Ronald Acuña Jr. flails as Braves fall to Dodgers, and difficult questions are coming in Atlanta: 'I did nothing to help the team'

ATLANTA — The face of Atlanta's postseason collapse sat in a corner of the Braves' locker room, blue dri-fit shirt pulled tight over his bowed head. All around Ronald Acuña Jr., the pops and slaps of hugs and daps resounded in the quiet locker room, marking the many farewells of a season that had ended earlier than anyone wanted.

The Braves whimpered out of the postseason on Wednesday , surrendering a second straight winnable game to the Dodgers in Atlanta after splitting the first two in Los Angeles. Losing in the postseason isn't unusual for Atlanta — or, at this point, for any team not based in Los Angeles — but the way Atlanta went out, meek and flailing, will sting.

"That's the postseason. You never know what you're going to get," Braves manager Walt Weiss said shortly after the final out. "You have a lot of unsung heroes a lot of times in the postseason, and sometimes guys struggle. It's obviously magnified because you're playing under a microscope."

That's true, but you didn't need a microscope to see the Braves' struggles in their final two games; they were visible from orbit. Zero-for-11 with men in scoring position. Sixteen men left on base. Opportunity after opportunity squandered time after time.

Acuña wasn't the only Brave to struggle at the plate in this series — he had two inconsequential singles in 15 at-bats — but he was the most visible one, given that he's the franchise's unquestioned star and the guy whose No. 13 jersey outnumbers all the others in the Truist Park stands.

"It's really frustrating. To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement," Acuña said via an interpreter after the game. "I'm particularly frustrated with myself. I feel like I did nothing to help the team this series. I'm supposed to be a spark plug for my team out there, and I never lit that fire. Extremely disappointed, very frustrated."

All four times Acuña walked to the plate in Game 4, a Brave was on base. All four times he failed to bring them home — striking out twice, walking once and, in his final at-bat of the season, grounding out to end the Braves' final scoring opportunity.

That final, meek out — coming on the very first pitch he saw, with Michael Harris II standing on second and the Braves trailing by two runs in the bottom of the seventh — brought out something that longtime observers of the Braves couldn't recall ever hearing before: boos for a Brave. They weren't thunderous, anti-Freddie-Freeman-level boos … but they weren't isolated, either, and they weren't shy.

Acuña heard the boos and accepted them. "It's really frustrating because they're well within their rights to boo and to say what they think and feel," he said later. "I didn't do anything [to help the team]."

He wasn't alone. Outside of Harris, every Braves batter who stepped to the plate this series might as well have been swinging a toothbrush. Matt Olson: 2-for-16. Drake Baldwin: 1-for-14. Austin Riley: 0-for-14. Ozzie Albies: 3-for-15. At least Albies' hits were two doubles and a home run.

"The Dodgers have something to do with [the Braves' offensive woes]," Weiss said afterward. "They're going for their third straight world championship for a reason. Their arms just keep coming at you."

Given what the Braves went through this season — wracked with injuries, setting out with a new skipper, stumbling into the playoffs with just two starting pitchers — it's arguable that this Braves team overachieved. This NLDS marked the first time Atlanta advanced past its first round of the postseason since 2021, the year the team won the World Series, and just the fourth time overall in the 2000s.

But achievement creates expectation, and this team proved — with its 5-1 record against the Dodgers in the regular season, its early-season surge, its late-season sprint and its gutsy elimination-game win against Philadelphia in the wild-card round — that it has the potential to achieve greatness. Now come the questions about whether this core, as currently constituted, can capitalize on that potential and advance past the divisional round.

In the top of the ninth inning Wednesday, perhaps to engender a little goodwill with the nearby fans, Acuña tossed his last warm-up ball of the season into the stands along the first-base line. It's not impossible that someone wearing an Acuña jersey caught it; there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them in the stands at every game this season.

Acuña won Atlanta fans' love with his magnificent early-career performances — his 2018 grand slam against these same Dodgers in the NLCS, his home run on the first pitch he saw in 2025 after nearly a full year lost to injury, his 40/70 season in 2023 that led to his unanimous MVP.

Starting next year, though, he'll need to work at getting them to believe in him — and the rest of the Braves' bats — all over again.