<img alt="Kansas City Royals v Atlanta Braves" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/K1ag6QoHlxPmPAcqJ73NzkVQ4a4=/0x0:8245x5497/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73786606/2174585626.0.jpg">
Photo by Matthew Grimes Jr./Atlanta Braves/Getty Images
In the end, we didn’t know that d’Arnaud’s 15th homer of the 2024 season would end up being not just his final one of the year, but also his final one as a member of the Atlanta Braves, at least for the time being. Following a 2023 season that fell below the standards that Travis d’Arnaud had set for himself during his time with the Atlanta Braves (although not really due to his own shortcomings), it was widely assumed that the man affectionately referred to as “TdA” or “Little D” would find a way to bounce back in the 2024 season. As it turned out, he was able to accomplish that goal — and it also turned out that this would end up being his final go-around with the Braves, at least for the time being, despite most expectations.
How acquired
Back in the 2019-2020 offseason, the Braves signed d’Arnaud to a two-year deal worth $16 million. He rewarded them during the COVID-shortened 2020 season by finishing with a 144 wRC+ over 44 games — basically, he straight-up raked. d’Arnaud eventually signed a two-year contract extension in the middle of the 2021 season, and once again immediately rewarded Atlanta’s faith in him by putting up a career year in 2022 before dropping off a bit in the 2023 season as the pseudo-backup catcher behind Sean Murphy.
What were the expectations?
Just like in 2023, the expectations were that Travis d’Arnaud would serve as a reliable pseudo-backup behind Sean Murphy. We say pseudo-backup because, despite Murphy being the higher-priced, higher-caliber, primary catcher guy that the Braves acquired, d’Arnaud got a bit more playing time towards the end of the 2023 season and the Postseason as well. If you looked at the projection models, then they weren’t expecting anything spectacular from d’Arnaud entering his age-35 season. If you’re a believer of the theory that the even year voodoo that resulted in the Giants winning three of the first five titles of the 2010s in each even-numbered year ended up getting transferred from the Giants to d’Arnaud’s bat, then you were expecting a better season from d’Arnaud in 2024.
More concretely, d’Arnaud’s tenure in Atlanta had been weirdly inconsistent. In 2020, as already mentioned, he went berserk with the bat, posting a near-.400 xwOBA in 184 PAs. d’Arnaud was mostly a league-average bat before then, so it was a big offensive breakout with a new team in a shortened season. The Braves substantially overhauled his approach, building off something d’Arnaud had already started to implement in 2019, essentially telling him to rip at the ball as hard as possible, everything else be damned. It worked out great.
In 2021, though, for whatever reason (perhaps injury issues), d’Arnaud abandoned that approach, and went back to essentially a league-average xwOBA, marred by massive underperformance. His luck bounced the other way in 2022 as he worked to regain his 2020 magic without much success — another league-average xwOBA year, but this time a huge overperformance that gave him a career-best 3.9 fWAR. Then, the pendulum swung the other way yet again: d’Arnaud once again went into grip-it-and-rip-it-mode along with his teammates, posted an above-average xwOBA... but was saddled with another gigantic xwOBA underperformance and tallied just 0.7 fWAR over 292 PAs.
So, coming into the season, it probably stood to reason that d’Arnaud would be solid, but it was hard to know exactly what the baseball gods had in store for him. He’d provided a-bit-above-average catcher defense in two of the last three seasons and had a elite defensive year in 2022; his xwOBAs and wOBAs balanced out to basically average. Put those things together and it made sense to expect him to put up about 2 WAR in a half-season’s worth of playing time — a pretty gaudy rate when you think about it, especially for a pseudo-backup catcher.
2024 results
Wouldn’t you know it, about 2 WAR in about half a season’s worth of playing time is pretty much what d’Arnaud did in 2024. He got a lot of playing time early on, as Sean Murphy suffered an oblique injury that essentially cost him the first two months of his season. April ended up being a great month at the plate for TdA, as he hit .282/.358/.592 with a .399 wOBA and a 157 wRC+. This included a two-game stretch against the Rangers where he hit three homers in one game before following that up with another homer the very next day. Those were four of the five homers that he hit in April as he stormed out of the gates in order to fill the hole at catcher that Sean Murphy had left due to injury.
That was as good as it got for d’Arnaud at the plate, though, as he ended up hitting .225/.285/.390 the rest of the way, with a wOBA of .294 and a wRC+ of 86 — meaning that he finished the season hitting .238/.302/.436 with a .319 wOBA, a .323 xwOBA, 103 wRC+ and 15 home runs for the year. This wasn’t a bad season at the plate by any means and it was certainly better than how he performed in 2023 outputs-wise, though we’re really talking pretty much the same xwOBA in both years. Basically, it was a non-weird year for d’Arnaud that was actually weird because his inputs and outputs actually aligned for the first time since 2020.
