Possibly one of the weirdest positive things about a member of the 2026 Atlanta Braves is that Dylan Lee is second among the team’s pitchers in fWAR, with 2.0. Among all pitchers, he is 71st with that mark. To be clear: every team has five-plus starters and a gaggle of relievers, and Lee is in the top 75 in production. Among relievers, he’s in the top ten, but really smack dab in a big cluster that runs from third to 20th.
Lee was dominant in terms of both peripherals and results-while-he-was-pitching
for much of the season. From the start of the season through August 16, he had a WPA over 2.5 and had recorded 26 shutdowns to just five meltdowns. In fact, the tail end of that stretch was 13 consecutive appearances with positive WPA, which accounted for six of his 26 shutdowns. His pitching line was video game numbers-y: a 46 ERA-, 48 FIP-, and a 69 xFIP-. His HR/FB was 5.0 percent (three homers all year, two in the same series against the Orioles). His strand rate was above league average, his BABIP-against was an absurd 2.05, though he was also managing contact to a supreme degree (2.28 xERA, yet still higher than his actual ERA in that span). Basically, he was dominant, but also aided by stuff he couldn’t control amid that dominance. Thanks, universe!
And then, as they do sometimes but not always, things changed for Lee on a dime. Lee has made seven appearances since August 16. He has been saddled with a meltdown in five of them (and shutdowns in the other two). He hasn’t allowed a homer in any, but…
- His FIP has been bad in two of the seven;
- His xFIP has been bad in four of the seven;
- His BABIP-against has been absurdly high in five of the seven;
- His xERA/xwOBA-against has been bad in three of the seven (the most recent three); and
- His aggregate line for these seven outings is 279/64/117.
The lack of homers hasn’t stopped him from accruing value. His pitching has been pretty bad, but it’s really split between his usual dominance in three outings (not in a row) and issues in four. Yes, two of his top four worst outings by xFIP have come in his bad stretch, but nothing else in his top (bottom?) ten. As you can probably tell by the 279 ERA-, this kind of looks like the universe getting back at him for the hubris and good fortune he enjoyed for pretty much the rest of the season. The only thing that hasn’t stung him in these seven outings has been his HR/FB.
Is this an effect of fatigue? It doesn’t quite look like it. His velocity hasn’t really budged, and is actually up slightly over earlier outings. He’s also gotten more chase. The issue has been fewer missed bats, especially on pitches outside the zone.
The reasons for this are fairly obvious once you look at some pitch plots. For the season, Lee has been relatively adept at spotting his slider on the lower glove-side edge. It sometimes drifts lower (below the zone) and sometimes higher (towards the middle of the plate), but he executes the pitcher’s pitch version of it often enough. Since August 19, it’s become more of a grab bag as to whether it ends up over the plate, too far below the zone, or in an intended spot. More minutely, it looks like it’s just missing below the zone. There’s less of a story with the four-seamer — maybe some are drifting below where he usually places them towards the upper part of the zone but nothing blatant. There’s no huge smoking gun as to why batters are making a bunch more contact on pitches outside the zone rather than missing them as they have. Maybe that’s the mechanism for the universe to get back at Lee…
…but honestly, it’s probably as simple as the fact that his first-pitch strike rate has fallen from about two-thirds before this stretch, to 50 percent in this stretch. That seems a more glaring change than anything else in this seven-outing stretch.
I don’t think there’s any real reason for concern, but I still somewhat expect Lee to catch an Injured List stint, even if there’s little suggest any kind of injury woe leading to performance issues. With a slightly-expanded September bullpen, the re-availability of Ray Kerr and the ability to shunt Brent Suter towards higher leverage, and the Braves’ usual foot-not-really-on-the-pedal approach to pitching management, that’s a way to give him a reset, even if that reset is just from the unrelenting pressure of the universe. If they don’t, though, I’d be surprised to see this rough stretch keep up, unless Lee somehow gets it in his head that he needs to do things differently in September after four-and-a-half months of near-unbridled success.
