The Atlanta Braves are, yet again, the biggest mystery in baseball.

Chipper Jones is out with a mangled leg, having played only six games. New shortstop Edgar Renteria has been hurt. Marcus Giles isn’t hitting, and he’s now hurt too. Sophomore Jeff Francoeur, who last year looked like he’d stepped into the majors as a middle-of-the-order force, is being eaten alive by his seeming inability to distinguish balls from strikes and unwillingness to stop swinging at the first pitch.

Worse, and shockingly, the Braves can’t pitch. It’s been a few years since the Braves have had a truly elite staff, but this is something else entirely. Tim Hudson has made four starts, one of them a 9-inning, one-run masterpiece against the Mets, and his ERA is 6.08.

The staff ERA was 5.19 going into last night’s game, and only John Smoltz, not exactly in Cy Young form, has been a reliable starter. The bullpen is full of bums, youngsters, and retreads, and without the guiding hand of departed pitching maestro Leo Mazzone, they’re looking like it.

For all that, the team entered last night’s game against the Washington Nationals just a game under .500, with an important series victory over the Mets to their credit. No one’s counting them out of the division race, and not just because of their recent history – there are quite a few reasons to like them.

You have to figure Hudson and Smoltz are going to turn it around, and that if the current crop of no-name relievers doesn’t get the job done, manager Bobby Cox will churn the roster until he finds some good arms. That should make the pitching perfectly solid, which will in turn allow the Braves’ offense to carry them.

It sounds odd, but that’s how the Braves are built these days. Even with the various injuries, this is one of the better lineups in the league. One of Cox’s secrets is his knowledge of how to break players into the league, and you can see it in the production he’s getting out of three younger players who are limited in various ways: first baseman Adam LaRoche is slugging .553, catcher Brian McCann is slugging .583, and left fielder Ryan Langerhans is slugging .558 with a .400 OBA. Partly that’s because it’s still early, partly it’s because these guys (especially McCann) are all talented, but a lot of it is that Cox protects them by judiciously slotting in reserves like Todd Pratt, Brian Jordan, and Matt Diaz when the Braves are facing lefties or crafty veterans who are likely to give these guys trouble. Neither Pratt nor Diaz has hit much, but they will, and by using them to help keep the younger guys out of situations that might cause them to slump, Cox is showing why he plays chess while other managers are playing checkers.

Of course, past these guys is center fielder Andruw Jones, whose recent power barrage – he killed the Mets with four well-timed home runs in three games – has people thinking that last year, when he led the league with 51 home runs, wasn’t a fluke after all, and that he’s finally developed into the offensive force everyone thought he would when he made the majors at age 19.

The funny thing is that he really hasn’t. Jones is slugging .701, but his .347 OBA is the exact same one he’s been putting up the last two years. It’s a bit above league average, but too low for him to really be considered a genuinely elite offensive player – he just makes too many outs.

This is especially odd because with the monstrous power he’s developed, you’d figure he’d walk more just as a consequence of pitchers being careful with him and giving him fewer pitches to hit. Plus, his defense has fallen quite a bit behind his reputation. Jones is downright slow these days, and while he still has a great arm, that’s probably the best aspect of his defensive game. He’s no longer a five-tool player; he’s an above average defender, a slow (if aggressive) runner, and not all that much of a hitter for average by today’s standards. He’s a power hitter, plain and simple.

So, though, are most of the other players on whom the Braves are staking their hopes. It’s a fascinating change of approach. If the typical Brave was once a young pitcher with a good fastball and changeup and a willingness to throw them both low and away, it’s now a young hitter with good fundamentals, reasonable defensive tools, acceptable on-base skills, and huge power.

I’m not sure Jeff Francoeur would have been an everyday player on the Braves five years ago; as the team’s constituted today, he, even more than Jones, is their poster boy, and it looks like he’ll be given every chance to play his way out of a truly brutal slump. Why he’s not being protected like LaRoche would seemingly be a mystery, but given the quality of Cox’s past judgments you’d have to suspect his methods will be vindicated in the end. Jones, Francoeur, and McCann hitting bombs and John Thomson throwing a six-inning, three-run start: It’s not the formula the Braves have used in the past, but their willingness to change is why you might still consider them the favorites in the NL East right now.

tmarchman@nysun.com