When it came to his duties behind the plate, it was one of the weirder seasons when it came to his catching profile. His pitch framing was nowhere near as good as it was over the past two seasons. He finished in the 63rd percentile in both Blocks Above Average (+3) and Caught Stealing Above Average (+1). However, he was only in the 47th percentile when it came to Framing — He was +4 and in the 74th percentile in 2023 and he was a whopping +10 and in the 97th percentile in 2022. So while d’Arnaud made some progress in some facets of his game, he declined in a spot where he’s usually been good-to-great since arriving in Atlanta. Still, he posted his best throwing mark since 2019, and in the end, it was another slightly-above-average-at-catcher defensive season.
All in all, d’Arnaud finished with 1.8 fWAR in 341 PAs, a 3.2 fWAR-per-600 PAs pace that was only slightly lower than the pace he had played at across the past three seasons. It was no 2020, but that’s not really a slight on d’Arnaud or his season.
What went right?
Here’s a look at that three-homer game back in April. Again, he hit five homers during the first full month of the season and while he would only hit ten more the rest of the way, it’s very difficult to be upset with a three-homer game in any context — especially when one of those dingers was a go-ahead grand slam.
As a matter of fact, whenever Travis d’Arnaud hit homers, they seemed to come in binges as well. Back in July, he had a pair of two-homer games — on the road, no less. The first one took place in San Diego right before the All-Star break and then he took his homer tour to Milwaukee a couple of weeks later.
d’Arnaud has had a flair for the dramatic and things didn’t change in 2024, either. He had a pair of walk-off hits last season and perhaps his biggest hit of the year was a massive one. His final homer of the season helped give the Braves a crucial victory in a must-win situation for Atlanta during the final weekend of the regular season.
From a process perspective, d’Arnaud had an interesting swing-and-miss filled year that didn’t really affect him that much in aggregate. He missed a lot of pitches in the zone by design, as he seemed to be guessing not-fastball quite often, and punishing them when he guessed right. In fact, only five of his 15 homers came on four-seamers, and only seven came on fastballs in general; he was befuddled by the straight stuff (and especially sinkers) but held his own against sliders and crushed a bunch of changeups, curves, cutters, and the like.
What went wrong?
As you can see above, whenever Travis d’Arnaud put the ball to the bat, good things happened. The main issue is that d’Arnaud did a metric ton of whiffing during 2024. He finished with a career high whiff rate of 32.8 percent, which was much higher than anything he’d put up in a non-shortened season. Further, as I mentioned earlier, his pitch framing was nowhere near the level it had been at for the past couple of seasons.
Also, remember when we talked about that great first full month of the season? Well, things certainly fell off of a cliff for TdA at the plate immediately following April, as Travis d’Arnaud proceeded to hit .196/.248/.326 for .251 wOBA and 57 wRC+ over his next 101 plate appearances. He even suffered a tough blow to the head in the middle of that stretch — he wasn’t out for long but that’s still pretty tough to deal with at any given point in a season, much less when you’re scuffling at the plate.
Overall, it was kind of a crazy season for d’Arnaud — he raked in April with a near-.400 wOBA and xwOBA, and had an insane July with a .456 wOBA and .418 xwOBA, but scuffled in the other four months. By September, he looked really worn out, with his lowest average exit velocity in a single calendar month since July 2022, and his highest whiff rate in a single month ever; the latter isn’t a problem in isolation, but when he was missing and making weak contact, it was a bad state of affairs.
This was maybe the low point of d’Arnaud’s season, and you can more or less see what we mean — guys shouldn’t be turning elevated in-zone fastballs into weak tappers:
2025 outlook
Despite publicly stating immediately following their elimination from the Postseason that they were planning on picking up Travis d’Arnaud’s player option in order to keep him around for another season, Alex Anthopoulos and the Braves did a shocking about-face and declined d’Arnaud’s option and allowing him to be a free agent. While there were intimations that perhaps the Braves were interested in bringing him back a lower price than $8 million, it ended up being meaningless — d’Arnaud quickly found a new home, as he reunited with Ron Washington in Anaheim on a two-year, $12 million deal with the Angels.
As of right now, ZiPS is projecting d’Arnaud to post up a similar season in 2025 to what he did in 2024 — a 1.6 WAR season with a slash line of .228/.292/.409 with a wOBA of .304 and an OPS+ of 94. That’s basically a gentle age-related decline from... pretty much what he’s done in the past four seasons with the Braves.
He’ll be sharing time with Logan O’Hoppe and playing a role similar to the one he had as a member of the Braves. d’Arnaud ended his time with the Braves on an ultimately successful note, and it’s safe to assume that he’ll receive a very warm reception should he come up to the plate when the Angels visit the Braves next July.
