<img alt="Wild Card Series - Atlanta Braves v San Diego Padres - Game 2" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MrlWH9WpQSIq1yxJh12jv9bhyXw=/0x0:7682x5121/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73797308/2175520518.0.jpg">
Photo by Kevin D. Liles/Atlanta Braves/Getty Images
Jimenez had one of those crazy-good reliever seasons in 2024. 2024 wasn’t great for most guys to don a Braves uniform, but that definitely did not apply to Joe Jimenez, who sparkled in the first year of his three-year deal with the Braves, smashing his prior career best in fWAR and putting a pretty generic 2023 behind him.
How acquired
The Braves first acquired Jimenez in a deal with the Tigers back in December 2022, sending prospects Justyn-Henry Malloy and Jake Higginbotham out in return. Malloy continued to rake in the minors in 2023 and 2024, but had a -0.5 fWAR season in the majors in 2024; Higginbotham was better on a repeat of Double-A, but isn’t much of a prospect.
After Jimenez had a fine 2023 season, the Braves locked him up during the post-World Series, pre-free agency “quiet period.” On November 2, they handed him a three-year, $26 million deal that paid him $8 million in 2024 and will pay him $9 million in each of 2025 and 2026.
What were the expectations?
There was an article recently that described trying to project single-season reliever performance as “throwing darts in a wind tunnel,” which, yeah. Jimenez’ career to date basically validated that: even before the Braves acquired him, he had two seasons of 1.4 fWAR, one additional above-replacement level season, and three sub-replacement level seasons. In aggregate, he was an 0.5 fWAR-per-65 innings reliever with the Tigers, but the closest he ever actually got to that rate was an 0.3 fWAR in 2019; in every other season, he was either brilliant or awful.
So, of course, and hilariously, Jimenez turned in his first year with a new team by putting up... 0.5 fWAR in 56 1⁄3 innings.
Another complicating factor was that despite pitching pretty well (69 ERA-, 84 FIP-, 82 xFIP-) in 2023, the Braves were pretty averse to using him in big spots: of his 59 appearances, only two started in high leverage, and only 16 started in medium leverage. There were literally ten relievers the team used with a higher average-leverage-at-entry than Jimenez in 2023, and considering the team doesn’t carry ten relievers but did carry Jimenez all season, you get the idea.
Still, the general idea, especially given that the Braves gave him a not-insubstantial amount of money for each of the next three years, was that Jimenez would see higher leverage, and could be expected to do something akin to what he did in 2023.
2024 Results
Boy, Jimenez was awesome in 2024. On the surface, he compiled a career-high 1.8 fWAR across 68 2⁄3 innings. He had a 63 ERA-, 59 FIP-, and an 87 xFIP-, benefiting from some combination of the ball resembling a wet sock and additional HR/FB variation to dominate hitters despite an uptick in his walk rate.
What went right?
Thanks to said FIP being lowered by the fact that the ball didn’t leave the yard when he was pitching, Jimenez finished tied for tenth-most fWAR by a reliever in 2024. The team also stopped playing leverage keepaway with him almost immediately; he finished second in the team in average-leverage-at-entry, trailing just Raisel Iglesias, for whom he usually served as the eighth-inning set-up guy.
He was an excellent contact manager, finishing in the top ten in xERA (again behind Iglesias). The exact reasons for this are probably complex, but a lot of it probably had to do with more sliders overall (from a 60-30 split last year with twice as many four-seamers as sliders to more 50-46 in favor of the slider this year) and the fact that he generally showed excellent fastball command, rather than the generic reliever profile of hoping that velocity and fear of the breaking pitch keeps guys from damaging a heater down the pipe. His slider actually took a step back in terms of depth, but it didn’t seem to affect his overall performance much, if at all.
He finished with a pretty crazy 30-8 shutdown/meltdown ratio, good for both the most shutdowns and the best such ratio on the team. Only 21 relievers finished with more shutdowns, and of those, only six had a better ratio.
He also pitched super-well down the stretch, with a 76/47/65 line from August-onward, which helped make up for some pretty blah peripherals from May through July.
On July 11, he closed out an extra-innings win over the Diamondbacks in the 11th (the Sean Murphy bolt from the blue homer game) thanks to some of that HR/FB fortune:
And here’s that nasty, nasty slider:
Oh, and Jimenez stayed healthy, or at least on the field, all season, which shouldn’t be discounted given what happened to the rest of his teammates.
What went wrong?
Amid his stellar season, Jimenez’ peripherals actually didn’t really improve over his pedestrian 2023; he mostly just benefited from a lack of homers leaving the yard, and whatever improved contact management his fastball command granted him. After two years with a reined-in walk rate, it crept upward in 2024, which sometimes caused messes. He was also on the mound for some of the Braves’ greatest disasters in 2024, such as the meltdown in Coors Field, where he entered with a four-run lead and had Rockies connect for three straight singles and a double to put the Braves in a hole.
And, of course, the same thing happened to him in Game 161 against the Mets, where he came in and had the Mets hit three straight grounder singles off of him. Karma for his HR/FB, perhaps? (More likely, in both the Rockies game and the Mets game, he just hammered the zone too much.)
2025 Outlook
For Jimenez and the Braves benefiting from him staying healthy while his teammates dropped like flies... he and the Braves won the very sad reward of cartilage damage leading to knee surgery that will keep Jimenez out of action for the entire 2025 season.
Amazingly, Jimenez actually dealt with the discomfort for much of the year, but succeeded wildly in doing so. He went into the surgery not expecting it to knock him out for an entire campaign, but the extent of the damage was only discovered during the procedure.
The Braves will now need to pseudo-scramble to figure out a replacement, though with Pierce Johnson and others in house, they’re not all that hard up for options at the moment, either.
