<img alt="Atlanta Braves v Milwaukee Brewers" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7xRH1oiZy46-NS3mLwlaxYEjgmM=/0x0:3000x2000/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73697545/2164544788.0.jpg">
Photo by John Fisher/Getty Images
At least we’ll always have his performance in Milwaukee? Let’s just ignore what happened when the Brewers got their rematch, shall we? The Atlanta Braves had an elite pitching staff that carried them to the postseason in 2024. The rotation in particular was absolutely off-the-charts good, as Atlanta was able to rely on their starters to carry them to most of their victories. That said, Bryce Elder wasn’t a huge factor in that rotation. Elder went from making the MLB All-Star Game in 2023 to being an International League All-Star — which usually means that you spent way more time getting things done in Triple-A than for the big league club.
How acquired
Elder was drafted with the 25th pick of the fifth round of the 2020 MLB Draft, making him the 156th overall pick. He made his minor league debut in High-A in 2021 and eventually made it to the bigs by April of 2022. He’s been up-and-down since, though he did stick around to make a whopping 31 starts in 2023.
Elder didn’t make the roster out of Spring Training, losing the battle for the fifth starter spot to Reynaldo Lopez in March.
What were the expectations?
Elder shocked Braves Country in 2023 by seizing the fifth spot in Atlanta’s rotation and not only staying there, but thriving in the role as well. Elder finished 2023 with an 86/103/103 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) and ended up making an appearance in the All-Star Game.
However, it was a tale of two seasons for Elder. He was excellent for 15 starts (54/87/84) and then completely fell apart in his next 16 (121/121/122). As those slash lines show, it wasn’t a case of him solely getting lucky early, and that luck running out late — his peripherals were legitimately excellent through late June, and then things turned horrible for him. And then, we all know what happened in NLDS Game 3.
Put that all together, and the expectations for Elder were in line with a guy who would be competing for the fifth spot in a rotation in Spring Training. Sure, he could’ve built on his 2023 season, but given that he went 16-plus starts last year in what was basically a downward spiral, he’d need to start showing an ability to recover his effectiveness to start turning heads again.
2024 results
As it turned out, Bryce Elder did not win the fifth spot in the rotation heading into 2024, as Reynaldo López emerged as a legit starter for the first time since 2019. Elder didn’t have to wait long to get another crack in the big leagues though, as he made his 2024 Atlanta debut on April 22 against the Marlins and pitched 6 2⁄3 shutout innings against Miami. That earned him another start the next week against the Guardians and he made it into the sixth inning while only giving up two runs, despite a horrible 2/4 K/BB ratio. After these two starts resulted in wins for the Braves, it sure seemed like Elder was on track to once again serve as an enigmatic/inconsistent fifth starter.
Right on cue, Elder got absolutely demolished by the Dodgers in Los Angeles on May 4. He bounced back with a solid start against the Mets eight days later but then he got blown up for seven runs (six earned) over three innings at home against the Padres. That was the last start that Elder made for a month, as he had been fully relegated to spot starter status.
He returned on June 26 as the 27th man for a doubleheader against the Cardinals and threw six innings while only giving up two runs in a loss and wouldn’t be seen again at the big league level until getting called up for a start on July 8 against the Diamondbacks, where he gave up three runs in five innings. He ended up getting another start against the Cardinals on July 20 and this one didn’t go nearly as well for him as the first one did (even though the result of a loss was the same), as he gave up six runs over five innings.
Then Elder had a pair of starts on July 30 and August 6 (both against Milwaukee) that pretty much sums up the Bryce Elder Experience for 2024. On July 30, Elder was called up to face the Brewers in Milwaukee and made it into the seventh inning while only giving up one run. This was Elder’s Magnum Opus for 2024 and arguably his best start of the season when you consider what his competition was. Honestly, it was one of the better starts of his career, overall. He earned another start against that same Milwaukee team on August 6 and it went incredibly poorly for Elder. He only made it into the fourth inning and got walloped for seven runs over that span.
That disastrous start was the final time we saw Bryce Elder pitch at the big league level this season, as he was never again able to gain a foothold in the majors in 2024. He finished the season with just 49 2⁄3 IP, a 20.4 percent strikeout rate, a 7.5 percent walk rate, and a 157/114/97 line. Oof.
