ATLANTA — Along Battery Avenue, the still-carpet-smooth new street that runs along the outside of Truist Park, home of the Atlanta Braves, the All-Star banners are flying. Images of Aaron Judge, Tarik Skubal, Paul Skenes and other MLB stars decorate the walls and light posts around the ballpark in advance of next week’s All-Star Game. But one of those banners will eat at Braves fans a whole lot more than the rest.
Just outside the first-base-line gate, a banner of Freddie Freeman flutters in the hot July breezes. That would be Freddie Freeman, onetime heart-and-soul of Atlanta, now in Dodger blue. The contrast is glaring and, to Braves fans, painfully obvious: Freeman is the defending World Series MVP of the defending world champions … and the 2025 Braves are so far underwater they can’t even see the sunlight anymore.
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You know how it goes, right? Company’s coming over soon, but you need a shower, the house is trashed, and the dog just threw up on the rug. You’ve got to get your stuff together fast, but where do you even start? At a time when the sports world should be celebrating Atlanta’s sizable impact on baseball and culture, the home team is a sputtering, inconsistent mess.
The Braves’ disarray has come as a shock, both how it began and how long it has persisted. Atlanta came into 2025 as a World Series favorite and promptly lost the first seven games of the season. The Braves were five games out of first place by April 2, which doesn’t even seem mathematically possible. They’ve spent exactly two days above .500 — a single game each time — and both came in mid-May.
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Less than two years ago, pretty much this exact same offense unleashed hell on the entire league, clubbing a majors-record-tying 307 homers, among other statistical gems. Now? Now they don’t appear to know which end of the bat to hold. Several Braves, including Ozzie Albies, Nick Allen, Marcell Ozuna and Michael Harris II, rank statistically among the worst hitters in the game in 2025. As a team, Atlanta ranks 22nd in the majors in OPS. Nobody’s hitting much, and even when they do, the ball isn’t going anywhere.
Well, almost nobody. The season’s lone high point came when Ronald Acuña Jr. returned from his second torn ACL in three seasons, an injury that cost him most of the 2024 season and the early weeks of 2025. In his very first at-bat back from injury, Acuña blasted a mammoth 467-foot homer, and since then, he has picked up right where he left off in his 2023 MVP season.
The only bright spot for the Braves this season has been Ronald Acuña Jr., but even he hasn’t been able to keep Atlanta above water. (Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images)
(Lachlan Cunningham via Getty Images)
But since Atlanta can’t have nice things this year, Acuña’s fate is once again in question. On Tuesday, he reported lower-back tightness that kept him out of the lineup and could jeopardize his participation in Monday’s Home Run Derby. (Add this to Atlanta’s list of roster-detonating injuries piling up, including 2024 Cy Young winner Chris Sale on the 60-day IL after fracturing a rib diving for a ball in June and AJ Smith-Shawver out for the season, needing Tommy John surgery after nine solid starts. Ugly.)
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The underlying problem for Atlanta is that Acuña is one of the few Braves bringing anything resembling fire to the field, meaning any absence costs the team far more than his bat. (Atlanta lost Tuesday’s game 10-1 to the Athletics. The Athletics.) Acuña hit two home runs in his return to the lineup Wednesday, but Braves fans already fear for him every time he charges a fly ball or rounds a base at full tilt, and this latest tweak only adds to the dread.
Braves manager Brian Snitker — who now surely risks second-degree burns every time he sits down — has tried to both motivate his team and find ways to explain the spiral. Earlier this month, he pointed the finger at analytics, suggesting, per The Athletic, that baseball is “about confidence and feel. I think we probably overwhelm ourselves with mechanics and video and all that kind of stuff. … We’re kind of overanalyzing everything.”
That might be so, but the standings need no analysis; their cold, hard numbers are right there for all to see. As the baseball world celebrates the Braves’ legacy — everyone from Chipper Jones to Ludacris is here to pay tribute — Atlanta heads toward the break buried in the NL East, in the company of the Marlins and Nationals and needing help even to get into the wild-card picture. The Braves’ front office has only days to decide whether it’ll do the unthinkable and fold on 2025, becoming sellers rather than buyers at the trade deadline.
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Perhaps this break will be just what Atlanta needs, a chance to pause, reflect and remember how to play this game. Otherwise, there will still be banners and bunting decorating Truist Park this year … but only in July, not in October.
