<img alt="Toronto Blue Jays v Atlanta Braves" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5WlN7Z5UyLxz0vMr-n8e1lLQ7Rs=/0x0:6110x4073/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73766437/2170230168.0.jpg">
Photo by Kevin D. Liles./Atlanta Braves/Getty Images
The once-intriguing offseason addition didn’t change his outlook much in 2024 Jarred Kelenic was one of the more intriguing offseason stories for the Braves. With an impressive pedigree but a lack of results at the major league level, Atlanta took on a bunch of salary to get a very team-controlled Kelenic, despite his lack of success. Did it work? Well, there are plenty of future years for Kelenic to do something, but he utterly failed to do so in 2024 and put his future into further question.
How acquired
The early December trade that got Kelenic had a lot of moving parts. Lottery ticket pitching prospect Cole Phillips and fringy bullpen arm Jackson Kowar went over to Seattle, but the real meat of the deal in addition to Kelenic had the Braves acquiring Marco Gonzales, Evan White, and their respective salaries. At the time of the trade, Gonzales was owed $12.5 million for 2024, while White was owed $7 million in 2024, $8 million in 2025, and a $2 million buyout for 2026. The Braves did get Seattle to cover some of White’s salary, and shed a few million of Gonzales’ salary when they sent him to Pittsburgh (while still paying most of it), so basically they took on upwards of $20 million in salary obligations (not all in one year, though) for the privilege of having Kelenic and his five years of control.
As a sidenote, both Kowar and Phillips went down with Tommy John Surgery in the Spring, while Gonzales missed much of the season with various injuries and then had flexor tendon surgery in September, which will knock him out for much of 2025. Basically, as far as this trade goes, whatever Kelenic provided was actually less cursed than what befell most of the guys involved.
What were the expectations?
Boy, this is a complicated question. The sixth overall pick in the 2018 MLB Draft, Kelenic was moved from the Mets to the Mariners in a high-profile trade after his draft year, and made his MLB debut in 2021. His seasons to date were all kind of odd:
In 2021, he had a half-season with a horribly epic xwOBA underperformance that gave him a -0.5 fWAR season;
In 2022, he was horrendous at the plate both in terms of xwOBA and wOBA, but once again underperformed his xwOBA by quite a bit. His defense was excellent, though, resulting in -0.1 fWAR across 181 PAs.
In 2023, he got about 400 PAs, put up a 109 wRC+ (still underhitting his xwOBA), and was basically a league-average corner outfielder guy in general, with 1.5 fWAR and 2.2 fWAR/600.
Put that together, and you get... who knows? Was Kelenic a guy that was going to build on his 2023 and make good on his pedigree? Or, were there flashes of his problems in 2022 that should’ve been factored in to any expectation? The projection systems definitely went with the latter, giving Kelenic pretty brutal point estimates of under 1 WAR (and under 1 WAR/600).
And, still, you could find reasons to dream, if you wanted to. After all, Kelenic was more fine than bad in 2023, and he was coming aboard a historically good offensive club that had helped more than a few hitters find a new gear. He was moving from maybe the worst hitting environment in the majors to a park that helps lefty pull power. He hit a ton of grounders in 2023, something that’s definitely within a hitter’s purview to change.
The situation only got more complicated, though. Initially announced as the full-time starter, perhaps because his inputs and outputs against lefties were both fine in 2023, he fell into a platoon role given the Braves pouncing on bringing Duvall back into the fold. That changed the outlook for his role, and was sort of an anti-vote of confidence in the early going.
2024 Results
Let’s get the top-level stuff out of the way: the season sucked for Kelenic, and this almost certainly wasn’t what the Braves thought they were trading for. He finished with 0.5 fWAR in 449 PAs, which was almost exactly the preseason point estimate from both Steamer and ZiPS. Chalk one up for the projection systems, I guess, but not for, you know, Kelenic and the Braves.