Elder actually improved on his xFIP- over 2023, but he gave up what felt like a bazillion homers, and the runs came in bunches. Whereas, in 2023, he really split his season into halves, in 2024, he pretty much bounced between two extremes from start to start. He had ten outings, and an xFIP- below 83 in six of them... but it exceeded 140 in the other four. By FIP-, which credits/debits him for homers directly, he had four truly excellent outings with an FIP- of 61 or below, but five horrific ones with an FIP- above 130. And by plain ol’ ERA-, the story was even more ridiculous: five starts with an ERA- of 81 or below, and four with an ERA- of 259 or above. Some guys are fringy major leaguers because they’re barely serviceable every time; Bryce Elder was a fringy major leaguer that finished the season with 0.2 fWAR because he basically spent as much time being really good as he did getting completely obliterated.
What went right?
Over the course of his career so far, Bryce Elder has been very good when it comes to inducing ground balls. He was rated in the 80th percentile in that department in 2022, he finished in the 84th percentile in 2023 and stayed in that neighborhood in 2024 with an 83rd-percentile finish in this past season. He also bumped up his chase rate a bit while also keeping the percentage of chase contact down as well. Also, that first start against Milwaukee was really, really good!
He also had a very good season at the Triple-A level, as he was named to the International League’s end-of-season All-Star team for his performances with the Stripers, so there’s that.
His season debut was also pretty nice — while he was able to cruise in the Milwaukee start because he got a sizable lead early, the game on April 22 against the Marlins was a bit tighter. Sure, it was just the Marlins, but for a guy who had a double-digit walk rate in his final 16 starts of 2023, coming out of the gate and walking none in seven innings was great. Unfortunately, Elder then walked eight guys in his next two starts...
What went wrong?
I’d imagine there’s a world where the Braves didn’t end up accomplishing their offseason goal of upgrading their rotation. In that world, Bryce Elder would’ve stuck around as a fifth starter instead of being relegated to spot starter status. With that being said, we’re in this actual world where Elder was, in fact, a spot starter.
He was given a couple of chances to stick around but ultimately, he just was unable to string together consistently strong performances in order to keep up with guys like Reynaldo López and Spencer Schwellenbach, who locked down the backend spots of the rotation with their consistency. Elder wasn’t exactly horrible, at least not all of the time, but it was very clear that his aggregate level of production was not good enough for the elite level of pitching that Atlanta’s starting rotation displayed in 2024.
Needless to say, you’re not going to get very far as a pitcher when opposing batters have a .382 wOBA against your sinker (with a .371 xwOBA, to boot). Things are also going to look downright bad for you when your slider, which had an aggregate wOBA and xwOBA-against of around .280 last year, shoots up to above .340 (.377 wOBA-against, .344 xwOBA-against). All of that definitely isn’t what you want to see!
A good summation of everything going wrong for Elder was his July 20 start against the Cardinals. The Cardinals both hit two homers off of him and managed a BABIP of .500, including collecting some hits on infield singles that Elder’s defense really needed to convert behind him. As a result, the Braves were pretty much put in an unwinnable hole... and yet Elder posted a 9/1 K/BB ratio in the process. It was his best start of the year by xFIP and he showed some nasty stuff, but got brutalized anyway.
2025 outlook
As of right now, the Braves have four spots in their rotation spoken for. If they somehow end up not adding a starter over the offseason, then Bryce Elder will likely be fighting for the fifth spot in the rotation once again. If he doesn’t get it, then he’ll once again serve as a top-end starter in Triple-A while being one of the main candidates for spot starts if the rotation starts to get thin.
If he does end up being a spot starter, that’s when anything could happen. He could give you six strong innings where he keeps the opposition quiet, or he could get blasted for a bunch of runs and a couple of homers along the way. There’s a reason why a lot of fans aren’t exactly enthused to see him whenever it’s his turn in the rotation or if he’s been called upon to make a spot start. Still, he’ll turn 26 next season and he’s still got a couple of seasons to go before he hits his arbitration years, so there’s that. We’ll likely see him again in the bigs at some point but how he performs is anybody’s guess. His competition did get a little tougher with the Braves adding Griffin Canning in the Jorge Soler trade, but they might just non-tender Canning when the time comes, so it’s not clear whether Elder’s status has changed at all. For the moment, he looks like your generic swingman/spot starter guy; the first part of 2023 looks real far away at this point.
