A guide to salvaging the Braves' 2025 season

For the first time in years, the Braves are really long shots to make the playoffs by mid-June. Now what?

The last time a Braves team didn’t make the playoffs, its Opening Day lineup included Brandon Phillips, Adonis García, and Matt Kemp. The 2017 Braves had a more interesting farm system than they had a major league squad; you could tune into MILB.TV and catch Ronald Acuña Jr., Austin Riley, Ozzie Albies, Dansby Swanson, Max Fried, Michael Soroka, or A.J. Minter. Atlanta hadn’t made the playoffs since 2013, and nobody thought that 2017 was going to be the team’s return to contention.

The 2025 Braves have seen their playoff odds slip to 27.4 percent per FanGraphs’ calculations entering this weekend’s series, and they’ve gotten further below .500 than any Braves team since the 2017 squad. This team is leagues more talented than the 2017 squad - that’s evinced by the fact that FanGraphs gives the Braves roughly the same World Series odds as the 38-28 Giants (and better odds than the 37-27 Padres) - but it’s been hoist by various petards, from its weird phase where it deprioritized hitting the ball hard to poor reliever deployment (Brian Snitker hates Aaron Bummer) to awful sequencing luck to plain old xwOBA underperformance. As of late, the Braves seem to be at least somewhat back to swinging hard and hitting the ball hard, but the poor reliever deployment (why is Rafael Montero continuing to pitch in close games?) and horrendous luck has cost them games - and precious points of playoff probability.

So while the Braves aren’t cooked - the 2021 squad had a playoff probability of under 10 percent at the trade deadline! - it’s a good time to talk about how they can make the most of this season, even if it doesn’t end up with a playoff berth.

#1: Do not fire Brian Snitker midseason

Baseball managers are different from football coaches in a fundamental way: they have way less impact on a given game. A reasonably smart baseball fan could make all in-game decisions for his favorite team for a week and nobody would notice; a very smart fan football probably couldn’t call a game’s worth of plays without getting embarrassed. So a large part of a manager’s job is vibes management. And ultimately, he’s a human referendum on the team’s direction. The final job of a manager on a disappointing team is to be ceremonially fired.

Brian Snitker has gotten plaudits for the vibes management aspect of his job over the years, but he’s long frustrated me as a tactician. He doesn’t align relievers with leverage, he’s too late to pull starters (remember when Bryce Elder got way too deep into the Phillies’ lineup in Game 3 of the 2023 NLDS and then was replaced by Michael Tonkin?), and he’s recently either tolerated or outright ordered a bunch of stupid sacrifice bunts. I recognize that at least some players really enjoy playing for him (though I find it difficult to believe that Ronald Acuña Jr. particularly likes it, or, for that matter, Aaron Bummer), but there’s got to be a manager out there who’s both enjoyable to play for and tactically adept.

Combine frustrations with Snit and frustrations with the team and I’m not surprised to see lots of calls online for Snit’s firing - sooner rather than later. And when the season is over, I’ll be as vocal as anyone in begging him to retire (or if he doesn’t, calling for the Braves not to renew his contract). But fire Snit now and your interim manager is Walt Weiss or Fredi Gonzalez. Weiss and Gonzalez are cut from the same tactical cloth as Snit. There’s no reason to think either has progressive views on using multi-inning relievers or matching pitchers with leverage. There’s no reason to think either would actively seek information from the team’s baseball operations department rather than merely tolerating it.

But if you’ve learned anything from how the Braves ended up with Brian Snitker as their manager, it should be this: an interim manager whose team shows life under his watch gets a very strong incumbency advantage when it’s time to pick a permanent manager. Unless you think that Weiss or Gonzalez is the best the Braves could possibly do to replace Snit (if so - why?), you should be rooting for a clean break this offseason and a managerial search with a full field of candidates. It’ll almost certainly be the most coveted position in the sport, so there’s no need to presumptively hand it to one of the two undistinguished former managers on the staff - especially since neither is positioned to fix anything that ails the Braves.

#2: Figure out what the 2026 bullpen looks like

Raisel Iglesias and Pierce Johnson will hit free agency at the end of this year. If the Braves can trade either without seriously damaging goodwill and get something interesting back (quite unlikely with Iglesias given his contract; possible but unlikely with Johnson) and they’re out of contention at the deadline, then by all means, go ahead.

There are plenty of guys to evaluate. Enyel de los Santos is under control through next year and has been pretty good (3.35 FIP/3.96 xFIP) in middle relief. Dylan Dodd’s stuff plays way up in relief; his spot in the bullpen is well deserved and I’d like to see if he can stick as the third lefty. Jhancarlos Lara has made it to Triple-A Gwinnett as a reliever, where his stuff has been devastating (although his command is, charitably, marginal), and he should get a cup of coffee by the end of the year. Hayden Harris just got promoted to Gwinnett after putting up a 1.02 FIP/1.67 xFIP (43.5 percent strikeout rate!) in Double-A Mississippi, and if he provides anything resembling a repeat performance, he should get major league innings too. Heck, I’d take a look at MLB journeyman vet Wander Suero, who’s putting up a 2.79 FIP (although it comes with a 4.25 xFIP) in Gwinnett.

Joe Jiménez will likely miss the entirety of 2025 recovering from knee surgery and will hopefully be back next season. He'll join Aaron Bummer and Dylan Lee at the back of the bullpen. Let’s figure out who else will be part of the picture.

#3: Reclaim the offensive identity

What made the Braves so effectively in the Anthopoulos/Seitzer era was a simple formula: swing at strikes as often as the possible and swing as hard as possible. Yeah, this results in strikeouts. Yeah, it means the team’s focus isn’t ‘taking pitches’ or ‘working counts’. But these players mostly aren’t designed to do those things, and the stretches of the season where they’ve tried to do so have proven that. Of late, the Braves have taken more aggressive swings and barreled the ball with greater frequency. In May, they were 14th in average bat speed; this month so far, they’re 6th. Here’s to more of that.