The Braves need to fire hitting coach Tim Hyers

The Braves fell again on Tuesday night, despite a marvelous outing from Grant Holmes, who fired six shutout innings with 10 strikeouts. It’s become an all-too-common theme in 2025: lights-out pitching performances wasted by a lifeless offense that no longer resembles the powerhouse of seasons past.

Tuesday marked Atlanta’s fifth loss in their last six games. They’ve now been shut out in three of their last five games and scored one run or fewer in four of them, as their offense continues to inch closer to the worst offense in all of baseball. The Braves rank in the bottom 10 in slugging, OPS, and home runs. Most alarmingly, they now sit 24th in runs scored — behind the Marlins, Athletics, and Nationals.

Poor offense isn’t a problem that’s all too new for this club. The Braves were a bottom 10 offense over the final four months of last season as well. However, at least then, there were a number of built-in excuses.

Atlanta’s lineup was decimated by injuries from start to finish. Sean Murphy, Ozzie Albies, Michael Harris, Austin Riley, and Ronald Acuña Jr. all missed multiple months. By the end of the season, half the club was either on the IL or playing hurt. It was at least understandable as to why they were struggling, which is why it was nothing short of shocking that the Braves decided to move off hitting coach Kevin Seitzer at the end of the season, a decision that might go down as one of the worst in franchise history.

Seitzer had proven to be a wizard for the Braves, credited with turning a slew of below average players into All-Stars once they arrived in Atlanta. Orlando Arcia, Jorge Soler, Eddie Rosario, Travis d’Arnaud, and countless others all experienced their best years while playing for the Braves under Seitzer’s watch. Yet, amid the first moment of adversity the organization had faced in nearly a decade, Seitzer was made the scapegoat.

The decision never made a lick of sense when it occurred and looks even more inept today. Kevin Seitzer landed on his feet in Seattle and has turned the Mariners into a top 10 offense after they ranked 25th in runs scored a year ago.

In his place, the Braves went on to hire Tim Hyers, who experienced a lot of success with the Red Sox and Rangers. How much he attributed to that success is impossible to calculate, but it’s already abundantly clear his words are not getting through to anybody in Atlanta.

The Braves are watching nearly their entire lineup — one that used to be chock-full of All-Stars — experience career-worst campaigns, and that really doesn’t even do the situation justice. Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies have gone from some of the best players at their respective positions to the worst offensive players in all of baseball. Austin Riley, once an MVP candidate, is now an average bat, and there’s not a single player in the lineup today outproducing their career norms.

The Braves have taken a juggernaut offense — the thing that set them apart from everybody else in the league– and managed to turn it into a glaring weakness. It’s almost unexplainable, but Austin Cain-Reach of Battery Power brought up a brilliant point about the club’s notable change in its once aggressive approach.

Braves Advanced Plate Discipline Stats

Year	1st Pitch Swing%	Ahead in Count Swing%	Swing% on Fastballs when Ahead in the Count	Swing% on Middle-Middle Pitches	Swing% on Middle-Middle Fastballs
2022-2024	3rd	1st	1st	1st	1st
2025	23rd	15th	8th	19th	21st

Stats from Statcast

“As a team, they’ve gone from being the most aggressive in baseball – especially in favorable counts, and on pitches in the zone, and on pitches down the middle – to being in the middle of the pack in each of those categories.”

That is a drastic difference that clearly illustrates a change in philosophy, a change that is having a negative impact across the board.

I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve called for a baseball coach/manager to be fired in the middle of the season. Typically, I just don’t believe they have the kind of influence that most fans would like to imagine. But in this case, we could be looking at irreparable damage to an entire young core of players that were supposed to carry this franchise for a decade.

Maybe Tim Hyers isn’t the issue at all. Maybe it’s just an inexplicable convergence of regression, an entire lineup of All-Stars falling off a cliff simultaneously. But regardless of the cause, in any professional setting, when things go this catastrophically wrong, change is inevitable.

If the Braves want to get to the bottom of this, they need to start eliminating variables. That starts with the hitting coach. Because at this point, not making a move feels more reckless than rolling the dice on a change.