Do Braves need to make coaching staff changes after another early postseason exit?

Ninety-four wins and a division title would satisfy most franchises in baseball. But when you’re the Braves — winners of 24 division titles and two World Series since 1991 — another quick postseason exit makes all of that regular-season success feel pretty hollow.

Especially when you look at how the season actually played out. The Braves couldn’t lose over the first two months, touting the best record in baseball with the best offense and the best pitching staff in the sport. Only one of those held up the rest of the way, and it wasn’t the one anyone expected.

From June until the Dodgers finally ended their season, the offense went quiet. Atlanta’s NLDS woes were really just a microcosm of what Braves fans had watched for four straight months — a group that couldn’t hit with runners in scoring position or do the little things required to manufacture runs, which added up to one of the least effective offenses in baseball.

Those issues were masked well enough during the regular season, largely thanks to the elite pitching. But every offensive flaw gets magnified in October against better arms, and Atlanta’s became obvious the moment the Dodgers showed up. The Braves finished the NLDS 1-for-23 with runners in scoring position — the second-worst mark in postseason history, and the worst since 1966.

The Braves went 1-for-23 (.043) with runners in scoring position in the series against the Dodgers.

That's the second-lowest batting average with RISP in a postseason series in MLB history (min. 20 AB with RISP), behind only the Dodgers in the 1966 World Series (0-for-22).

— OptaSTATS (@OptaSTATS) October 8, 2026

Numbers like that make it easy to point the finger at hitting coach Tim Hyers. The offense has stayed relatively healthy the last two years, yet the production has dropped off significantly from its 2023 peak, when the Braves were historically great and set a slew of MLB records. Atlanta ranked 8th in runs scored this season — respectable enough — but 16th in OPS and, most glaring of all, 28th in on-base percentage at .309. Back in 2023, they led the league in that category at .344.

But here’s the question worth raising: how much of this is really on Tim Hyers?

This is an organization built around the long ball — a slug-or-bust mentality implemented by the front office, and one franchise legend Chipper Jones has criticized ad nauseam. It works just fine over 162 games, but these playoff numbers suggest a much deeper root cause than a hitting coach who’s only been around since the start of 2025.

“The Braves shouldn’t try to spin their postseason hitting woes as just the randomness of the baseball or because they faced good pitching,” MLB writer Jason Foster writes on Twitter/X. “When you compare them to the rest of the postseason field over the past five years, they stand out in the worst way.

“Since the start of the 2022 postseason, Atlanta is last — by a wide margin — in average (.185), on-base percentage (.265), OPS (.575), runs per game (2.6) and average with RISP (.180) among teams that’ve played at least 15 postseason games (that’s 14 teams).

“They’re the only team with a postseason average below .200, the only team with a postseason OPS below .600 and the only postseason team that averages fewer than three runs per game. Meanwhile, their .265 OBP is nearly 20 points lower than the next-closest team.”

This is no longer a sample size anyone can scoff at. What the Braves are doing philosophically isn’t working, and it hasn’t worked for a long time. They can try to make Hyers the scapegoat, and maybe he hasn’t done enough to fix the issues. But until the people at the top admit there’s a problem with the way this team approaches offense, the Braves are going to keep running into the same wall every October.

The issues run much deeper than one man not doing his job. Fixing them will take an all-hands-on-deck approach — a scarier thing to admit, but ignoring it will only leave the Braves further behind.

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Photo: IMAGO / Newscom World