This weekend in Atlanta, two teams whose seasons have strayed from the norm will square off.

At this point, you likely know all about the Braves’ trials and tribulations in 2024. At 36-30, the Braves are far below where they were expecting to be by the time mid-June rolled around. This weekend, though, they’ll play host to another team that’s had a bummer of a season so far: the Tampa Bay Rays.

While projection systems often struggle to incorporate the roster legerdemain the Rays so expertly leverage year after year after year, the Rays were expected to be a premiere contender in 2024 — they came into the season with MLB’s fifth-best projections, seventh-highest playoff odds, and fifth-highest championship odds. Just like the Braves, though, they’ve run aground on the rocky shoals of reality, as they’re currently 33-36, last place in the AL East. It’s been nothing short of a sinkhole of a season for a team that has a five-season playoff streak going, and hasn’t had a winning percentage below .537 (i.e., an 86-win season) in its last six tries.

The bad news doesn’t stop there, though. It’s one thing to have a bottom-10 record in MLB. It’s quite another to have a bottom-five run differential and BaseRuns record. In fact, the Rays are five games better than their estimated record using either of those methodologies; no team is outplaying its run differential by more, and only the Guardians are outplaying their BaseRuns by more than the Rays. Being 33-36 and in last place in your division sucks; having signs pointing to that 33-36 record being the result of small-sample weirdness on record? That’s brutal.

Like the Braves, the Rays aren’t hitting much, with a 95 team wRC+ (21st in MLB). They’re 22nd in position player fWAR. Unlike the Braves, this has been the case all season, as they’ve basically been mired in that below-average-but-not-awful zone all year — compared to the Braves, who started off great and have had awful results since. A key difference, though: the Rays don’t have broadly poor fortune to blame for their offensive shortcomings — their team wOBA is .294 but their team xwOBA is .299 (compared to the Braves’ .311 and .326).

There’s another huge similarity between these two teams, too: they have both gotten an extreme shaft on barrels so far. We’ve talked a lot about how the Braves are doing near-inconceivably poorly on barrels so far. Well, the Rays are right there too:

• The Braves are just barely ahead of the Rays in the rate of barrels that become hits, with both teams clocking in right around 59 percent (league average is 67 percent); and
• The Rays are second to only the Braves in terms of barrels not becoming homers. Tampa Bay has just 36 percent of its barrels become homers; the Braves are dead last at 34 percent. (League average is 45 percent.)

That said, there’s a bit more than meets the eye here, too. The Braves’ barrel non-luck has been so frustrating because the Braves hit their barrels fairly well. The Rays, though, have the second-slowest average barrel in MLB, and the third-lowest xwOBA on barrels. (By comparison, the Braves have the third-hardest average barrel, and are middle of the pack in xwOBA.) The Braves have far and away the worst luck on barrels in MLB, and no one else is even close to how badly they’ve been screwed; the Rays are bottom three in this regard, but again, not too close to the Braves.