The Atlanta Braves ended up using a whopping 37 different relief pitchers over the course of the 2025 season. They also ended up using a franchise-record 19 different starting pitchers as well. Somehow, Scott Blewett fell into both categories — of course, he’s primarily a relief pitcher but he was also utilized as an opener in his Braves debut.
Now granted, Brian Snitker didn’t really use him as an opener more than he did as a “Guy who can just go out and pitch until the wheels fall off in the third
inning” but still, Blewett goes down as one of the many, many pitchers who took part in the cavalcade that was Atlanta’s deployment of pitchers in 2025. Now it’s time to take a look at how Blewett’s short stint ended up going for him here in Atlanta.
How acquired
April was a busy month for Scott Blewett. He started the season with the Twins and didn’t last long in Minnesota before he got DFA’d and claimed by the Orioles. Again, he had another extremely short stint with Baltimore before he got DFA’d there as well. The Braves officially picked him up in a trade after Baltimore DFA’d him, as they sent cash consideration to pick up the now-journeyman reliever. This was actually Blewett’s second stint with Atlanta’s organization — he spent 2023 as a member of the Double-A Mississippi Braves.
What were the expectations?
The Braves were in desperate search of bullpen arms already at this early point of the season and they figured that Blewett could get right with the Braves and establish a foothold in their relief corps. He was bringing his arsenal of a slider, four-seamer and splitter with him to Atlanta with the hopes of potentially becoming a reliable option out of the pen for the Braves.
With that being said, he probably would’ve had to become an integral part of the bullpen in order to stay around since he was already out of minor league options by the time he got to the Braves. In racing terms, it was either “wreckers or checkers” for Blewett here in Atlanta — he’d either stick around as a vital part of the bullpen or eventually get traded or DFA’d — again.
Coming into 2025, Blewett hadn’t had much of an opportunity to pitch in the majors, tossing just 28 1/3 innings over parts of three seasons, with a small-sample-nice-on-the-surface 52/93/110 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-). His two appearances with the Twins in 2025 were effective but didn’t save him from a DFA; he was much worse with the Orioles and that DFA was a lot less surprising. Basically, he was expected to be a replacement-level reliever on paper, and given his waiver wire adventures, that essentially came to pass in 2025.
2025 results
Aside from a couple of rough appearances where he, well, blew it (I’m sorry but y’all knew this was coming eventually), Blewett wasn’t completely terrible with the Braves while he was around. He ended up making 11 appearances for the Braves and seven of those were of the scoreless variety. While his stats ended up looking pretty gnarly once he was shipped out of town in early June as he finished his time here with a 5.51 ERA (130 ERA-) and a 7.36 FIP (133 FIP-), a lot of that was due to his final appearance being part of an absolutely disastrous day for Atlanta’s pitching staff (more on that later).
Now granted, this isn’t to say that Scott Blewett was otherwise outstanding outside of those few rough appearances. If he was, then he would’ve stuck around a lot longer than he did. It is to say that his time here wasn’t completely nightmarish, either. He had his ups and downs for the short stint that he spent here in Atlanta — it just so happens that the valleys were a lot deeper in comparison to how high his peaks were. Again, his lack of minor league options meant that the margin of error was pretty much slim-to-none. Scott Blewett couldn’t really afford to have any blowup-type appearances and unfortunately for him, the Cardinals, Dodgers, Phillies and Diamondbacks all attempted to ensure that Blewett would have a bad time while he was facing them.
In the end, Blewett finished 2025 with a 133/133/110 line; his time with the Braves was a scarier 130/180/109 experience. He “earned” -0.5 fWAR in 44 1/3 total innings (16 1/3 with the Braves, which accounted for the entirety of that -0.5, which is what happens when you’re around for 49 outs and allow five homers in the process).
What went right?
Outside of those bumpy appearances against those aforementioned teams, Blewett wasn’t half-bad. He had a three-appearance stretch between May 8 and May 24 where he pitched six scoreless innings in a row while only giving up two hits and two walks during that span. As you can imagine by the fact that he only got six innings across three weeks, it wasn’t like he was getting a frequent call from the dugout to go out and make things happen while he was out there. Still, he pitched two scoreless innings on May 8 against the Reds and then followed that up with two more scoreless innings against the Pirates a couple of days later. I’d say that that qualifies as the high point for Blewett while he was here, but actually, it was a bit more than that.
