The Braves’ season came to end on Wednesday night. It’s hard to tie a nice bow on the narrative arc with the loss: Tyler Mahle was good, the bullpen was not, and the Braves were neither done in by one of their particular strengths nor a specific, exceptional weakness. The offense started out very well with a novel approach of jumping on pitches early, but by June, it had descended into incoherence, going very passive for no reason at all. There wasn’t any semblance of consistency or purpose in the summer and fall, either, and I guess you could say the same applied to the postseason as well.
Looking ahead, I think figuring out offensive identity and then shaping the roster and/or approach accordingly is the key offseason action item, to the extent there’s any latitude for action items this offseason as it is. But, before we get there, I guess we’ll pause for one more rumination.
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The season is over. The Braves were supposed to be good, and they were “good” in the standings. The production didn’t quite match the win total (to a ludicrous degree, really), but that didn’t stop the Braves from exorcising some franchise demons by A) winning a playoff series and B) having that win come against the Phillies, who knocked two much better Braves teams out of the tournament in 2022 and 2023. But, their ride also ended there, as they suffered a power outage (and really, an offensive outage altogether) in the NLDS.
So, satisfied? Gratified? Something else? Or was anything other than hoisting the trophy going to be a failure for you? Personally, I just feel pretty weird, and nothing in the playoffs really changed that (I definitely pay less attention to the playoffs, so it was never going to). I don’t know how the Front Office thinks about the equivalent of solving the problem wrong and getting the right answer anyway, but that’s more or less what happened, so eh. I’d give the season a B if I had to grade it U.S. school system-style, but even that doesn’t quite capture the weirdness of having to slap a score on what happened with the Braves in 2026.
