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Yeah, let’s not beat around the bush here. This is quite easily the worst stretch of baseball that the Atlanta Braves have played since returning to relevancy back in the 2018 season. In every way that the Braves could fail at playing big league baseball this, they found a way to do so this past week. Sometimes it was genuinely shocking. Sometimes it was sadly and entirely predictable. It was sad every single time, though and it’s incredibly frustrating to watch what is looking more and more like a lost season unfold right in front of our eyes.

This all started last weekend, which is when the Braves lost a close one 4-3 to the Marlins. While losing to a team of Miami’s caliber (and I really hate to talk like this since the Braves are very clearly not in a position to be looking down on any team at the moment) is always frustrating, things definitely felt like it would be okay the next day. After all, the Braves had Max Fried returning from the IL and he was surely going to beat up on the team that he had already tortured twice this season, right? Right?

Nope. Fried was given an extremely rude welcome back to the mound the very next day and the Marlins cruised to a 7-0 win over the Braves. All the good will that had come from the Braves picking up a series win in Milwaukee (remember that?! That actually happened!) had evaporated in frustrating fashion after dropping a series against a team that they not only have historically dominated but was also in an extremely diminished form after the All-Star Break. I was personally annoyed by that game to the point where I figured the Marlins would go and immediately rattle off five straight losses or something like that. While they haven’t gone on a losing streak just yet, they did lose both of their series to the Reds and Padres this week.

But I digress! The point is that it was fair to believe that this might have been an aberration where the Marlins simply got up for this series and wanted to throw a monkey wrench in Atlanta’s potential run for a Postseason spot. After all, the Braves were still at the top of the Wild Card standings and with the Phillies slowing down a bit, it seemed like the Braves just needed to get it together against Milwaukee, pick up where they left off against the Brewers in the week before and things would be back on track. It would’ve been a tough task to beat the Brewers again but they just showed that they were capable of doing so.

Oh, how wrong we were. The Braves then proceeded to suffer one of the worst three-game beatdowns that they’ve sustained since Truist Park opened in 2017. Unless your name was Aaron Bummer, Raisel Iglesias or Luke Williams (who, is very much not a pitcher), if you were a Braves pitcher then you got bombed. 10-0 Milwaukee in the series opener. 8-5 Brewers in the middle game, then a 16-7 loss to complete the sweep where that score was extremely flattering for the Braves because it was 13-3 at one point. The only positive of this series was that the Braves did start to show signs of life at the plate after getting shutout for two consecutive nine-inning games for the first time in a decade and seeing their shutout streak grow to 24 innings — again, the first time in a decade that they had been shut out for that long.

After going that long without scoring, it seemed like the Braves were ready to break out and finally dish out some pain of their own. With a trip to Colorado on the cards next, this seemed perfect for the offense — and also the absolute worst time for this pitching staff to go to such an extreme environment. So as it turned out, the Braves did indeed dish out some pain — to their own fans, that is. If you watched every inning of this series in Colorado, I’m going to suggest that you visit your doctor as soon as you can in order to make sure that your blood pressure is still at a normal rate because this was an utterly zany series at Coors Field — one that was reminiscent of the pre-Humidor days and not in a good or fun way for the Braves, either.

This series saw Atlanta’s offense prove that the flashes of life that were on display during the nightmarish Brewers series had indeed made the trip with them to Denver. Marcell Ozuna continued to smack the ball as the only consistent member of this lineup in 2024 and Jorge Soler decided that he really, really liked Coors Field and began to annihilate the ball over the course of the weekend. Sean Murphy showed signs of finally getting things going at the plate, Travis d’Arnaud continued to hit the ball pretty well and Matt Olson made his presence felt in a major way over the course of this three-game series. While it’s very easy to imagine this all simply evaporating once they go from the extreme of Coors Field to the near-extreme of Oracle Park for four games, it did feel really good to see this Braves lineup finally start looking like something that we’ve been used to seeing in recent years instead of this 2024 aberration.

