Whose Walks Are Missing

ESPN's David Schoenfield gave every contender one fatal October flaw on Friday morning, and Atlanta's comes under a heading that reads like a charge sheet: "Fatal flaw: Can they hit in the postseason? (.186 average from 2022 to 2024)". Atlanta went 2-8 across its last three postseasons, hitting .186 and scoring two and a half runs a game, and every figure in Schoenfield's paragraph checks. The argument begins with the sentence he built on them.

"The one thing the Braves don't do is draw many walks, as they rank 28th in walk rate and 29th in chase rate," he wrote, and both ranks hold. Atlanta has walked 442 times in 5,757 plate appearances, one in every thirteen, against a league that walks about nine times per 100; only Toronto and San Francisco walk less often. On chase rate the club is 29th on all four of FanGraphs' methodologies, through Thursday. None of it is in dispute.

It is also a distribution, not a trait, and a one-paragraph-per-team format cannot see the difference. Nine Atlanta hitters have 200 plate appearances. Ronald Acuña Jr. walks about once every nine of his, 50 in 445, 73rd among the 353 hitters with that many, the top quarter. Michael Harris II walks about once every twenty-eight, 21 in 592, and only five hitters in that population walk less often; among qualified hitters, only Toronto's Andrés Giménez. Mike Yastrzemski, Matt Olson and Drake Baldwin sit between nine and ten per 100; Austin Riley, Dominic Smith and Ozzie Albies below them; Mauricio Dubón walks about once every seventeen.

The tempting sentence is that the rank is Harris's. It is not. Take his plate appearances and walks out of the club's and the rest walk 8.15 per 100, still 28th, still behind Colorado. Take Acuña's out instead and the club walks 7.38, last in baseball, behind San Francisco. Acuña is holding the rank up more than Harris is dragging it down.

Schoenfield's "several aggressive swingers in the likes of Harris, Albies, Mauricio Dubon and even Baldwin" deserve the same test on the axis he chose. Among those 353 hitters, the median chase rate, swings at pitches outside the zone, is about 30 per 100. Harris swings at 45, tied for the fourth-highest rate among them; Albies at 38, 32nd; Dubón at 37, tied for 46th; Baldwin at 34, tied for 95th, above about seven in ten of the population. On chase, the word fits all four. Baldwin's defence is the other column: 9.1 walks per 100, a shade above that pool's 8.8 median and fourth on the club. He walks like a median hitter and chases like one well above it. The label fits on one axis and not the other.

Then there is "essentially the same group of players that struggled in those postseasons." Nineteen position players batted for Atlanta in those ten games. Six are on the active roster: Olson, Harris, Riley, Albies, Acuña and Sean Murphy. Thirteen are not, among them Marcell Ozuna, Orlando Arcia and Travis d'Arnaud, who batted in all three Octobers, and Dansby Swanson. The five returnees with 200 plate appearances have taken about half of Atlanta's this season and drawn about half its walks, 7.64 per 100 against the newcomers' 7.96; neither half is the problem alone. The sentence is true of the top of the order and not of the rest.

On Friday night, after the swings that clinched a berth, I wrote that they "said nothing new about the offense." Schoenfield's paragraph says what the offense does not do. What it cannot say is whose walks are missing, so the October question is not whether Atlanta can walk but which of these hitters good pitching exploits: Harris and Dubón, at the bottom of both columns; Albies; Baldwin on one axis only. Olson, with 40 home runs as of Saturday morning, and Acuña are not on that list, and the rank they are blamed for is partly theirs to hold up.

Grant Holmes is listed tonight. The number Schoenfield led with is ten games and 349 plate appearances, taken by six hitters who are still here and thirteen who are not. The number he closed with is 5,757 plate appearances by a lineup whose best walker would sit near the top of most of them. The October lineup lives between those two numbers, and it is not a place a rank can describe.