How Atlanta Braves' Offense Can Return to Form

The Atlanta Braves were the first team in baseball to reach 20 wins, 30 wins and 40 wins this season.

They held a 9.5-game lead in the NL East as recently as June 7, and for the first two months of the year, everything seemed to come easy for a team that missed the playoffs entirely in 2025.

But June has been a completely different story, and what once felt like a comfortable division lead is now shrinking by the day.

Atlanta has gone 9-13 this month and has dropped 12 of its last 16 games overall, watching the lead over the Philadelphia Phillies get cut from 9.5 games all the way down to three.

The Braves sit at 49-33 on the year, still in first place, but the gap that once looked safe is starting to feel a lot more fragile.

After Sunday's 3-2 loss to the San Francisco Giants, first-year manager Walt Weiss was blunt about what is going wrong.

"These are the way things go when you're not going well," Weiss said. "Their stuff falls and ours doesn't. That's just the way it goes right now. But we don't have a lot of margin for error because we're not scoring runs. So every run we give up is a big one."

The offense has been the biggest issue during this stretch of losses.

Chris Sale has been one of the few bright spots on the entire roster during this run, throwing Cy Young-level stuff on a nightly basis and getting almost nothing back from the lineup.

Over his last four starts as the pitcher of record, the Braves have scored a total of just two runs behind him.

Sale struck out 10 in Sunday's loss and has been touching 99 mph on his fastball regularly this month, but none of it has mattered because the bats have not been able to back him up.

Even with Atlanta suddenly in an uncomfortable spot in the standings, there are real reasons to think the offense will come back around.

This is a lineup led by Ronald Acuna Jr., Matt Olson, Austin Riley and Ozzie Albies, all of whom played a big part in building that huge early-season lead.

Through 82 games, the Braves have scored 390 runs, which is still a solid number overall even though the recent stretch has been ugly.

John Smoltz noted earlier this season that the real version of this team probably falls somewhere between the hot start and the rough patches, and the numbers support that idea.

Weiss also pointed to the schedule ahead as a chance to reset, with a homestand starting Tuesday against the St. Louis Cardinals followed by a four-game set against the New York Mets over the Fourth of July weekend.

After a tough month spent mostly on the road, getting back to Truist Park could be what this team needs to start turning things around.