2023's Braves Are Hotter Than The '90s Dynasty Braves Ever Were

Atlanta is currently enjoying its best month in more than a century.

In the midst of this strange, upside-down MLB season, one result is not too surprising: the Atlanta Braves have been dominant. The 2021 World Series champions are 50-27 on the year, good for MLB’s second-best record behind the Tampa Bay Rays, and they have a 97% chance of winning the NL East for the sixth consecutive season (according to an average of the prediction models at FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference).

Six straight division crowns is highly impressive, though it would not even be halfway to the 14 consecutive division titles that Atlanta famously piled up from 1991 to 2005. However, the current Braves are in the midst of a run this month unlike any they had throughout that dynasty run — or even longer ago than that.

After hanging on Sunday to beat the Cincinnati Reds 7-6 for a second consecutive game — they snapped Cincy’s remarkable 12-game winning streak with a separate 7-6 win on Saturday — the Braves have won 9 of their last 10 and 17 of their last 20 games. They have a 17-4 record in the month of June so far, the best in baseball by 1½ games over the surging San Francisco Giants.

Anytime a baseball team loses only four times in a month (granted, with four games left to play before July), that’s a scorching hot streak. Over the entire period of Atlanta’s division-winning streak from 1991-2005, the Braves’ best winning percentage in any month came when it went 21-5 in June 2002 — a slightly lower success rate than Atlanta has this month:

Those ‘02 Braves ended up being one of the strongest teams of the dynasty era, winning 101 games with the look of a real World Series contender until they blew a 2-1 lead over the Giants in the Division Series. In June 2002, Gary Sheffield led the way at the plate with 7 home runs (tied with Andruw Jones), 21 RBIs and a .958 OPS; Tom Glavine, Kevin Millwood and Greg Maddux went a collective 6-1 with a 2.60 ERA in the month, while John Smoltz collected 13 saves — tied for the 11th-most by any pitcher in any month on record.

But this version of the Braves has been even stronger, particularly when we dig into their performance at the plate. Led by the mercurial Eddie Rosario and his 1.216 OPS, all 10 qualified Atlanta batters have an OPS above league average this month. Nine of 10 have been at least 20% better than average; six of 10 have been at least 60% percent better than average! That’s how you score 7.0 runs per game across nearly an entire month’s worth of games — the first time a team has done that since the Houston Astros in August 2019, and just the 16th time it’s happened this century (if it holds up).

Pitching-wise, the current Braves could be sharper. Among the eight pitchers with at least 40 batters faced this month, only two — Bryce Elder and my old high-school classmate Collin McHugh — are allowing an OPS below (i.e., better than) league average. Spencer Strider is 3-0, but carries a 6.86 ERA; Charlie Morton, AJ Smith-Shawver and Jared Shuster are all above 4.20 as well. Raisel Iglesias has 7 saves, but sports a very un-Smoltz-like 5.25 ERA and .893 OPS allowed. Perhaps Brian Snitker should have Leo Mazzone on speed dial.

In terms of runs-per-game differential, there were three months during the dynasty era that outpaced Atlanta’s current +2.33 mark this June: May 1996 (+3.12), July 2004 (+2.73) and April 1997 (+2.68). But in terms of pure record, you’d have to go back to the 1914 Boston Braves and their 26-5 mark (an .839 winning percentage) in September for the last time the franchise was better in any given month than these Braves have been.

(We’ll have to save the truly deep-cut history lesson of the 1875 Red Stockings going 20-0 with 1 tie in the month of May — the only time in franchise history the Braves/Bees/Red Stockings/etc went undefeated in a qualified month — for later.)

According to the projection systems, there are four main World Series front-runners this year — a group that is led by Atlanta (19%) but also includes Tampa Bay (16%), the breakout Texas Rangers (12%) and the L.A. Dodgers (11%).¹ If these Braves are truly channeling their ancestors from the ‘90s and early ‘00s, this scorching midseason month may mean approximately nothing come postseason time. But right now, Atlanta looks scarier than it’s been in a very long time — and that’s saying something, given the Hall of Fame competition of the Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz-Chipper-Andruw era.

Filed under: Baseball

1. The drop-off after that group is dramatic, falling down to the Astros, Giants and Yankees at 5% apiece.