LOS ANGELES — Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani swung at the first pitch he saw from Braves closer Raisel Iglesias in the ninth inning Wednesday night. The ball bounced off Ohtani’s bat and kept going until it cleared the left-field wall and put the Braves on the wrong side of history.
No MLB team has made the playoffs after losing their first seven games. There is some selection bias at play in that dataset. Nearly all the previous MLB teams to start 0-7 were expected to be bad. The 2025 Braves are supposed to be good. Yet they are 0-7, too, mostly because they aren’t scoring enough runs.
The Dodgers spotted the Braves five unearned runs in the first two innings of the series finale. The Braves still lost because they didn’t score again, and their bullpen gave back a three-run lead over the final two innings. A series that began with news of Jurickson Profar’s 80-game suspension for doping and Reynaldo Lopez’s injured list stint ended with a gut-punch loss to the best team in baseball that played a bad game.
“I don’t wish this on anybody, honestly, in a competitive arena and what we are going through,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said after the 6-5 defeat. “It’s tough. It’s very tough.”
The Braves said all the things you’ve heard before. They’ve got many good hitters to be this bad for long. They’ll get it going eventually. Those words might be more persuasive if the offensive struggles were just about these seven games. The reality is that the sample size also includes last season.
After the Braves produced an all-time great offense in 2023, it was below average last season. It’s even worse to begin this one. The Padres shut them out in back-to-back games last weekend. In L.A., the Braves managed to score just one run in three games that wasn’t unearned.
“We are putting a lot of pressure on ourselves offensively,” Braves third baseman Austin Riley said “I think it’s evident. At times, there were some good at-bats the series, and I think we’ve just got to hold on to that and build off of it.”
This isn’t a team that’s supposed to be seeking encouragement from at-bats that don’t produce runs. Ronald Acuna isn’t in the lineup, but six lineup regulars from 2023 are on the active roster. The Braves are still 0-7, a record that has proved to be a cutoff for playoff hopefuls.
Three of 23 teams to start 1-6 before this year made the playoffs, according to Baseball Reference. But none of the 27 teams to start 0-7 have pulled it off in the World Series era (since 1903). That’s not surprising for the era when the postseason included just two teams (through 1968) or four (1968-93).
But the trend continues during MLB’s wild card era, when the playoffs have included eight teams (1994-2011), 10 (2012-19, 2021) or 12 (2022 to present). Nine 0-7 teams during the wild-card era have failed to make the playoffs (the list includes the 2016 Braves, who were managed by Snitker on an interim basis after the team fired Fredi Gonzalez). The Braves won’t overcome that history if they don’t end the struggles at the plate that have carried over to this season.
It’s true that some of their good hitters were hurt in 2023. It’s also true that, once they were healthy, they still didn’t produce up to their standards. They still aren’t. At least Marcell Ozuna and Matt Olson are taking walks. But the Braves can’t create sustained offense when two of their sluggers aren’t seeing many good pitches and the batters behind them in the lineup don’t make pitchers pay.
Riley took his part of the blame. He’s 3-for-27 with more strikeouts (11) than total bases (seven). On Wednesday, Riley went to the plate in the sixth inning with the bases loaded, one out and the Braves leading 5-3. He struck out looking against reliever Ben Casparius.
“From a personal standpoint, it’s embarrassing what I’ve displayed offensively, and I’ve got a lot of work to do,” Riley said.
He’s not the only one among Braves hitters. The offensive struggles have put pressure on a starting rotation that’s been good enough to win even with Spencer Strider on the injured list. A leaky bullpen is another issue. In four of their seven losses, the Braves had a tie or lead in the seventh inning.
The Braves used to regularly overcome bad nights from their pitchers. Two years ago, they produced one of the best offensive seasons in MLB history. They set MLB records for slugging percentage (.501) and tied the MLB record for home runs (307). The 2023 Braves set several franchise marks for offense: runs scored (947), runs per game (5.9), total bases (2,803), extra base hits (623) and RBIs (916).
Since then, Riley, Olson, and Ozzie Albies aren’t hitting up to the standard they set over many seasons. Michael Harris hasn’t been able to repeat his strong numbers from his first two big-league seasons. Orlando Arcia has been one of the worst everyday hitters in MLB since his career year in 2023.
That season now seems like it was long ago.
“In ‘23, we couldn’t lose,” Braves right-hander Bryce Elder said. “Last year, being up and down, it was kind of tough when I’d come up and see how things were. But to start like this. ... There is a reason we play 162 of em, and we’ve only played seven.”
The Braves have lost them all. No MLB team has done that and went on to the playoffs, even during an era when so many non-division winners make the postseason. The Braves are more talented than most of the other 0-7 teams. That doesn’t matter if they don’t play like it.
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