<img alt="Atlanta Braves v Milwaukee Brewers" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7xRH1oiZy46-NS3mLwlaxYEjgmM=/0x0:3000x2000/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73697545/2164544788.0.jpg">
Photo by John Fisher/Getty Images
At least we’ll always have his performance in Milwaukee? Let’s just ignore what happened when the Brewers got their rematch, shall we? The Atlanta Braves had an elite pitching staff that carried them to the postseason in 2024. The rotation in particular was absolutely off-the-charts good, as Atlanta was able to rely on their starters to carry them to most of their victories. That said, Bryce Elder wasn’t a huge factor in that rotation. Elder went from making the MLB All-Star Game in 2023 to being an International League All-Star — which usually means that you spent way more time getting things done in Triple-A than for the big league club.
How acquired
Elder was drafted with the 25th pick of the fifth round of the 2020 MLB Draft, making him the 156th overall pick. He made his minor league debut in High-A in 2021 and eventually made it to the bigs by April of 2022. He’s been up-and-down since, though he did stick around to make a whopping 31 starts in 2023.
Elder didn’t make the roster out of Spring Training, losing the battle for the fifth starter spot to Reynaldo Lopez in March.
What were the expectations?
Elder shocked Braves Country in 2023 by seizing the fifth spot in Atlanta’s rotation and not only staying there, but thriving in the role as well. Elder finished 2023 with an 86/103/103 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) and ended up making an appearance in the All-Star Game.
However, it was a tale of two seasons for Elder. He was excellent for 15 starts (54/87/84) and then completely fell apart in his next 16 (121/121/122). As those slash lines show, it wasn’t a case of him solely getting lucky early, and that luck running out late — his peripherals were legitimately excellent through late June, and then things turned horrible for him. And then, we all know what happened in NLDS Game 3.
Put that all together, and the expectations for Elder were in line with a guy who would be competing for the fifth spot in a rotation in Spring Training. Sure, he could’ve built on his 2023 season, but given that he went 16-plus starts last year in what was basically a downward spiral, he’d need to start showing an ability to recover his effectiveness to start turning heads again.
2024 results
As it turned out, Bryce Elder did not win the fifth spot in the rotation heading into 2024, as Reynaldo López emerged as a legit starter for the first time since 2019. Elder didn’t have to wait long to get another crack in the big leagues though, as he made his 2024 Atlanta debut on April 22 against the Marlins and pitched 6 2⁄3 shutout innings against Miami. That earned him another start the next week against the Guardians and he made it into the sixth inning while only giving up two runs, despite a horrible 2/4 K/BB ratio. After these two starts resulted in wins for the Braves, it sure seemed like Elder was on track to once again serve as an enigmatic/inconsistent fifth starter.
Right on cue, Elder got absolutely demolished by the Dodgers in Los Angeles on May 4. He bounced back with a solid start against the Mets eight days later but then he got blown up for seven runs (six earned) over three innings at home against the Padres. That was the last start that Elder made for a month, as he had been fully relegated to spot starter status.
He returned on June 26 as the 27th man for a doubleheader against the Cardinals and threw six innings while only giving up two runs in a loss and wouldn’t be seen again at the big league level until getting called up for a start on July 8 against the Diamondbacks, where he gave up three runs in five innings. He ended up getting another start against the Cardinals on July 20 and this one didn’t go nearly as well for him as the first one did (even though the result of a loss was the same), as he gave up six runs over five innings.
Then Elder had a pair of starts on July 30 and August 6 (both against Milwaukee) that pretty much sums up the Bryce Elder Experience for 2024. On July 30, Elder was called up to face the Brewers in Milwaukee and made it into the seventh inning while only giving up one run. This was Elder’s Magnum Opus for 2024 and arguably his best start of the season when you consider what his competition was. Honestly, it was one of the better starts of his career, overall. He earned another start against that same Milwaukee team on August 6 and it went incredibly poorly for Elder. He only made it into the fourth inning and got walloped for seven runs over that span.
That disastrous start was the final time we saw Bryce Elder pitch at the big league level this season, as he was never again able to gain a foothold in the majors in 2024. He finished the season with just 49 2⁄3 IP, a 20.4 percent strikeout rate, a 7.5 percent walk rate, and a 157/114/97 line. Oof.