Did he underperform his xwOBA again? Yes, .309 versus .294, giving him an 86 wRC+ that should’ve been closer to 100 had he not underperformed his inputs like most of his teammates. Did he play good defense? Well, not really — though he filled in for a while in center field, which was nice. Did he actually lose his starting spot altogether, to Ramon Laureano, of all people? Yep. He made just eight starts in September and didn’t appear in either of the Braves’ playoff games.
What went right?
Kelenic’s season was really weird in some ways (more on this below), but things clicked for him in June. After a really bad April and May, with a sub-.300 xwOBA in both months, he absolutely exploded in June with a .384 xwOBA and outputs to match (147 wRC+, and a 160 wRC+ from May 30 through June 29).
How did he get there for a whole month? It’s a complicated story, but the basic idea is that he spent the first two months sitting on fastballs, not doing much with them, and getting absolutely carved up by everything else. Come June, he made a fairly obvious adjustment and started sitting on non-fastballs, which let him clobber the breaking pitches in the zone and avoid chasing fastballs, bumping up his walk rate. The chart below doesn’t look dramatic, but it actually is: his xwOBA on breaking pitches went to .373 (from sub-.270) and his xwOBA on offspeed pitches went to .273 (from .239 in April and a hilarious .055 in May).
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/n-midFrIWAQpa5R_08ttXreoKZ4=/400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25772467/Screenshot_2024_12_03_212809.png">
The swing rate chart gives you the rest of the story:
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/u40Yw5TOLEEPx3KS7Cwmh_yFXSg=/400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25772472/Screenshot_2024_12_03_213211.png">
Beyond that, what else can you really say? Kelenic’s arm was enough of a highlight reel here and there that he was even getting some consideration as a potential Gold Glover in left field.
Kelenic’s arm in display keeping Atlanta up 1-0! #BravesCountry pic.twitter.com/83wL0XONUq— Ozuna’s Keys (@OzunasKeys) May 4, 2024
And, it’s not like Kelenic never had a feel-good moment. Here’s him doing what he did in June, sitting on a non-fastball and cranking it, this time for a go-ahead dinger:
And before the season basically melted down into an interminable quagmire, good things like this happened to Kelenic and the Braves:
What went wrong?
So many things, but for the main ones, you can just scroll up to the charts above. Look, if you’re Jarred Kelenic and you struggled in April and May, and then things click for you in June and you start sitting on non-fastballs and destroying them, and that helps you figure out how to tackle fastballs a bit better, why would you stop?
You might jump in here and say, “Well, pitchers probably adjusted to his new approach in June.” And they did, but not in a way that makes his reaction make sense. They swapped offspeed stuff for breaking stuff, but didn’t simply hammer him with more fastballs now that he wasn’t sitting on them. At least as far as July goes, they actually threw him more non-fastballs in the zone than before, which should’ve played into his hands. But for whatever reason, Kelenic abandoned what was working and ended up stuck in between — he didn’t fully revert to hunting fastballs, but he also gave up on hunting breaking pitches, even though he was crushing them in June. It was like he adjusted to something that pitchers weren’t even doing yet, and he went into a tailspin. By the time he righted the ship, it was September and he had lost his starting role — perhaps ironically, he nearly replicated his June xwOBA in September, but it came in a pittance of PAs.
Most things that dragged him down over the course of the season kind of follow on from whatever happened after June. He started swinging less hard in July and August (but in September he was taking these crazy long, massive swings basically every time). His barrel rates and exit velocities weren’t particularly impressive, and certainly not really improved from 2023. His walk rate was super-erratic and ended up at a career low. Kelenic’s 2024 at the dish was confusing, and maybe the simplest explanation is just that he was confused. And then he got benched.
Confusing is also a good word for his defense. Despite playing a bunch of center reasonably well, despite average “jump” metrics, and despite his strong arm, he finished with -2 OAA-based runs. The big drag on him defensively? Near-routine, one-star catches — the sort made 91-95 percent of the time, where Kelenic flubbed five of his 28 chances. Stuff like this and this just happened too much for a guy with his physical talents.
Oh, and then of course he underhit his xwOBA, too.