<img alt="Wild Card Series - Atlanta Braves v San Diego Padres - Game 2" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MrlWH9WpQSIq1yxJh12jv9bhyXw=/0x0:7682x5121/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73797308/2175520518.0.jpg">
Photo by Kevin D. Liles/Atlanta Braves/Getty Images
Jimenez had one of those crazy-good reliever seasons in 2024. 2024 wasn’t great for most guys to don a Braves uniform, but that definitely did not apply to Joe Jimenez, who sparkled in the first year of his three-year deal with the Braves, smashing his prior career best in fWAR and putting a pretty generic 2023 behind him.
How acquired
The Braves first acquired Jimenez in a deal with the Tigers back in December 2022, sending prospects Justyn-Henry Malloy and Jake Higginbotham out in return. Malloy continued to rake in the minors in 2023 and 2024, but had a -0.5 fWAR season in the majors in 2024; Higginbotham was better on a repeat of Double-A, but isn’t much of a prospect.
After Jimenez had a fine 2023 season, the Braves locked him up during the post-World Series, pre-free agency “quiet period.” On November 2, they handed him a three-year, $26 million deal that paid him $8 million in 2024 and will pay him $9 million in each of 2025 and 2026.
What were the expectations?
There was an article recently that described trying to project single-season reliever performance as “throwing darts in a wind tunnel,” which, yeah. Jimenez’ career to date basically validated that: even before the Braves acquired him, he had two seasons of 1.4 fWAR, one additional above-replacement level season, and three sub-replacement level seasons. In aggregate, he was an 0.5 fWAR-per-65 innings reliever with the Tigers, but the closest he ever actually got to that rate was an 0.3 fWAR in 2019; in every other season, he was either brilliant or awful.
So, of course, and hilariously, Jimenez turned in his first year with a new team by putting up... 0.5 fWAR in 56 1⁄3 innings.
Another complicating factor was that despite pitching pretty well (69 ERA-, 84 FIP-, 82 xFIP-) in 2023, the Braves were pretty averse to using him in big spots: of his 59 appearances, only two started in high leverage, and only 16 started in medium leverage. There were literally ten relievers the team used with a higher average-leverage-at-entry than Jimenez in 2023, and considering the team doesn’t carry ten relievers but did carry Jimenez all season, you get the idea.
Still, the general idea, especially given that the Braves gave him a not-insubstantial amount of money for each of the next three years, was that Jimenez would see higher leverage, and could be expected to do something akin to what he did in 2023.
2024 Results
Boy, Jimenez was awesome in 2024. On the surface, he compiled a career-high 1.8 fWAR across 68 2⁄3 innings. He had a 63 ERA-, 59 FIP-, and an 87 xFIP-, benefiting from some combination of the ball resembling a wet sock and additional HR/FB variation to dominate hitters despite an uptick in his walk rate.
What went right?
Thanks to said FIP being lowered by the fact that the ball didn’t leave the yard when he was pitching, Jimenez finished tied for tenth-most fWAR by a reliever in 2024. The team also stopped playing leverage keepaway with him almost immediately; he finished second in the team in average-leverage-at-entry, trailing just Raisel Iglesias, for whom he usually served as the eighth-inning set-up guy.
He was an excellent contact manager, finishing in the top ten in xERA (again behind Iglesias). The exact reasons for this are probably complex, but a lot of it probably had to do with more sliders overall (from a 60-30 split last year with twice as many four-seamers as sliders to more 50-46 in favor of the slider this year) and the fact that he generally showed excellent fastball command, rather than the generic reliever profile of hoping that velocity and fear of the breaking pitch keeps guys from damaging a heater down the pipe. His slider actually took a step back in terms of depth, but it didn’t seem to affect his overall performance much, if at all.
He finished with a pretty crazy 30-8 shutdown/meltdown ratio, good for both the most shutdowns and the best such ratio on the team. Only 21 relievers finished with more shutdowns, and of those, only six had a better ratio.
He also pitched super-well down the stretch, with a 76/47/65 line from August-onward, which helped make up for some pretty blah peripherals from May through July.
On July 11, he closed out an extra-innings win over the Diamondbacks in the 11th (the Sean Murphy bolt from the blue homer game) thanks to some of that HR/FB fortune:
And here’s that nasty, nasty slider:
Oh, and Jimenez stayed healthy, or at least on the field, all season, which shouldn’t be discounted given what happened to the rest of his teammates.
What went wrong?
Amid his stellar season, Jimenez’ peripherals actually didn’t really improve over his pedestrian 2023; he mostly just benefited from a lack of homers leaving the yard, and whatever improved contact management his fastball command granted him. After two years with a reined-in walk rate, it crept upward in 2024, which sometimes caused messes. He was also on the mound for some of the Braves’ greatest disasters in 2024, such as the meltdown in Coors Field, where he entered with a four-run lead and had Rockies connect for three straight singles and a double to put the Braves in a hole.
And, of course, the same thing happened to him in Game 161 against the Mets, where he came in and had the Mets hit three straight grounder singles off of him. Karma for his HR/FB, perhaps? (More likely, in both the Rockies game and the Mets game, he just hammered the zone too much.)
2025 Outlook
For Jimenez and the Braves benefiting from him staying healthy while his teammates dropped like flies... he and the Braves won the very sad reward of cartilage damage leading to knee surgery that will keep Jimenez out of action for the entire 2025 season.
Amazingly, Jimenez actually dealt with the discomfort for much of the year, but succeeded wildly in doing so. He went into the surgery not expecting it to knock him out for an entire campaign, but the extent of the damage was only discovered during the procedure.
The Braves will now need to pseudo-scramble to figure out a replacement, though with Pierce Johnson and others in house, they’re not all that hard up for options at the moment, either.
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