Regression might be coming for the Atlanta pitching staff in 2025
Several Braves pitchers put up career years, but Reynaldo López in particular is in danger of regressing next season
In a 2024 season where the Braves offense dealt with massive injuries and underperformance, the pitching staff was what carried Atlanta to the postseason.
It’s a given that the staff was good - I mean, Chris Sale won the Cy Young award and got down-ballot MVP votes (7th), while Reynaldo López received a down-ballot Cy Young vote. But you might not realize that the Braves staff was one of, if not THE best in baseball by several measures:
ERA: 3.49, tied with Seattle Mariners for best in baseball
Starters = 3.58 (3rd), relievers = 3.32 (3rd)
FIP of 3.44 (1st) and xwOBA of .295 (2nd)
WAR: 12.5, 1st in baseball
Starters = 8.6 (3rd), relievers = 3.9 (2nd)1
Braves pitching led the game in strikeouts with 15532 and were second in homers allowed with 150, just four behind the Kansas City Royals despite a ballpark that was a lot closer to neutral than Kauffman Stadium.
While I expect the pitchers to be good next year, it feels like there’s enough unknowns to be concerned that they’ll be as good as they were this season. For one, losing 59 combined starts and 35% of your innings in the departures of Max Fried and Charlie Morton means someone (or multiple someones) need to step up next season. Some of that will be absorbed by a full season of Spencer Schwellenbach and more than two starts from Spencer Strider, but there’s still a clear need there.
While I doubt Chris Sale will repeat his Cy Young season, it’s reasonable to assume that the worst of the health issues are behind him and so I’m tenatively penciling him in for 150 to 170 innings with a slight step back in ERA and WAR. ZiPS has him at 4.5 WAR and a 2.99 ERA, reasonable steps back from a 2.38 ERA and 6.2 WAR season in 2024.
And then there’s Reynaldo López. Converting from relief back to starting for the first time since 2020, he looked like one of the best free agents in baseball. López finished 2024 with an 8-5 record and 1.99 ERA across 25 appearances, striking out 148 and walking 42 in his 135.2 innings. While he didn’t get enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, both by virtue of frequently working on extra rest and two late injured list stints, he was one of the best pitchers in baseball last year with a WAR total (5.1) surpassed by only seven other starters.
But unlike a lot of those names, there’s reason to question if what López did last season is sustainable in a larger sample.
López significantly outperformed his inputs
A 1.99 ERA was much greater than we could have possibly expected from Reynaldo López; even when watching him, it didn’t feel like we were watching a 2.00 ERA pitcher on the mound at times.
That’s because under the hood, he wasn’t a 2.00 ERA pitcher.
Fielding Independent Pitching, a ERA measure that strips out the impacts of the defense and just considers what the pitcher can control3 had López at almost a full run worse: 2.92. His Expected ERA (xERA on Statcast), which measures both the amount and the quality of a pitcher’s contact allowed, had him even worse at 3.94, right around league average.
The answer for this is in the contact that López allows: hard contact, typically in the air.
Reynaldo is mostly a flyball pitcher that gets hits hard - last season, he had a 39.6% ground ball rate with a 8.8% barrel rate and a 42.2% hard-hit rate, all easily below average.
Not, not all of these hard-hit balls went for home runs, mind you, but the discrepancy between his ERA and his FIP/xERA should give us concern that they might regress next season.
Saved by the baseballs
Looking at some individual pitches is illuminating, as well. López is a fastball-dominant pitcher (55% usage), sticking with that and his slider to right-handed hitters while adding the curveball and changeup against lefties.4
The fastball was slightly lucky - a .369 slugging allowed against an xSLG of .409 - but the curveball was incredibly lucky. Allowing only one homer, a .151 BA, and .264 SLG on the bender might normally be reason to ask him to throw it more, but the expected stats are a lot more worrisome: a .231 xBA and a .452 xSLG.
He gave up eleven BBEs off of the curveball that were over 95 mph, including six over 100 mph. Exactly one was a homer, launched to center by Michael Toglia of the Colorado Rockies at 106.5 mph in early September.
Five more were lineouts to either center or right field, with one groundout, a few outs to left, and a single to right. The last was a triple by Jarren Duran of the Boston Red Sox:
Eleven hard-hit balls (six barrels), but exactly three hits. The league-wide batting average for a hard-hit ball was .506, while the average on a barrel was .742.5 Statcast Search tells us that the expected batting average on these exact 11 batted balls was .556.
The deadened baseballs, for as much as they hurt the Braves offense earlier in the season, helped López avoid more serious damage in several of his outings.
So what does this mean for 2025?
I’m not saying López will be bad next season. But also, know that it’s unlikely he repeats his 2024 production simply because he was exceptional lucky in the damage he received from his batted balls. Instead of a 1.99 ERA, maybe a 3.00? Instead of 5.1 WAR, ZiPS has him at a more reasonable 4.1 projection for 2025. I’m not sure exactly where it will come in, but expecting a sub-two ERA feels like a bad move.
The Guardians got 7.5 WAR from their bullpen, just an absurd number. Closer Emmanuel Clase by himself was worth 4.5.
Only six total teams have over 1450 strikeouts and only one other, the Minnesota Twins, even broke 1500.
Home runs, strikeouts, walks, and hit by pitches.
Of López’s 244 curveballs thrown in 2024, all but 20 went to LHHs. He threw 81 changeups, 79 of which to LHHs.
2023 numbers, as the league hasn’t published overall 2024 numbers that I’ve seen.
Good points. Do we know if the baseball is going to change?