<img alt="Kansas City Royals v Atlanta Braves" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/K1ag6QoHlxPmPAcqJ73NzkVQ4a4=/0x0:8245x5497/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73786606/2174585626.0.jpg">
Photo by Matthew Grimes Jr./Atlanta Braves/Getty Images
In the end, we didn’t know that d’Arnaud’s 15th homer of the 2024 season would end up being not just his final one of the year, but also his final one as a member of the Atlanta Braves, at least for the time being. Following a 2023 season that fell below the standards that Travis d’Arnaud had set for himself during his time with the Atlanta Braves (although not really due to his own shortcomings), it was widely assumed that the man affectionately referred to as “TdA” or “Little D” would find a way to bounce back in the 2024 season. As it turned out, he was able to accomplish that goal — and it also turned out that this would end up being his final go-around with the Braves, at least for the time being, despite most expectations.
How acquired
Back in the 2019-2020 offseason, the Braves signed d’Arnaud to a two-year deal worth $16 million. He rewarded them during the COVID-shortened 2020 season by finishing with a 144 wRC+ over 44 games — basically, he straight-up raked. d’Arnaud eventually signed a two-year contract extension in the middle of the 2021 season, and once again immediately rewarded Atlanta’s faith in him by putting up a career year in 2022 before dropping off a bit in the 2023 season as the pseudo-backup catcher behind Sean Murphy.
What were the expectations?
Just like in 2023, the expectations were that Travis d’Arnaud would serve as a reliable pseudo-backup behind Sean Murphy. We say pseudo-backup because, despite Murphy being the higher-priced, higher-caliber, primary catcher guy that the Braves acquired, d’Arnaud got a bit more playing time towards the end of the 2023 season and the Postseason as well. If you looked at the projection models, then they weren’t expecting anything spectacular from d’Arnaud entering his age-35 season. If you’re a believer of the theory that the even year voodoo that resulted in the Giants winning three of the first five titles of the 2010s in each even-numbered year ended up getting transferred from the Giants to d’Arnaud’s bat, then you were expecting a better season from d’Arnaud in 2024.
More concretely, d’Arnaud’s tenure in Atlanta had been weirdly inconsistent. In 2020, as already mentioned, he went berserk with the bat, posting a near-.400 xwOBA in 184 PAs. d’Arnaud was mostly a league-average bat before then, so it was a big offensive breakout with a new team in a shortened season. The Braves substantially overhauled his approach, building off something d’Arnaud had already started to implement in 2019, essentially telling him to rip at the ball as hard as possible, everything else be damned. It worked out great.
In 2021, though, for whatever reason (perhaps injury issues), d’Arnaud abandoned that approach, and went back to essentially a league-average xwOBA, marred by massive underperformance. His luck bounced the other way in 2022 as he worked to regain his 2020 magic without much success — another league-average xwOBA year, but this time a huge overperformance that gave him a career-best 3.9 fWAR. Then, the pendulum swung the other way yet again: d’Arnaud once again went into grip-it-and-rip-it-mode along with his teammates, posted an above-average xwOBA... but was saddled with another gigantic xwOBA underperformance and tallied just 0.7 fWAR over 292 PAs.
So, coming into the season, it probably stood to reason that d’Arnaud would be solid, but it was hard to know exactly what the baseball gods had in store for him. He’d provided a-bit-above-average catcher defense in two of the last three seasons and had a elite defensive year in 2022; his xwOBAs and wOBAs balanced out to basically average. Put those things together and it made sense to expect him to put up about 2 WAR in a half-season’s worth of playing time — a pretty gaudy rate when you think about it, especially for a pseudo-backup catcher.
2024 results
Wouldn’t you know it, about 2 WAR in about half a season’s worth of playing time is pretty much what d’Arnaud did in 2024. He got a lot of playing time early on, as Sean Murphy suffered an oblique injury that essentially cost him the first two months of his season. April ended up being a great month at the plate for TdA, as he hit .282/.358/.592 with a .399 wOBA and a 157 wRC+. This included a two-game stretch against the Rangers where he hit three homers in one game before following that up with another homer the very next day. Those were four of the five homers that he hit in April as he stormed out of the gates in order to fill the hole at catcher that Sean Murphy had left due to injury.
That was as good as it got for d’Arnaud at the plate, though, as he ended up hitting .225/.285/.390 the rest of the way, with a wOBA of .294 and a wRC+ of 86 — meaning that he finished the season hitting .238/.302/.436 with a .319 wOBA, a .323 xwOBA, 103 wRC+ and 15 home runs for the year. This wasn’t a bad season at the plate by any means and it was certainly better than how he performed in 2023 outputs-wise, though we’re really talking pretty much the same xwOBA in both years. Basically, it was a non-weird year for d’Arnaud that was actually weird because his inputs and outputs actually aligned for the first time since 2020.
