There wasn’t a lot to watch in the tail end of the 2025 season for the Braves, but one thing that turned out to be a fun surprise was the emergence of Hurston Waldrep. The 2023 first-rounder turned in a pretty nice set of starts down the stretch, suggesting he would be a prime candidate for a rotation shot in 2026… except that injuries pretty much tanked the entirety of what ended up being a very short-lived campaign.
How Acquired
The Braves took Waldrep with the 24th overall pick in the 2023 draft. He pitched
in four different minor league levels after the draft, and made his MLB debut with a couple of cups of coffee in 2024.
What were the expectations?
Waldrep had few issues in Double-A in 2024, but didn’t exactly solve Triple-A, and was completely overmatched in a couple of June starts at the MLB level that year (3/8 K/BB ratio in a combined seven innings, yeesh). He spent the first part of 2025 pitching exclusively at Triple-A, and honestly, it wasn’t great, with ERA and estimators all in the mid-4.00s.
But, he came up as a fresh arm in that whole Bristol Motor Speedway disaster affair and pitched okay, and then really took off after being inserted into the rotation for a dead-in-the-water team. Basically, pitching as a steady rotation arm for the last two months of 2025, Waldrep had seven good-to-great outings and three pretty rough ones. Even though he sort of looked like he ran out of gas after a month of starting, he bounced back with two really nice outings to end his season. All told, Waldrep put up a 68/79/89 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) in 56 1/3 innings (1.2 fWAR) — not a large sample, but one certainly warranting a longer look.
On the back of that, and his minor league track records, projection systems had him as a below-average-to-average starter on a rate basis — albeit one that wasn’t going to pitch very much or go deep into games. That certainly seemed like it would be useful for a perpetually-injured Braves rotation with some pretty frayed depth at the back end.
2026 Results
Where injuries gave Waldrep an opportunity to thrive in 2025, they pretty much did him in the following year. He was first reported as experiencing elbow discomfort in mid-February, and then underwent surgery to remove loose bodies from said elbow a few days later. He began a rehab assignment in June, and started taking regular turns at Triple-A afterwards. After two of those, the Braves called up him for three appearances (two starts), then sent him back down. He made one minor league start, which he left due to feeling arm discomfort. After a shutdown of a few weeks, he resumed throwing, and then bam, Tommy John Surgery.
After a combined 148 innings across the minors and majors in 2024, Waldrep completed just 29 innings total in 2026.
I guess it’s worth noting that Waldrep looked nothing like the surprisingly effective guy from 2025 in the scant MLB exposure he got in 2026. Two of his three outings were really bad by ERA, xERA, and xFIP; all three were bad by FIP. He somehow managed an insane, two innings, two hits, four walks, three strikeouts, no runs line in his season debut against the Giants, then had an okay 4/1 K/BB ratio, homer allowed in 5 1/3 innings start against the Cardinals, and then got blown up by the Pirates (2/5 K/BB ratio, two homers), and that was pretty much it. The -0.3 fWAR in 10 2/3 innings leading to Tommy John Surgery was the perfect way to completely ruin any hype or goodwill from his strong turn in August and September 2025. Oh well.
What went right?
Basically nothing. The team’s win expectancy decreased while he was pitching in all three outings. I guess the fact that his start against the Cardinals was okay is perhaps small consolation… or maybe the fact that the Braves won his season debut (they were blown out in his two starts).
Performance-wise, there really isn’t anything to mention. He tried to do his junkball thing again, but it didn’t really work. Maybe some of that was because he threw a ton of sinkers instead of a ton of his freaky splitters, but the sample is so small it’s hard to really focus on that. His command was understandably all over the place, and while that can work with his great-shape splitter as a secondary, it’s mostly just a recipe for disaster when you throw a bunch of sinkers whose destinations have little rhyme or reason.
What went wrong?
Tommy John Surgery is brutal. Tommy John Surgery as the capstone to arm woes that basically interrupted a whole season is even worse. Yeah, the pitching was bad, but now the Braves will get a few outings of bad pitching and a lack of Waldrep availability until 2028.
I guess it’s worth highlighting, briefly, just how awful his start against the Pirates was. Facing Paul Skenes, the Braves handed Waldrep a 1-0 lead… only for a grand slam to turn that around. (Two of the runners on base came as a result of a plunking and walk.) After a quick second, there was another walk, then an infield single, and then Ryan O’Hearn, the same guy who hit the slam, got Waldrep for a three-run homer. Not that a 1/2 K/BB ratio with two homers by O’Hearn was a good line, but Waldrep walked two of the three batters he faced in the fourth before being removed. It wasn’t the worst start of the year for a Braves pitcher, but it was pretty close — third-worst by each of ERA, FIP, and xFIP, in the bottom ten by xERA, and second-worst by WPA. Sigh.
2027 Outlook
Waldrep will spend 2027 rehabbing from Tommy John Surgery. While some Braves have made it back very quickly (see: AJ Smith-Shawver), even that timeline puts Waldrep on “ramping up for Spring Training 2028” rather than anything else, given how long it took for his elbow issues to condemn him to going under the knife. (Seriously, we went from elbow discomfort in February to Tommy John Surgery in August, with barely any actual “official” pitching in the middle.)
There’s no way to know what Waldrep will look like when he returns, either — maybe he bounces back, or maybe he’s another intriguing arm whose career prospects are upended by the taxation that throwing a baseball places on a human arm.