You see, both of those outings came in extra innings. So, those four total scoreless innings weren’t just scoreless, they were scoreless while each one started with a runner on second. The Braves won both games — in the first, he set up their walkoff in the 11th, and in the second, he kept the game scoreless and then finished it after the Braves took the lead in the 11th. In three of those four innings, his opponents got the Manfred man/ghost runner to third with one out, but none of those runners scored, thanks to a strikeout and some weak contact/nifty fielding.
As you might surmise, the change to the extra-inning rules causes a bit of a nightmare for WPA, putting pitchers (and teams) in an unfortunate position from the get-go. Still, if we go with what’s recorded on FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference and such, then Blewett recorded two pretty absurdly high single-game WPAs in those two contests. In fact, his May 10 outing against the Pirates was the highest single-game WPA earned by a relief pitcher in an appearance this year, and his May 8 outing against the Reds was the 10th-highest. It’s probably a safe bet that no relief pitcher has earned more WPA in a three-game period. That May 10 game was the highest WPA for any reliever in a game since 2023, and the highest for the Braves since Cristhian Martinez threw six scoreless innings in the infamous 19-inning game… which also featured the Pirates as an opponent.
Here’s Blewett’s highest-WPA play, which wasn’t really his play, but you get the idea. He’ll take the win where he can get it:
Anyway, that’s how Blewett ended up with the fourth-worst fWAR among 2025 Braves pitchers… but the fifth-highest WPA. Go figure.
What went wrong?
Those two amazing extra-inning efforts aside, you can’t give up tons of homers and maintain a decent pitching line, which is what the Braves learned writ large in 2025. Blewett had a 42 percent HR/FB as a Brave, which seems like a typo but isn’t. But it’s not like he dominated otherwise and just got dinged from being around the plate too much — quite the opposite, as he posted a walk rate of about 14 percent with the Braves. That’s horrible when you consider he only struck out about 18 percent of batters faced while with the Braves.
Atlanta’s bullpen had some absolutely dreadful moments in 2025 and the nightmare on June 5 here in Cobb County certainly qualified as one of those lowlights. Atlanta held a 9-3 lead heading into the eighth inning and ended up losing 11-10 — without extra innings, mind you. Blewett entered that game in the eighth inning and faced ten batters between the eighth and ninth inning and nearly gave up as many home runs (three) as outs recorded (four). Blewett left three hangers in the zone against Ketel Marte, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Alek Thomas to give up three homers in the process and help fuel an incredible comeback for Arizona. Blewett’s line at the end of the day was 1 1/3 IP, 3 hits, five runs charged (all earned), two walks, and one strikeout. That was the end of Blewett’s time with the Braves, as Atlanta shipped him back to Baltimore in another bit of bullpen reshuffling.
In the same vein of “boy this random fill-in reliever had a wild season,” Blewett didn’t even lose all that much WPA for his blowup against the Diamondbacks, because it was garbage time, and Raisel Iglesias probably shouldn’t have blown the game anyway… except he did. Instead, Blewett’s worst WPA game of the season came… against the Braves, when he loaded the bases with none out by giving up a single to Nick Allen and then walking two, and then yielding the go-ahead run in the form of a Jurickson Profar groundout. (The Braves ended losing the game anyway.) But as a Brave, his worst WPA outing came in his first appearance as a Brave — he was fine the first time through, got pushed to a second time through, and promptly gave up a two-run homer. It took a leadoff walk in the following inning for the Braves to mercifully remove him from the game in what ended up being a blowout loss. Oops.
2026 outlook
Shortly before the season ended, the Orioles outrighted Blewett to their Spring Training Complex. Blewett eventually elected free agency at season’s end, but not beforespending two months on the 60-day Injured List due to an elbow injury that he suffered relatively early on in his return to Baltimore. This isn’t the first time that Blewett has been in this situation though, so it’s probably safe to say that he’ll simply be looking to latch on to an organization somewhere on a minor league deal with an invite to Spring Training.
It’s tough to envision where he’ll stick around in the future mostly because his lack of minor league options gives teams less flexibility to potentially keep him around on a regular basis. His three-year projections via ZiPS had him tabbed for a 4.52 ERA and a 4.53 FIP for 0.3 fWAR in 2025 — but again, he ended up finishing with -0.5 fWAR in 2025. He’s probably going to be projected for replacement level, or maybe below, for 2026, given his pretty horrible homerfest in 2025.
While relievers are always volatile and he could potentially bounce back, all of the above adds up to a pretty big hill for Blewett to climb in order to become a successful reliever. After a few middling big league seasons with a short stop in Taiwan over the course of his career, I think that the book is out on Scott Blewett at this point.
