In defense of Kevin Seitzer

The Braves made essentially the same swing decisions they made last year. They just got worse results.

On Friday, Alex Anthopoulos announced that the entire Braves coaching staff would be back in 2025. This was pretty unsurprising. Atlanta has had one of the best runs of any team in baseball over the last seven years, and even in a snakebitten season, they won 89 games and snuck into the playoffs.

But there’s been some grumbling in recent weeks about hitting coach Kevin Seitzer. Seitzer has been Atlanta’s hitting coach since 2015, predating both Anthopoulos and Brian Snitker. And while he spent the first few years of that tenure mired in the confusion of the John Coppolella/Fredi Gonzalez regime, Seitzer has hit his stride with Anthopoulos and Snitker, culminating in the legendary 2023 Braves offense that won him Baseball America’s MLB Coach of the Year.

A year later, Seitzer isn’t just getting criticized online by fans. He’s getting sideswiped by Chipper Jones in a podcast appearance, who complains that the current Braves regime just doesn’t prioritize what Jones sees as the key tenets of a good offense: bunting runners over, making contact, and (as though this is is a skill and not just a result) hitting with runners in scoring position.

Having written about the Braves’ offense this year, I think there’s a strong, logical null hypothesis for what’s happening here. After a number of players played at a career-best level last year, the 2024 Braves dealt with brutal injury and batted-ball luck, and a few players took a step back from their career-best performances. Maybe you assign partial blame for the third issue to Seitzer - if we’re going to credit coaches when players break out, we can criticize coaches when players regress. But the first two are just ‘flush it and wait for next year’ factors, as far as I’m concerned.

That being said, I don’t want to dismiss out of hand the idea that the Braves had a ‘bad approach’ or ‘lacked a plan at the plate’ or whatever it is that Seitzer’s detractors think has happened. So let’s compare the 2024 Braves and the 2023 Braves.

The 2024 Braves had the same plan at the plate as the 2023 Braves

The Braves have had an extremely clear hitting approach in recent years, as I’ve discussed here before. They’re an aggressive-swinging team that, in particular, takes a lot of swings in the zone. (As a result of their desire to swing in the zone, they’ll swing at pitches out of the zone at a higher rate than you’ll like, but not one at the very top of the league.) And those zone swings are absolute hacks. So the Braves will also whiff in the zone more than most teams. But Atlanta does all of that so that when they make contact on pitches in the zone, good things will happen. This approach is strong enough that the Cleveland Guardians spent the offseason trying to get their hitters more comfortable with the idea of whiffing in the name of better contact quality.

Now that we’ve laid out the approach, let’s talk about what that looked like with the numbers in 2023. In 2023, the Braves were 1st in swing rate for in-zone pitches (72.7%), 9th in swing rate for out-of-zone pitches (33.4%), and 24th in contact rate for in-zone pitches (84.0%). As a result, the Braves were 1st in xwOBA (.396) and 1st in wOBA (.388) in plate appearances that ended in an in-zone pitch.

What happened in 2024? In 2024, the Braves were 1st in swing rate for in-zone pitches (72.9%), 9th in swing rate for out-of-zone pitches (33.0%), and 29th in contact rate for in-zone pitches (83.3%). As a result, the Braves were 2nd in xwOBA (.346) and 9th in xwOBA (.331) in plate appearance that ended in an out-of-zone pitch.

Here, have a chart.

The Braves went out there and they kept the exact same approach as they had the previous year! In fact, thanks to Baseball Savant’s swing data, we can confirm that the 2024 Braves had the longest average swing in baseball on in-zone pitches.

The 2024 Braves got worse results in ways not clearly attributable to coaching

So what happened? As you can see, for starters, the Braves got extremely unlucky on their in-zone contact. When you should be getting the second-best results in baseball on your in-zone contact and you get the ninth-best results, that’s bad news for an offense that’s built around trying to maximize the value of in-zone contact.

But maybe there’s a skill issue here too! The 2023 Braves were 4th in the league at making out-of-zone contact last year, while the 2024 Braves dropped to 23rd. Maybe a healthy, fully functioning Braves offense is better at spoiling off out-of-zone pitches when it guesses wrong than the husk Atlanta trotted out in 2024. And certainly, the absolute values of the xwOBA and wOBA for in-zone contact went down significantly this year. Part of that is the result of MLB having a very hostile run environment in 2024, but part of it is the result of guys not getting the quality of contact they got last year.

But that brings me back to the point, which is, where does blaming Kevin Seitzer come in? Chipper Jones implied that the league had adjusted to the Braves’ offensive approach and that the Braves had failed to counter-adjust. That’s the kind of narrative that fans enjoy peddling because it sounds intuitive - everyone knows the Braves had an apocalyptic record in games where they allowed more than four runs this year, and everyone knows they produced at a merely average rate after being legendary last year.

It’s just not a story that’s at all supported by the numbers, though. The Braves made the same swing decisions this year as they did last year - this time with a more injured and thus less talented crew. Like last year, they used their approach to get elite offensive inputs when they swung at in-zone pitches (and the 7th best offensive inputs leaguewide overall). But hard-hit line drives found gloves and barrels died at the warning track, resulting the Braves being the 4th-unluckiest team in the sport by xwOBA underperformance.

It was painful to watch. We can only hope that we don’t see a repeat of that kind of metric underperformance. But it’s no reason to get mad at a coach who’s put together one of the most productive offenses in the league over the last seven years. No matter what Chipper Jones says.