The former Mets regular ended up bouncing between teams in 2024, with Atlanta serving as his first stop.
After spending years as a consistent and familiar face on the other side of the baseball diamond from the Atlanta Braves as a member of the New York Mets, Luis Guillorme decided to take a chance and see what baseball life could be like on the other side of things. Guillorme was brought in on a one-year deal and the obvious hope was that maybe he’d end up biting his former team at some point. He ended up pitching against them, so that should give you an idea of what his time with the Braves was like.
How acquired
The Braves brought Luis Guillorme in during January on a one-year deal worth $1.1 million. This was Guillorme’s first change of scenery after spending his entire career to date (2018-2023) with the Mets.
What were the expectations?
This signing was a bit of a weird one, since the Braves had already acquired David Fletcher from the Angels via trade and it sure seemed like Fletcher was going to be the one to fill the role of bench infielder the Braves heading into 2024. Instead, the Braves brought in Guillorme despite the fact that his final season in New York was his worst full-season performance while he was there. Another weird aspect of the situation was that both Fletcher and Guillorme are notoriously slappy, contact-over-everything guys, and that’s the polar opposite of how the Braves conduct themselves at the plate. Sure, having a rarely-used bench guy use that approach isn’t a signal of a shift in strategy, but while Fletcher was acquired to shuffle money around, there was no reason to sign Guillorme other than to have Guillorme.
Still, it was widely expected that Guillorme would be the infield bench option for the Braves, since he had been signed to a major league deal. Sure enough, he ended up performing well enough in Spring Training and made the Opening Day roster, while Fletcher started the season in Triple-A. As such, Guillorme was expected to fill in when needed for a starting infield that had historically been incredibly durable and didn’t miss a ton of games.
Performance-wise, Guillorme came into the season with 2.8 fWAR in 823 career PAs, which is a more-than-solid rate for a bench guy. However, following a very good partial season in 2022 where he played excellent defense and put up an average-ish batting line, he faceplanted in 2023 to the tune of his worst-ever defensive year and a 69 wRC+ that was the product of massively outhitting an abysmal .239 xwOBA — hence the Mets moving on. As a result, Guillorme was projected to be essentially a generic bench guy — okay bat, decent infield defense. At the time, it didn’t seem like the Braves needed much more.
2024 results
Luis Guillorme played 10 games and had 21 plate appearances for the Braves. A “fun” trivia answer for the 2024 Braves (if you actually want to spend a lot of time remembering this wacky season) is that Guillorme’s first appearance for the Braves was as a pitcher, as he came in on April 11 to eat the ninth inning as the Braves were down 12-4. While position players as a whole had a surprisingly decent year on the mound, this wasn’t the case for Guillorme, as he served up a grand slam to Tyrone Taylor in order to bring that game to its 16-4 final score.
The fact that I’ve spent a decent amount of time on his appearance as a pitcher oughta tell you something about how Guillorme’s time with the Braves went. He made a handful of starts in mid-to-late April when Ozzie Albies was out with a fractured toe and he racked up a few hits (more on that later) but ultimately, he wasn’t exactly effective or productive during his time with the Braves. His last appearance as a “regular” came on April 24 against the Marlins, where he went hitless and struck out twice in what turned out to be a wild win over the Marlins. Guillorme didn’t play for the Braves again until making a pinch-hit appearance against the Dodgers on May 4. Five days later, the Braves traded him to the Angels for cash considerations and a player to be named later.
Interestingly enough, Luis Guillorme ended up getting designated for assignment by the Halos (and eventually finished his season in the Diamondbacks organization) before the the player to be named later was actually named. As of right now, we still don’t know who the player is and I’d imagine that we probably never will since both teams have moved on from Guillorme. Maybe the player to be named later is the friends that we made along the way?
All in all, Guillorme finished with 0.0 fWAR as a Brave, no thanks to his 19 wRC+ in those 21 PAs. He got much more run in Anaheim and Phoenix and his season ended with 0.1 fWAR in 187 PAs. He posted the second-worst xwOBA of his career after 2023, but continued to play pretty good infield defense.
What went right?
Luis Guillorme made a couple of really nifty plays in the field whenever he got the chance to play. I’ll show you both of them, because why not?
April 21 against the Rangers:
April 24 against the Marlins:
One of his biggest hits in a Braves uniform came when he blooped in this two-run double off the line (???) that eventually put the game out of reach for the Braves in a win in Houston over the Astros. The call itself was extremely close, especially considering that there wasn’t the visual evidence of that satisfying splash of white chalk coming from the dirt to indicate that the ball had in fact dropped right on the line in fair territory. Still, the umpires ruled it fair and the Braves had themselves a four-run ninth-inning lead thanks to Luis Guillorme.
A couple of days later, he had his highest WPA game as a Brave, as he kickstarted a rally against Nate Eovaldi that scored the first of five unanswered runs to engineer a comeback victory, thanks to this weakly-hit double (a Guillorme special):
What went wrong?
Those two hits that you just watched? Yeah, those were two of his three hits, and all three of his runs knocked in during his time with the Braves. Granted, nine appearances as a hitter and 21 plate appearances is hardly a strong sample size to judge by, but you have to imagine that Guillorme maybe would’ve gotten a smidgen more of a chance here if he showed something legit at the plate. Instead, he finished with some very light offensive numbers at the plate and that ended up being the story of his season. He finished with a sub-70 wRC+ for the second year in a row, so maybe it’s safe to assume that things probably wouldn’t have turned out much better had he stayed here.
It is kind of funny, though, that the Braves moved on from Guillorme, and then due to injuries striking the infield (and everywhere else), ended up giving a combined 455 PAs to Whit Merrifield, Gio Urshela, Cavan Biggio, Zack Short, Luke Williams, and Nacho Alvarez Jr., who combined for 0.7 fWAR (almost entirely due to Merrifield and Urshela). One wonders if they regret the move given that Short, who effectively replaced Guillorme, was even worse on both sides of the ball.
2025 outlook
Guillorme finished the season getting outrighted by the Diamondbacks to Triple-A and then he elected free agency shortly after that, so the 30-year old utility player’s future is clearly up in the air. If he latches on somewhere by Spring Training then he’ll likely be in the same position he was last season, where he’ll be looking to make an Opening Day roster as a bench option. It’s hard to see anything else for him as far as MLB playing time is concerned, even though he still projects as a pretty good bench option. At this point, a light-hitting infielder whose good defensive plays is based less on tools than past performance is a tough sell for a guaranteed roster spot.