{"id":673415,"date":"2026-04-11T16:57:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T16:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/673415\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T16:57:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T16:57:00","slug":"braves-keeping-faith-in-austin-riley-as-potential-turnaround-emerges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/673415\/","title":{"rendered":"Braves Keeping Faith in Austin Riley as Potential Turnaround Emerges"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the season marches on, Austin Riley might be starting to turn the corner. He\u2019s not putting the ball in the stands yet, but the at-bats are looking better. The Atlanta Braves<\/a>\u2019 third baseman is seeing the ball drop for a hit more often.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that long ago, less than a week ago, that we were highlighting how the dominant spring training performance by no means translated<\/a> to the regular season. It still hasn\u2019t, but the quality of those recent at-bats is starting to show something encouraging.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Riley has reached base in each of his last four games. He\u2019s had two multi-hit games in his last three games, and has tallied two total bases in each of those three games.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEven a few games before he started getting the hits, I thought some of the swings were better,\u201d manager Walt Weiss said ahead of Friday\u2019s 11-5 win over the Guardians. \u201cSome of the at-bats were better. I thought he was hitting in the right direction, and you know, I said after the game the other night, I\u2019m not worried about Austin Riley.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Weiss said that it\u2019s easier to put the stats under the microscope early in the season. They\u2019re still prone to major changes compared to later in the year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you struggle for a week in June, nobody notices,\u201d Weiss said.<\/p>\n

Three or four games still don\u2019t make a trend. It\u2019s still fair to say this is encouraging. Maybe, just maybe, this season has a chance to be different. A lazy fly ball is still going to happen. A turnaround doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019ll never pop one up to first base again this season.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is a game of averages and trends. Right now, those averages are starting to lean back in his favor. It\u2019s helped translate to his team winning three games in a row. How he\u2019s looking now could start to translate to more home runs and shots in the gaps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For those who have seen the movie Major League, and I\u2019m using this example on purpose because they\u2019re playing Cleveland, and Friday\u2019s game was 80s night, that\u2019s called a winning streak. It\u2019s happened before. Riley succeeding at the plate has happened before, too, and to raging success. Perhaps that can happen again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Overall on the year, Riley is batting .224 with a .599 OPS. Both those stats are well up from the .162 average and .451 OPS he had on Tuesday. As Weiss said, this is the time of year when the numbers can change in a hurry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sign up for our free newsletter for the latest news<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the season marches on, Austin Riley might be starting to turn the corner. He\u2019s not putting the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673416,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2394],"tags":[191,46,4166,5,192,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-673415","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-braves","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-braves","10":"tag-atlantabraves","11":"tag-baseball","12":"tag-braves","13":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116387132998281227","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}