the American League in 1988.

This column spent three consecutive October mornings auditing Weiss's rest and rotation decisions in a Division Series Atlanta lost. The ballots were sealed before any of that happened, so not one of those mornings reached a voter. That does not make the voters wrong, and tonight's result does not make October wrong. Both documents are accurate about the thing they measured. They measured different months.

Where they agree is the roster. The ballot says 94 wins was a feat of management. October said the rotation ran out. The front office in Las Vegas this week is operating from the same premise as both, which is why this column has spent the month counting what left rather than what arrived.

Second place is not a consolation prize. It is a reading, and the reading is that Atlanta spent 2026 playing some distance above the sum of its parts. That is a lovely thing to have done. It is a dangerous thing to plan around.