Second Month in Review, Part 1: The Offense

Offensive MVP & LVP of the Month:

MVP: Matt Diaz & Willie Harris - apologies to Edgar Renteria.

LVP: Scott Thorman - apologies to Andruw Jones, Pete Orr, and Chris Woodward.

May was a weird month. As a team we went 14-14 and played like a team unsure of its own ability and talent at times. Playing like that makes it tough to dole out accolades and even tougher to issue criticism. We can be sure of two things though, Willie Harris has been on fire since being called up from Richmond, and Matt Diaz is proving that he sure can hit.

Diaz paced the team with a .424 batting average and an 1.021 OPS in May. Harris wasn't too far behind, though, racking up a .391 BA and .998 OPS. The addition of the red-hot Harris and the turnaround of Diaz helped fill the major void in production that used to be Ryan Langerhans' spot in the order. Harris also brought the added element of speed. The Braves stole just 7 bases in April, and Harris alone almost matched that total with 6 steals in May.

The steady and often forgotten Brave is Edgar Renteria. He continued his solid play both offensively and defensively throughout May. His .323 May average kept him in the top-5 in batting average in the National League and his 9 doubles led the team. In far too many games this month it seemed the only person doing any hitting was Renteria.

Judging the poor performances in May is difficult because we instantly want to say Andruw and Thorman, and they did hit poorly, posting batting averages of .202 and .200 respectively. The problem in deeming them completely ineffective comes from them being one and two on the team in RBI for the month of May. Andruw led the team with 17 RBIs and Thorman was tied for second with 14. They still left far too many runners on and were also one and two on the team in strikeouts; fanning a combined 53 times in 189 at-bats.

It was good to see the team once again move quickly to replace a struggling player. Following on the heels of Ryan Langerhans' trade, the Braves released the ineffective Craig Wilson despite his high (for the Braves) salary. With his dismissal the Braves chose to recall their top prospect, Jarrod Saltalamacchia. Following the similar pattern they used when Jeff Francoeur and Brian McCann made their debuts in 2005, Salty was recalled all the way from double-A Mississippi, and seemed to have no problems making the adjustment to the majors. In just a short time in the majors he has already shown great plate discipline to go along with big time power, not to mention an above average ability to throw out runners attempting to steal.

While the team hit great with runners in scoring position in April - the best in baseball - they were only average with RISP in May. Their power also mysteriously disappeared - including an eight game homerless streak at the beginning of the month. While the team led the majors with 36 homeruns in April, they hit only 23 in May. Some of that may have been due to the injury to Chipper Jones, which forced him to miss almost half the month, but everyone's power numbers slipped just a bit. Seven of the 14 games we lost in May were lost by two runs or less. Perhaps the power outage had something to do with the .500 baseball the team played in May.

Tomorrow I'll take a look at the pitching.