However, any goodwill that the offense engineered was completely wiped out by the performance that Atlanta’s pitching and defense put on this weekend. The Braves gave up 23 runs this weekend and let’s take a glance at how this all went down:

• A 6-5 loss on Friday where Brenton Doyle made it into the 20/20 club for the season. This included a backbreaker of a seventh inning where right after Ramón Laureano and Jorge Soler had tied up the game with solo homers, A.J. Minter enters the game and immediately gives up two doubles to give us the final score.
• An 11-8 win on Saturday where Max Fried had his second consecutive bad start since returning from the IL and Aaron Bummer got tagged for three runs and didn’t even make it out of his frame. Coors got him and Sam Hilliard in particular got him. They both combined at one point in order to get the defense — here’s a “web gem” that really shows you how things are going for the Braves right now:

• An absolutely calamitous Coors collapse on Sunday where (in one single inning) the bullpen turned what should’ve been a feel-good series win into one that elicited this response from Brian Snitker:

We have to talk about that eighth inning because it was genuinely incredible to witness. I’ll be honest with y’all: I switched off for a bit so I could watch the end of the closing ceremonies for the Olympics. After seeing Tom Cruise, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Billie Eilish do their thing in order to give everybody a taste of Los Angeles ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics, I was in a great mood! Then I switched back to the baseball game and saw that what was an 8-2 lead had become an 8-4 lead after Luke Jackson had gotten bombed while he was out there. That was okay, though! While the Rockies had two men on, Luke had gotten two outs and all we needed was the usually-reliable Joe Jiménez to just get one out to take it to the ninth inning.

You don’t need me to tell you what happened but I will because I’m a sick man and you’re sick people for reading this. Jiménez proceeded to give up four straight hits — a two-RBI single from Charlie Blackmon because Charlie Blackmon seemingly hates the Braves, a single for Ezequiel Tovar, an RBI single for Ryan McMahon and then the backbreaker: A double from Brendan Rogers to make it 9-8. The Braves then went down in order in the ninth (including a situation where following a leadoff single from Marcell Ozuna, Luke Williams entered as a pinch runner only to get caught in a GIDP with Matt Olson) and now here I am venting about it.

I’m not going to sit here and tell y’all that this is as bad as it’s going to get for the Braves this year because apparently they might read this and take it as a challenge. I said that their 10-0 loss to the Brewers was rock bottom and then they went and topped it by blowing a six-run lead in one inning to a team that is 31 games under .500. Once again, I do have to point out that this is a ballpark where this sort of thing can happen — 2024 Rockies or not, they did put up 20 on the Red Sox in this ballpark not too long ago and they did bomb the Pirates for 16 runs earlier this season as well. The Rockies have proven that they can go off in their home ballpark at any given time.

With that being said, I’m going to use a word that I hate using when it comes to sports: Pathetic. This was absolutely pathetic from the Braves and their pitching staff in particular. While you do have to mention that the Braves would be in an even worse position right now if not for the great performance of their pitching staff so far this season, what they’ve done this week as a collective has been astonishingly poor. It also feels like the baseball gods have a sense of humor since it’s coincided with Atlanta’s offense finally putting on a sustained run of production for the first time since April. The Atlanta Braves right now are Smokey’s analysis of Craig’s house from “Friday”:

For most of this season, they’ve had pitching but no offense. Now, they have offense but no pitching. They can’t win for losing and they’ve done a lot of losing this week. Somehow, the Braves still aren’t in a completely hopeless spot as their upcoming games on this road trip against the Giants and Angels should still be manageable. However, “should” is most definitely the operative word there. If this team wants to get back to holding a Postseason spot, they should come out of these next seven games with a winning record. With that being said, this team has not operated in a serious manner for long stretches of this season. If I’m being completely honest, they will have to prove it to us if they want a lot of this fanbase to believe that there’s something left in the tank for them to somehow get into the Postseason.