We’re only a few players deep into this series and… hey, wait a minute! Bryce Elder? Bryce Elder?!
We did Matt Olson, Michael Harris II, and Ozzie Albies, but… Bryce Elder? Two of those other three guys
struggled, but you can be pretty certain they’ll be hoovering up PAs for the Braves provided they’re healthy. Bryce Elder, though? He might get traded! Or DFAed! Or DFAed and then traded! To put it another way, the success of the Braves in 2026 hinges a lot more on those other three guys than it does on Elder.
So, why are we doing Bryce Elder? Because my order of this series is “2025 playtime” and, as you may have heard repeatedly, Elder led the Braves in innings last year. So, Bryce Elder, here we go.
Career-to-date, status
I think I’ve covered Elder and his ups and downs so much over the past few years that I really want to zoom past all of it at this point.
For his career, Elder has 3.7 fWAR in 434 2/3 innings, with a 108 ERA-, 107 FIP-, and 100 xFIP-. He’s pitched like an average starter, but he’s been exceedingly homer-prone in each of the last two years, which has knocked down his value even as he’s minimized his walk rate. There’s probably a study out there in the aether somewhere that uses Elder as a case study for how FIP and xFIP can be misleading in the rare cases where pitchers will always get blasted in the zone, but that would require focusing even more on the array of Elder-related contretemps, so I’ll pass.
Elder had a few nice starts against weak competition at the tail end of 2022, and his 2023 is now-well-documented as a legitimately great run of 15 outings before he lost what made him so successful and more or less collapsed. 2024 was a smaller sample HR/FB nightmare, and 2025 was just a larger sample HR/FB nightmare. Again, maybe that HR/FB nightmare is because by virtue of how his pitching has evolved, his choices are either bad peripherals or lots of homers without much in between, but I’m once again going to skip right past that dichotomy.
Elder is out of options, and isn’t arbitration-eligible until next year. I still hope he gets traded to a team that can work with him and give him more run, but the Braves of past years kept, to my extreme annoyance, fetishizing innings completion rather than quality of innings pitched, and Elder offers them that in spades, so we’ll see how things shake out.
Recent performance
Elder’s line last year was 125/112/98. He doesn’t get strikeouts, not really, but compensates by at least managing not to walk the guys he isn’t striking out. Elder’s success is seemingly predicated on working the sinker’s fade armside and the slider’s break gloveside, taking advantage of seam-shifted wake to make up for his lack of velocity. Unfortunately, since 2023, everything has kind of backed up on him — his command has gotten far worse such that he’s largely just lobbing pitches towards the plate, his movement profile is less exaggerated and therefore less useful than before, and the seam-shifted wake on his slider is evaporating. There’s league average starter production somewhere in there, but he needs to have stuff break his way while also moving towards what he managed during that 15-start run in the first half of 2023.
Forecasting
Same brief disclaimer: once upon a time I built a projection system to try to mirror/get at the workings of Steamer and ZiPS. I called it IWAG. You can figure out what that means, maybe. I’m bringing it back for this series of posts. Here’s Elder, for 2026.
Basically, the above is the result of not fully buying into “will certainly have HR/FB” problems, but doing so to some extent. If there was full buy-in about the homer issues, the WAR would probably be about half as high. Still, because those issues exist, IWAG doesn’t see Elder as a free-and-clear average starter. He’s more like a good #4 whose issues mean something like 16 outs a start when everything shakes out.
Don’t be misled by the uneven size of the tails — the system figures (as, I guess, is logical) that worse performances generally lead to a decrease in opportunities, so there’s no giant tail of horrible pitching, but there a sizable tail of pretty good pitching, even if the expected inefficiency caps the non-rate value pretty harshly.
Your turn
Alright, I’ve given you the info. Well, some info. You may have your own info. With that, I ask you:
- Rounded to the nearest fWAR, how much will Bryce Elder produce in 2026? (If you ignore this and provide a partial fWAR, I will round it for you, and your scoring will not be based on 1 WAR around your point estimate, but 1 WAR around the rounded number.)
- How confident are you in your choice? Go with a scale from 1-5, where 3 is “I dunno, reasonably confident,” 5 is certain, and 1 is “I am participating but have no confidence in my choice and don’t want the fact that it will likely be incorrect to affect my place in any theoretical standings all that much.”
Note: this will still be scored if Elder gets traded. Minor league production will not count towards anything. The guesses are for major league production only, with no conversion or equivalent.
