The Problem Had an Address

Since the All-Star break, Atlanta have had two offenses.

One scores 5.11 runs a game and ranks sixth in baseball. The other scores 3.05 and ranks thirtieth. They share a lineup, a manager and the same eight weeks of calendar. The only variable separating them is the address.

The home version is 138 runs in 27 games, 21-6. The road version is 67 runs in 22 games, 9-13. That is a gap of 2.07 runs a night, the second widest in baseball behind Boston. Over the same stretch, the league's ordinary home edge is 0.17.

I have spent most of a week on the road half of that, and none of it needs taking back. On Friday I wrote: "Since the break, across 19 road games, Atlanta has scored 3.16 runs per game." That was 60 runs in 19 games, correct to the decimal when it was filed. The three games since, all at Citizens Bank Park, produced two runs, then five, then none. The figure is now 3.05 across 22 games. Nothing has rescued it. It got slightly worse, and it is still last in baseball.

What was wrong was never the number. It was the noun. The thing we have all been calling a hitting problem has been, for eight weeks, a hitting problem with an address.

Tonight the schedule returns them to it. Tampa Bay at Truist Park, 7:15, the first regular-season meeting between these clubs all year, AJ Smith-Shawver listed for Atlanta and Freddy Peralta for Tampa Bay; listed is the operative word at this hour. The trip that ended Monday ran seven days and six games, two at Washington and four in Philadelphia: 3-3, 26 runs.

Then the number this actually turns on. Eighteen games remain. Nine are at Truist Park and nine are somewhere else. An exact half. The homestand is not the road question being dropped; it is the first half of a schedule that splits down the middle, and the second half opens on the fourteenth at Wrigley Field.

Nine home dates is one more than Milwaukee have left in seventeen games, one more than Los Angeles have left in eighteen. One game is thin. What is not thin is what a home date is worth to each of them. Since the break, Milwaukee's home-road scoring gap is 0.75 runs and Los Angeles's is 0.40. Atlanta's is 2.07. The same fixture is worth more to the club that has forgotten how to hit anywhere else.

And here is where I have to be careful with my own arithmetic. Last Thursday I argued that "a season's home-road split regresses nearly all the way to the league average, and the league average forecasts a club's future split better than the club's own observed number does." I asked whether a hundred and forty games of split told you anything about the next twenty-two, and my answer was mostly no. That answer does not become yes because the split has started flattering Atlanta. The 2.07 lives entirely inside 49 post-break games. Take the full season and the gap is 0.49 runs, 4.86 at home against 4.38 away, tenth against seventeenth. Ordinary. Nine home games is a far smaller sample than the twenty-two I was skeptical of. A method that only holds when it agrees with me is not a method.

What is on offer is a test, not a promise, and it resolves by Sunday night. Six home games, three against Tampa Bay and three against Philadelphia. At the post-break home rate they produce roughly 31 runs. At the road rate, roughly 18. Tampa Bay sharpen it. They arrive 85-58 and leading the American League East, and they are Atlanta's mirror image: 4.00 runs a game at home since the break, 4.96 away from it. Yesterday I called them "a team that has won and lost exactly as often as Atlanta have." Monday afternoon ended that; they are one better in the loss column now, with a game in hand. Tonight still puts both clubs in the ballpark where they score.

The rest is quickly said. Atlanta are 85-59 in 144 games, four clear of Philadelphia at the same 144, magic number 15. The prize still live is the bye: two behind Los Angeles, at the same 144, and three and a half behind Milwaukee, who have played 145.

Nine home games do not buy a bye, and a bye does not buy what comes after it. The 2023 club won 104 games, earned the week off and lost the division series anyway. Baseball has a long memory. What the next nine dates at Truist Park buy is nine chances to learn whether the last eight weeks described a lineup or a location, and the first of them begins at 7:15.