We won’t dwell too long on maybe the dumbest moment of the Braves’ season, when Kelenic squared around to squeeze and got Laureano thrown out at third, because life is too short. Instead, we can talk about other times Kelenic had a horrible game, like on April 17, when he went 0-for-4 in a one-run win, with three of his outs coming with the go-ahead run on base, and this strikeout, which came in a PA where Kelenic saw three pitches in the zone and swung at one, while swinging at two out of the zone:
And, early in the year, there was a lot of stuff like this, where Kelenic connected with a pitch he clearly wasn’t swinging at, with big-time consequences:
2025 Outlook
Is Kelenic still a starting outfielder for this club, given the fact that Ronald Acuña Jr. is unlikely to be available for Opening Day and Michael Harris II is the only guy actually penciled in to a starting role in the outfield? Probably? Ramon Laureano got non-tendered, after all, but Kelenic is still here.
Is he going to get some more run as a starter? That depends on what the Braves do, but given that there are two outfield spots open for the beginning of the year, it’s very possible. Even if the Braves get a starting-caliber outfielder like Anthony Santander or Teoscar Hernandez (or, uh... Juan Soto?), there’s still a place for Kelenic to play. If they get a platoon bat instead, then Kelenic becomes much more of a de facto full-season starter... provided he doesn’t lose his job to his platoon-mate again.
Role aside, Kelenic has the pedigree, but is now 25 and in his third organization, failing to really make the needed improvements in both Seattle and Atlanta. As shown above, his season was already a case study in bizarre decision-making, and maybe there’ll be some improvement with new voices in the dugout on the hitting coach side, but really, who knows? Maybe a full offseason with the same organization will do him some good, plus the Braves now have a full season’s worth of firsthand data on his foibles and issues.
Kelenic actually projects better, on a point estimate basis, for 2025 than he did for 2024, which is interesting, given how bad his 2024 was. Given a point estimate of an average bat, he could be an okay option in left field assuming the rest of the team isn’t laden with injuries again, but it’s doubtful that the Braves wanted an average bat and below-average production overall when they blew all that cash on acquiring him to begin with.
<img alt="Toronto Blue Jays v Atlanta Braves" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5WlN7Z5UyLxz0vMr-n8e1lLQ7Rs=/0x0:6110x4073/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73766437/2170230168.0.jpg">
Photo by Kevin D. Liles./Atlanta Braves/Getty Images
The once-intriguing offseason addition didn’t change his outlook much in 2024 Jarred Kelenic was one of the more intriguing offseason stories for the Braves. With an impressive pedigree but a lack of results at the major league level, Atlanta took on a bunch of salary to get a very team-controlled Kelenic, despite his lack of success. Did it work? Well, there are plenty of future years for Kelenic to do something, but he utterly failed to do so in 2024 and put his future into further question.
How acquired
The early December trade that got Kelenic had a lot of moving parts. Lottery ticket pitching prospect Cole Phillips and fringy bullpen arm Jackson Kowar went over to Seattle, but the real meat of the deal in addition to Kelenic had the Braves acquiring Marco Gonzales, Evan White, and their respective salaries. At the time of the trade, Gonzales was owed $12.5 million for 2024, while White was owed $7 million in 2024, $8 million in 2025, and a $2 million buyout for 2026. The Braves did get Seattle to cover some of White’s salary, and shed a few million of Gonzales’ salary when they sent him to Pittsburgh (while still paying most of it), so basically they took on upwards of $20 million in salary obligations (not all in one year, though) for the privilege of having Kelenic and his five years of control.
As a sidenote, both Kowar and Phillips went down with Tommy John Surgery in the Spring, while Gonzales missed much of the season with various injuries and then had flexor tendon surgery in September, which will knock him out for much of 2025. Basically, as far as this trade goes, whatever Kelenic provided was actually less cursed than what befell most of the guys involved.
What were the expectations?
