This question probably would’ve made more sense on the day ahead of a Bryce Elder start, but we don’t live in a perfect world. There’s not too much to ponder with regards to the Atlanta Braves in 2025 anymore, so I’ve been thinking about this a fair bit.
The Braves are obsessed with covering innings. Brian Snitker talks about it, sometimes to the extent that it feels like it’s to the exclusion of everything else. The pitchers themselves talk about it, and I have no trouble believing that guys like Elder
have internalized the messaging that their job is to save the bullpen rather than much of anything else. Given that the pitching staff is in shambles these days due to injury, it seems like the Braves won’t want to part ways with Elder, just because he exists and can, at least in concept, sop innings, the quality of which is irrelevant at this point. And yet... I wonder anyway.
I don’t think the Braves have ever, from a roster management perspective, been huge fans of Bryce Elder. There’s no real way to know, but he’s served as a fill-in guy more often than not. Even when he had that breakout in 2023, it came after he started the season the minors. With the Braves being in the shape they’re in, they didn’t even line up Elder to start one of the first few games after the All-Star Break. Ahead of that miserable playoff game (you know the one), the Braves didn’t have any real other options, but still hemmed and hawed for what felt like forever before finally admitting that yeah, Elder was going to be the starter.
But, the more specific reason that I’m thinking about Elder right now is that he’s kind of pseudo-devolving in a really weird way, and at this point I just don’t know if he needs a reset somewhere else, especially given that the Braves don’t really need anyone to do anything specific for the rest of the year, and can easily get a replacement for him in the offseason.
Leaving aside the story of his 2022 and 2023, which have been covered infinitely at this point, we come to his 2024, where the team used him fairly reticently, and he somehow managed an absolutely bonkers 157/115/97 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-). That 97 xFIP- was his best-ever, as he posted a career-low walk rate. But the HR/FB was brutal. In that season, he had ten starts, with a good-to-dominant xFIP in six, and an awful xFIP in four. By FIP, it was an even split between really good starts, and really terrible ones. Whatever Elder’s deal was in 2024, it wasn’t about an inability to succeed, it was about an inability to do anything consistently.
When the Braves asked Elder to throw some frames for them in 2025, it wasn’t quite the same, as he was meh-to-awful in four of his first five outings. But then he reeled off a good five-start stretch with only one clunker, and it seemed like he was at least in the process of fixing the game-to-game inconsistency from 2024, if not returning to his first-starts-of-2023 dominance. But then, in his last six starts, he’s dominated twice, and been completely heinous, in a bad way, the other four times. The 2024-ish inconsistency is back in full force, and it makes him reasonably unplayable. He’s 16 starts into 2025 now, and he’s about two years removed from when his mechanics faltered in the middle of 2023 — at no point has he shown an ability to work with the Braves to fix stuff for more than a few starts at a time. So, maybe he should go elsewhere, if only for his sake.
The sad thing is that for the course of the season overall, his 2025 looks like his 2024, just less extreme. Last year, as noted, was 157/115/97. This year, he’s at 136/129/100. It’s just an even bigger HR/FB issue, and when you smooth out the inconsistency, he’s a generic starter but for the homers. It’s just... that inconsistency isn’t something any team wants, and the Braves clearly can’t help him fix it at this point.
Anyway, what do you think?
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