When it came to his duties behind the plate, it was one of the weirder seasons when it came to his catching profile. His pitch framing was nowhere near as good as it was over the past two seasons. He finished in the 63rd percentile in both Blocks Above Average (+3) and Caught Stealing Above Average (+1). However, he was only in the 47th percentile when it came to Framing — He was +4 and in the 74th percentile in 2023 and he was a whopping +10 and in the 97th percentile in 2022. So while d’Arnaud made some progress in some facets of his game, he declined in a spot where he’s usually been good-to-great since arriving in Atlanta. Still, he posted his best throwing mark since 2019, and in the end, it was another slightly-above-average-at-catcher defensive season.
All in all, d’Arnaud finished with 1.8 fWAR in 341 PAs, a 3.2 fWAR-per-600 PAs pace that was only slightly lower than the pace he had played at across the past three seasons. It was no 2020, but that’s not really a slight on d’Arnaud or his season.
What went right?
Here’s a look at that three-homer game back in April. Again, he hit five homers during the first full month of the season and while he would only hit ten more the rest of the way, it’s very difficult to be upset with a three-homer game in any context — especially when one of those dingers was a go-ahead grand slam.
As a matter of fact, whenever Travis d’Arnaud hit homers, they seemed to come in binges as well. Back in July, he had a pair of two-homer games — on the road, no less. The first one took place in San Diego right before the All-Star break and then he took his homer tour to Milwaukee a couple of weeks later.
d’Arnaud has had a flair for the dramatic and things didn’t change in 2024, either. He had a pair of walk-off hits last season and perhaps his biggest hit of the year was a massive one. His final homer of the season helped give the Braves a crucial victory in a must-win situation for Atlanta during the final weekend of the regular season.
From a process perspective, d’Arnaud had an interesting swing-and-miss filled year that didn’t really affect him that much in aggregate. He missed a lot of pitches in the zone by design, as he seemed to be guessing not-fastball quite often, and punishing them when he guessed right. In fact, only five of his 15 homers came on four-seamers, and only seven came on fastballs in general; he was befuddled by the straight stuff (and especially sinkers) but held his own against sliders and crushed a bunch of changeups, curves, cutters, and the like.
What went wrong?
As you can see above, whenever Travis d’Arnaud put the ball to the bat, good things happened. The main issue is that d’Arnaud did a metric ton of whiffing during 2024. He finished with a career high whiff rate of 32.8 percent, which was much higher than anything he’d put up in a non-shortened season. Further, as I mentioned earlier, his pitch framing was nowhere near the level it had been at for the past couple of seasons.
Also, remember when we talked about that great first full month of the season? Well, things certainly fell off of a cliff for TdA at the plate immediately following April, as Travis d’Arnaud proceeded to hit .196/.248/.326 for .251 wOBA and 57 wRC+ over his next 101 plate appearances. He even suffered a tough blow to the head in the middle of that stretch — he wasn’t out for long but that’s still pretty tough to deal with at any given point in a season, much less when you’re scuffling at the plate.
Overall, it was kind of a crazy season for d’Arnaud — he raked in April with a near-.400 wOBA and xwOBA, and had an insane July with a .456 wOBA and .418 xwOBA, but scuffled in the other four months. By September, he looked really worn out, with his lowest average exit velocity in a single calendar month since July 2022, and his highest whiff rate in a single month ever; the latter isn’t a problem in isolation, but when he was missing and making weak contact, it was a bad state of affairs.
This was maybe the low point of d’Arnaud’s season, and you can more or less see what we mean — guys shouldn’t be turning elevated in-zone fastballs into weak tappers:
2025 outlook
Despite publicly stating immediately following their elimination from the Postseason that they were planning on picking up Travis d’Arnaud’s player option in order to keep him around for another season, Alex Anthopoulos and the Braves did a shocking about-face and declined d’Arnaud’s option and allowing him to be a free agent. While there were intimations that perhaps the Braves were interested in bringing him back a lower price than $8 million, it ended up being meaningless — d’Arnaud quickly found a new home, as he reunited with Ron Washington in Anaheim on a two-year, $12 million deal with the Angels.
As of right now, ZiPS is projecting d’Arnaud to post up a similar season in 2025 to what he did in 2024 — a 1.6 WAR season with a slash line of .228/.292/.409 with a wOBA of .304 and an OPS+ of 94. That’s basically a gentle age-related decline from... pretty much what he’s done in the past four seasons with the Braves.
He’ll be sharing time with Logan O’Hoppe and playing a role similar to the one he had as a member of the Braves. d’Arnaud ended his time with the Braves on an ultimately successful note, and it’s safe to assume that he’ll receive a very warm reception should he come up to the plate when the Angels visit the Braves next July.
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