Boy, this is a complicated question. The sixth overall pick in the 2018 MLB Draft, Kelenic was moved from the Mets to the Mariners in a high-profile trade after his draft year, and made his MLB debut in 2021. His seasons to date were all kind of odd:
In 2021, he had a half-season with a horribly epic xwOBA underperformance that gave him a -0.5 fWAR season;
In 2022, he was horrendous at the plate both in terms of xwOBA and wOBA, but once again underperformed his xwOBA by quite a bit. His defense was excellent, though, resulting in -0.1 fWAR across 181 PAs.
In 2023, he got about 400 PAs, put up a 109 wRC+ (still underhitting his xwOBA), and was basically a league-average corner outfielder guy in general, with 1.5 fWAR and 2.2 fWAR/600.
Put that together, and you get... who knows? Was Kelenic a guy that was going to build on his 2023 and make good on his pedigree? Or, were there flashes of his problems in 2022 that should’ve been factored in to any expectation? The projection systems definitely went with the latter, giving Kelenic pretty brutal point estimates of under 1 WAR (and under 1 WAR/600).
And, still, you could find reasons to dream, if you wanted to. After all, Kelenic was more fine than bad in 2023, and he was coming aboard a historically good offensive club that had helped more than a few hitters find a new gear. He was moving from maybe the worst hitting environment in the majors to a park that helps lefty pull power. He hit a ton of grounders in 2023, something that’s definitely within a hitter’s purview to change.
The situation only got more complicated, though. Initially announced as the full-time starter, perhaps because his inputs and outputs against lefties were both fine in 2023, he fell into a platoon role given the Braves pouncing on bringing Duvall back into the fold. That changed the outlook for his role, and was sort of an anti-vote of confidence in the early going.
2024 Results
Let’s get the top-level stuff out of the way: the season sucked for Kelenic, and this almost certainly wasn’t what the Braves thought they were trading for. He finished with 0.5 fWAR in 449 PAs, which was almost exactly the preseason point estimate from both Steamer and ZiPS. Chalk one up for the projection systems, I guess, but not for, you know, Kelenic and the Braves.
Did he underperform his xwOBA again? Yes, .309 versus .294, giving him an 86 wRC+ that should’ve been closer to 100 had he not underperformed his inputs like most of his teammates. Did he play good defense? Well, not really — though he filled in for a while in center field, which was nice. Did he actually lose his starting spot altogether, to Ramon Laureano, of all people? Yep. He made just eight starts in September and didn’t appear in either of the Braves’ playoff games.
What went right?
Kelenic’s season was really weird in some ways (more on this below), but things clicked for him in June. After a really bad April and May, with a sub-.300 xwOBA in both months, he absolutely exploded in June with a .384 xwOBA and outputs to match (147 wRC+, and a 160 wRC+ from May 30 through June 29).
How did he get there for a whole month? It’s a complicated story, but the basic idea is that he spent the first two months sitting on fastballs, not doing much with them, and getting absolutely carved up by everything else. Come June, he made a fairly obvious adjustment and started sitting on non-fastballs, which let him clobber the breaking pitches in the zone and avoid chasing fastballs, bumping up his walk rate. The chart below doesn’t look dramatic, but it actually is: his xwOBA on breaking pitches went to .373 (from sub-.270) and his xwOBA on offspeed pitches went to .273 (from .239 in April and a hilarious .055 in May).
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/n-midFrIWAQpa5R_08ttXreoKZ4=/400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25772467/Screenshot_2024_12_03_212809.png">
The swing rate chart gives you the rest of the story:
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/u40Yw5TOLEEPx3KS7Cwmh_yFXSg=/400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25772472/Screenshot_2024_12_03_213211.png">
Beyond that, what else can you really say? Kelenic’s arm was enough of a highlight reel here and there that he was even getting some consideration as a potential Gold Glover in left field.
Kelenic’s arm in display keeping Atlanta up 1-0! #BravesCountry pic.twitter.com/83wL0XONUq— Ozuna’s Keys (@OzunasKeys) May 4, 2024
And, it’s not like Kelenic never had a feel-good moment. Here’s him doing what he did in June, sitting on a non-fastball and cranking it, this time for a go-ahead dinger:
And before the season basically melted down into an interminable quagmire, good things like this happened to Kelenic and the Braves:
What went wrong?
