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Is this the best Braves team ever? 4 franchise icons weigh in.
As the Braves prepare to open their National League Division Series against the Phillies on Saturday night, it seems like an appropriate time to ask four icons from the club’s previous great era whether this year’s team is the best in franchise history.
No other team in any club’s history could boast of a season like the one constructed by Ronald Acuña Jr., who became the first player to record a 40-homer, 70-steal season. And no Braves team had ever benefited from a season like the one produced by Matt Olson, who set a franchise record in homers and a modern-era club record for RBIs.
This year’s Braves team produced the franchise’s modern-era record in runs, RBIs and OPS. It also topped the all-time marks for home runs, OPS+ and slugging percentage.
At the same time, this year’s Atlanta club boasts two NL Cy Young Award-caliber starters in Max Fried and Spencer Strider. Fried missed approximately four months this season because of injuries, but he enters the postseason with the capability of pitching like he did when he finished fifth in NL Cy Young balloting in 2020 and second in ’22.
Strider broke John Smoltz’s single-season strikeout record while recording MLB’s only 20-win season this year.
So was this the best Braves team ever? MLB.com surveyed four franchise legends to get their takes on how this club stacks up against some of the best they played on.
Tom Glavine: “It’s hard to say which one is the best, right? You know, We used to get those questions and to me, unless you win a World Series then you don’t have much to talk about. So, that puts the ’95 team in the conversation and that puts their most recent (2021) World Series championship team in the conversation. But if you’re talking purely statistically, it’s hard to say they’re not, at least offensively. When you are doing historic things offensively, then that speaks for itself.”
As Chipper Jones mentioned, the Braves ended the season with a .501 slugging percentage. How incredible was this? The only teams to ever slug over .480 in a season were the 2019 Astros (.495), ’19 Twins (.494), ’19 Yankees (.490), 1927 Yankees (.488) and ’36 Yankees (.483).
You know how the 1927 Yankees have long been described as the greatest lineup ever assembled? This Atlanta group led by Acuña and Olson actually rivaled what Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the other Pinstripers did nearly a century ago.
The 1927 Yankees hold the all-time record with a 127 OPS+. This year’s Braves rank third with a 124 OPS+, just behind the ’31 Yankees (125).
OPS+ takes a player’s on-base plus slugging percentage and normalizes the number across the entire league. It attempts to adjust for external factors like ballpark dimensions to give you a context-neutral number.
In other words, in a context-neutral world, this year’s Braves were the third-most productive offense the baseball world has seen in the modern era (since 1900). Plus, their 307 home runs matched the 2019 Twins for the most in MLB history.
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