Over the three seasons leading up to 2024, Austin Riley had established himself as a true star in an infield that was full of them for the Atlanta Braves. It sure seemed like it was supposed to be full speed ahead \u2014 both for Riley and the Braves as a whole. Then we got, well, the season that we got and Austin Riley was not immune to the ghosts that haunted this team in 2024. Riley gave it an incredible effort but sometimes, it\u2019s hard to avoid something hurtling towards you at near-100 mph.<\/p>\n
The Braves drafted Austin Riley with the 41st overall pick of the 2015 MLB Draft. Riley has clearly emerged as the gem of Atlanta\u2019s 2015 draft class. Riley eventually made his debut with the big league team (as a left fielder, no less) in 2019, bursting out of the gates before eventually coming down to Earth once big league pitchers got used to him. He continued to show flashes of greatness in 2020 before eventually putting it all together for a breakout season in 2021. While putting on an even better encore performance in 2022, Austin Riley signed a 10-year, $212 million contract extension with the Braves, which includes a club option that could see it go up to $232 million over 11 years.<\/p>\n
Austin Riley rolled into the 2024 season off the strength of three-straight 5 fWAR seasons, which included at least 30 homers, a wOBA that was above .360 (and in 2021 and 2022\u2019s cases, a wOBA North of .370) and wRC+ numbers that went like 136 in 2021, 144 in 2022 and 128 in 2023. Riley had become the picture of consistency \u2014 and excellent consistency, at that. He\u2019d fully established himself as one of the top third basemen in baseball and there was little reason to suspect that we\u2019d see anything less than that. Again, this had been three seasons of fantastic production from Riley so the expectations were pretty high.<\/p>\n
The story of the 2024 Atlanta Braves was a story of a team that somehow still made the Postseason (for only two games, but I digress) despite being bogged down by injuries and underperformance. Poor Austin Riley was a victim of both, as he was on his way to having a down season before a 97-mph heater from Jack Kochanowicz ended his season on August 18.<\/p>\n
Now granted, a down season for Austin Riley still qualifies as a pretty good season for a lot of big league players. I\u2019d imagine that there are a bunch of baseball players who would be lining up to gladly accept a season where they hit nearly 20 homers with a .338 wOBA and 116 wRC+ on the year. He was still on pace to just about get over the line for another 30-homer season had he not suffered the heater smacking him on the wrist and for all we know, he could\u2019ve gone on a heater to end the season and help give the Braves more of a fighting chance once they eventually fell into the Postseason.<\/p>\n
After all, if you take a quick mosey over to his Baseball Savant page, you\u2019ll see that a lot of his hitting metrics ended up looking pretty similar to how they were over the previous three seasons of excellence from Riley.<\/p>\n A lot of this was propped up by the fact that Riley had finally started to look like himself at the plate through June and July after sputtering about for the first two months of the season. From March through May, Austin Riley only hit at a .228\/.295\/.353 clip with just 3 home runs, a very rough-looking .287 wOBA and a wRC+ of just 82. However, Riley found himself again once the Summer rolled around and proceeded to hit .284\/.349\/.532 with a wOBA of .375, a wRC+ of 141 and 11 home runs from June 1 through July 31. Riley kept that up going into August, as he added five more dingers on his way to putting up a slash line of .250\/.311\/.529 with .358 wOBA and 130 wRC+ right up until his season ended.<\/p>\n So when it came to his bat, it was pretty obvious that Austin Riley was starting to really figure it out again and it would\u2019ve been huge for the Braves to have him down the stretch. With that being said, he definitely appeared to stagnate when it came to his defense. While Riley was still good for making a highlight reel play with his glove every now and then, the consistency that he was starting to show at the hot corner in 2023 started to fall off a bit here in 2024. His DRS went down from 9 in 2023 to 0 in 2024 and his OAA went down from 0 in 2023 to -4 in 2024. You\u2019d like to hope that he\u2019ll be able to bounce back in 2024 but for now, it was an up-and-down campaign \u2014 not just defensively but overall for Riley.<\/p>\n As I mentioned earlier, it took a while but Austin Riley eventually started to really cook at the plate. According to wRC+, four of RIley\u2019s best five games at the plate took place during an 7-day span in June. For seven games over June 14 through June 21, Austin Riley gave the Rays, Tigers and Yankees a very tough time. The Rays in particular were probably very happy to be done seeing Riley once he got done with them, as he homered in all three games the Braves played against the Rays.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the Friday homer:<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what he did to Tampa on Saturday:<\/p>\n Now, here\u2019s his grand finale on Sunday:<\/p>\n June was Austin Riley\u2019s month and that series against Tampa (and the next few days after that as well) was his peak.<\/p>\n Riley completely stumbled out of the gates and it didn\u2019t help that he suffered an oblique injury in May. He eventually recovered and started to hit his stride again but the broken wrist he suffered in August was just a brutal way for his season to end and another brutal blow to what was a very frustrating season for the team overall. The fact that Austin Riley even suffered those injuries threw a major wrench in everybody\u2019s plans \u2014 Riley played 160 games in 2021, 159 in 2022 and 159 again in 2023. 110 games is still a nice number of games but it was clear that the Braves would\u2019ve much rather preferred to have him healthy down the stretch. While Gio Urshela and Whit Merrifield at times did admirably in the efforts to man the hot corner, there\u2019s a clear difference between a healthy Austin Riley and whatever his replacement is capable of.<\/p>\n Obviously, we\u2019re all hoping that 2024 will go down as just a blip on the radar as far as Austin Riley\u2019s career goes. He\u2019s still pretty young and as far as projection models go, they\u2019re still pretty bullish on RIiey bouncing back. ZiPS is protecting Riley to finish with 5.0 fWAR and another big season at the plate. Considering what Riley looked like before he got bitten by the injury bug, I would definitely bet on Riley coming back healthy and returning to the form that made him one of the premier third basemen in all of baseball.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" He started out slow and started to look like himself again before the injury bug claimed one of its biggest victims of the 2024 Braves season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":19975,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mlb"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat went right?<\/h3>\n
What went wrong?<\/h3>\n
2025 Outlook<\/h3>\n