So many things, but for the main ones, you can just scroll up to the charts above. Look, if you’re Jarred Kelenic and you struggled in April and May, and then things click for you in June and you start sitting on non-fastballs and destroying them, and that helps you figure out how to tackle fastballs a bit better, why would you stop?
You might jump in here and say, “Well, pitchers probably adjusted to his new approach in June.” And they did, but not in a way that makes his reaction make sense. They swapped offspeed stuff for breaking stuff, but didn’t simply hammer him with more fastballs now that he wasn’t sitting on them. At least as far as July goes, they actually threw him more non-fastballs in the zone than before, which should’ve played into his hands. But for whatever reason, Kelenic abandoned what was working and ended up stuck in between — he didn’t fully revert to hunting fastballs, but he also gave up on hunting breaking pitches, even though he was crushing them in June. It was like he adjusted to something that pitchers weren’t even doing yet, and he went into a tailspin. By the time he righted the ship, it was September and he had lost his starting role — perhaps ironically, he nearly replicated his June xwOBA in September, but it came in a pittance of PAs.
Most things that dragged him down over the course of the season kind of follow on from whatever happened after June. He started swinging less hard in July and August (but in September he was taking these crazy long, massive swings basically every time). His barrel rates and exit velocities weren’t particularly impressive, and certainly not really improved from 2023. His walk rate was super-erratic and ended up at a career low. Kelenic’s 2024 at the dish was confusing, and maybe the simplest explanation is just that he was confused. And then he got benched.
Confusing is also a good word for his defense. Despite playing a bunch of center reasonably well, despite average “jump” metrics, and despite his strong arm, he finished with -2 OAA-based runs. The big drag on him defensively? Near-routine, one-star catches — the sort made 91-95 percent of the time, where Kelenic flubbed five of his 28 chances. Stuff like this and this just happened too much for a guy with his physical talents.
Oh, and then of course he underhit his xwOBA, too.
We won’t dwell too long on maybe the dumbest moment of the Braves’ season, when Kelenic squared around to squeeze and got Laureano thrown out at third, because life is too short. Instead, we can talk about other times Kelenic had a horrible game, like on April 17, when he went 0-for-4 in a one-run win, with three of his outs coming with the go-ahead run on base, and this strikeout, which came in a PA where Kelenic saw three pitches in the zone and swung at one, while swinging at two out of the zone:
And, early in the year, there was a lot of stuff like this, where Kelenic connected with a pitch he clearly wasn’t swinging at, with big-time consequences:
2025 Outlook
Is Kelenic still a starting outfielder for this club, given the fact that Ronald Acuña Jr. is unlikely to be available for Opening Day and Michael Harris II is the only guy actually penciled in to a starting role in the outfield? Probably? Ramon Laureano got non-tendered, after all, but Kelenic is still here.
Is he going to get some more run as a starter? That depends on what the Braves do, but given that there are two outfield spots open for the beginning of the year, it’s very possible. Even if the Braves get a starting-caliber outfielder like Anthony Santander or Teoscar Hernandez (or, uh... Juan Soto?), there’s still a place for Kelenic to play. If they get a platoon bat instead, then Kelenic becomes much more of a de facto full-season starter... provided he doesn’t lose his job to his platoon-mate again.
Role aside, Kelenic has the pedigree, but is now 25 and in his third organization, failing to really make the needed improvements in both Seattle and Atlanta. As shown above, his season was already a case study in bizarre decision-making, and maybe there’ll be some improvement with new voices in the dugout on the hitting coach side, but really, who knows? Maybe a full offseason with the same organization will do him some good, plus the Braves now have a full season’s worth of firsthand data on his foibles and issues.
Kelenic actually projects better, on a point estimate basis, for 2025 than he did for 2024, which is interesting, given how bad his 2024 was. Given a point estimate of an average bat, he could be an okay option in left field assuming the rest of the team isn’t laden with injuries again, but it’s doubtful that the Braves wanted an average bat and below-average production overall when they blew all that cash on acquiring him to begin with.
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