Elder actually improved on his xFIP- over 2023, but he gave up what felt like a bazillion homers, and the runs came in bunches. Whereas, in 2023, he really split his season into halves, in 2024, he pretty much bounced between two extremes from start to start. He had ten outings, and an xFIP- below 83 in six of them... but it exceeded 140 in the other four. By FIP-, which credits/debits him for homers directly, he had four truly excellent outings with an FIP- of 61 or below, but five horrific ones with an FIP- above 130. And by plain ol’ ERA-, the story was even more ridiculous: five starts with an ERA- of 81 or below, and four with an ERA- of 259 or above. Some guys are fringy major leaguers because they’re barely serviceable every time; Bryce Elder was a fringy major leaguer that finished the season with 0.2 fWAR because he basically spent as much time being really good as he did getting completely obliterated.
What went right?
Over the course of his career so far, Bryce Elder has been very good when it comes to inducing ground balls. He was rated in the 80th percentile in that department in 2022, he finished in the 84th percentile in 2023 and stayed in that neighborhood in 2024 with an 83rd-percentile finish in this past season. He also bumped up his chase rate a bit while also keeping the percentage of chase contact down as well. Also, that first start against Milwaukee was really, really good!
He also had a very good season at the Triple-A level, as he was named to the International League’s end-of-season All-Star team for his performances with the Stripers, so there’s that.
His season debut was also pretty nice — while he was able to cruise in the Milwaukee start because he got a sizable lead early, the game on April 22 against the Marlins was a bit tighter. Sure, it was just the Marlins, but for a guy who had a double-digit walk rate in his final 16 starts of 2023, coming out of the gate and walking none in seven innings was great. Unfortunately, Elder then walked eight guys in his next two starts...
What went wrong?
I’d imagine there’s a world where the Braves didn’t end up accomplishing their offseason goal of upgrading their rotation. In that world, Bryce Elder would’ve stuck around as a fifth starter instead of being relegated to spot starter status. With that being said, we’re in this actual world where Elder was, in fact, a spot starter.
He was given a couple of chances to stick around but ultimately, he just was unable to string together consistently strong performances in order to keep up with guys like Reynaldo López and Spencer Schwellenbach, who locked down the backend spots of the rotation with their consistency. Elder wasn’t exactly horrible, at least not all of the time, but it was very clear that his aggregate level of production was not good enough for the elite level of pitching that Atlanta’s starting rotation displayed in 2024.
Needless to say, you’re not going to get very far as a pitcher when opposing batters have a .382 wOBA against your sinker (with a .371 xwOBA, to boot). Things are also going to look downright bad for you when your slider, which had an aggregate wOBA and xwOBA-against of around .280 last year, shoots up to above .340 (.377 wOBA-against, .344 xwOBA-against). All of that definitely isn’t what you want to see!
A good summation of everything going wrong for Elder was his July 20 start against the Cardinals. The Cardinals both hit two homers off of him and managed a BABIP of .500, including collecting some hits on infield singles that Elder’s defense really needed to convert behind him. As a result, the Braves were pretty much put in an unwinnable hole... and yet Elder posted a 9/1 K/BB ratio in the process. It was his best start of the year by xFIP and he showed some nasty stuff, but got brutalized anyway.
2025 outlook
As of right now, the Braves have four spots in their rotation spoken for. If they somehow end up not adding a starter over the offseason, then Bryce Elder will likely be fighting for the fifth spot in the rotation once again. If he doesn’t get it, then he’ll once again serve as a top-end starter in Triple-A while being one of the main candidates for spot starts if the rotation starts to get thin.
If he does end up being a spot starter, that’s when anything could happen. He could give you six strong innings where he keeps the opposition quiet, or he could get blasted for a bunch of runs and a couple of homers along the way. There’s a reason why a lot of fans aren’t exactly enthused to see him whenever it’s his turn in the rotation or if he’s been called upon to make a spot start. Still, he’ll turn 26 next season and he’s still got a couple of seasons to go before he hits his arbitration years, so there’s that. We’ll likely see him again in the bigs at some point but how he performs is anybody’s guess. His competition did get a little tougher with the Braves adding Griffin Canning in the Jorge Soler trade, but they might just non-tender Canning when the time comes, so it’s not clear whether Elder’s status has changed at all. For the moment, he looks like your generic swingman/spot starter guy; the first part of 2023 looks real far away at this point.
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