The baseball gods rewarded Brebbia’s long and arduous stint with the White Sox by letting him end his season with a playoff team.
It was an up-and-down season for John Brebbia — at least, individually speaking. At the team level, it was mostly down for Brebbia and the Chicago White Sox, as he spent the vast majority of his season pitching for a team that will go down in history for all of the wrong reasons. While Brebbia wasn’t wholly off the hook for that team being bad, he had some bright spots and strong stretches while he was in Chicago. After the White Sox cut him loose, those bright spots were enticing enough for the Atlanta Braves to take a chance on him.
How acquired
Brebbia was released by the White Sox just five days after his final appearance on August 24, when he was blown up for a four-run, two-homer inning in a game that eventually ended up being the second of a 12-game losing streak for Chicago. Somehow, that was only the third-longest losing streak of the season for the White Sox, but I digress. The point is that Brebbia was spared of having to go through yet another extended losing streak by getting released on August 29. Two days later, on August 31, the Braves signed him to a minor-league deal in extremely quiet fashion, and then they selected his contract on September 1 in order to call him up from Triple-A for the final month of the season. It was a little surprising to see Brebbia called up when rosters expanded instead of, say, Daysbel Hernandez, but the latter was called up in ten days anyway.
What were the expectations?
The expectations for Brebbia while he was with the Braves was to enter into games in low-leverage situations where they didn’t have to burn one of their high-leverage (or even medium-leverage) guys in the bullpen. It’s hard to say that expectations were even close to being sky-high for Brebbia when you consider that he had just gotten released by what turned out to be the worst team in modern baseball history and had just got done putting up an ERA- of 155 and a FIP- of 105 over 54 appearances with that team. On the flip side, he had a better 95 xFIP-, but that’s still not exactly a ticket to high-leverage relief work.
Still, you have to figure that Alex Anthopoulos and Atlanta’s front office had to have seen something in Brebbia that could’ve helped a team that was busy fighting for their postseason lives, and maybe it was simply the ability to eat an inning or two whenever called upon. A 26.9 percent strikeout rate while with the White Sox probably helped to sweeten the pot. Prior to 2024, Brebbia spent three seasons with the Giants, including a bad, shortened 2021 campaign, and two solid campaigns as a swingman. Consequently, the Braves probably figured they were adding an average-y reliever to their bullpen.
2024 results
John Brebbia ended up making five appearances totaling 6 2⁄3 innings pitched for the Braves over the month of September. Only one of those appearances came in a situation where the result of the game was still in doubt and that was in the top of the ninth in a game where the Braves were trailing the Rockies 3-1, which was still a teeny-tiny leverage index of 0.30. Other than that, Brebbia usually appeared as a human victory cigar or a human white flag.
When he did make an appearance, he looked like how you would expect John Brebbia to look. He racked up at least two strikeouts in three of his five appearances and struck out at least one batter in each appearance, keeping up his reputation of racking up strikeouts. He only gave up four hits and two of them came in the same outing (more on that later). He only gave up two walks (which came in the same outing, more on that later, as well). It was only a handful of innings but a 34.6 strikeout percentage and a 7.7 walk percentage will do just fine in any given bullpen. It’s hard to imagine that he could’ve kept that up for an entire season but for a month of mop-up duty, that’ll do the trick.
Unfortunately, said homers resulted in a pretty weird line for him as a Brave, with a 65 ERA-, 132 FIP-, and 79 xFIP-. So, he finished with -0.1 fWAR as a Brave and 0.1 fWAR on the season.
What went right?
By far, his most-appreciated appearance as a member of the Braves (and also his best appearance of the season) came on September 10 against the Nationals. He entered the game with the Braves up 8-0 and proceeded to toss three shutout innings where he didn’t give up a single hit and struck out two. The only blemish is that he did walk a pair of batters but other than that, Brebbia and his fastball-and-slider combo were too much for the Nationals to handle on this particular day.
Oh, and he had a 1-2-3 inning with two strikeouts in that one close-ish game mentioned above, but the Braves ended up losing it by that same 3-1 score despite his best efforts.
What went wrong?
His appearance on September 15 against the Dodgers was absolutely one to forget and not just for him, either. That was the game where Raisel Iglesias and gave up a triple, two RBI singles and a homer — with those last three hits coming with two outs, no less. With the game having gone from being a tight 2-2 contest to suddenly falling out of reach for the Braves at 5-2, Brebbia was called upon to put out the fire and at least get the Braves to the bottom of the ninth with just a three-run deficit to deal with.
By the time Brebbia got that final out of the top of the ninth, it was 9-2, as he gave up back-to-back homers to Tommy Edman and Max Muncy (making it back-to-back-to-back homers for the Dodgers after Teoscar Hernandez ran Iglesias from the game with a dinger). This was the third time that Brebbia had given up multiple homers in the same stint and this was clearly his low point during his time with the Braves.
2025 outlook
John Brebbia is now a free agent and while it’s pretty clear that we aren’t going to see anything close to a bidding war for his services, it’s also easy to imagine that some team is probably going to pick him up on a minor league deal and give him an invite to Spring Training. Brebbia may not be able to find the quality that he had back when he was with the Cardinals and the Giants, but some organization is going to see his career strikeout percentage of 25.9 percent and think that they’ll be happy to have a pitcher like that in their bullpen. It’s very likely not going to be the Braves again, though.
That said, Brebbia has better projections for 2025 than many of the other low-leverage fill-ins the Braves used in 2024. It doesn’t mean he should count on a guaranteed roster spot or anything other than mop-up duty for his upcoming age-35 season, but you could do a lot worse than having the underbelly of your bullpen staffed with a guy who’s had a combined 95 xFIP- over the past two seasons.