A remarkable year and one of the best stories of the season.
Reynaldo Lopez, a starter turned reliever turned starter once again, signed with the Braves around this time a year ago with a lot of intrigue. The club said all the right things in the offseason and insisted that Lopez was going to get a chance to start in the spring, but many felt he would ultimately wind up in the bullpen, where he was quite good the past few seasons.
I’m not sure the biggest Reynaldo Lopez fan on the planet could have told you his 2024 season was in the cards. He went from a pretty unheralded, “Hey, I guess he’s the fifth starter now” beginning to making 25 starts at an All-Star level of performance.
How acquired
Alex Anthopoulos struck quickly last November and inked Lopez to a three-year, $30 million deal. The prevailing thought was that Lopez would reinforce a bullpen in need of some help, especially from the right side. Heck, even the official Braves.com headline read: Braves bolster ‘pen, sign RHP Reynaldo López to 3-year deal.
What were the expectations?
As we progressed deeper in Spring Training, it became apparent that the Braves were going to hold true to their word of giving Lopez a real chance to start. None of the Triple-A arms like Bryce Elder or Allan Winans had shown anything to suggest they could hold down a spot in the rotation while providing an interesting level of production, and Lopez was sharp in his spring appearances. I remained skeptical — Lopez had not started games regularly since 2019, which feels like a lifetime ago — but he found himself in the Opening Day rotation and immediately delivered.
Given this, projecting Lopez was really hard. ZiPS had him as a 1.4 WAR swingman in 70 innings, but largely concentrated on relief. To be clear: that’s an insanely good reliever. But, Dan Szymborski noted that ZiPS projected Lopez to be something like 35 percent worse on a rate basis as a full-time starter compared to a reliever. One only has to look at his career performance to see the discrepancy. From 2017-2020, as a full-time starter with the White Sox, Lopez posted 4.9 fWAR in 446 2⁄3 innings, with a 108 ERA-, 111 FIP-, and a 122 xFIP-. That’s basically a fifth starter, maybe a fourth starter if you truly believe he had some magical way of avoiding homers. Since his bullpen transition, including the starts he made anyway, Lopez posted 3.5 fWAR in just 189 innings, with a 75/76/89 line. That’s a quality reliever, perhaps one approaching elite territory if, again, you believed he had magical homer warding powers. Lopez had clearly found a niche, but the Braves were perhaps going to take him out of it and use him where he previously wasn’t really all that interesting? Hmm…
2024 results
Lopez missed the arbitrary, less-and-less-relevant-as-time-goes-by cutoff to qualify for the leaderboards, but he was stellar across the board. His 1.99 ERA only trailed a guy named Paul Skenes among starters with 130+ innings. His 2.92 FIP trailed only Cy Young winners Chris Sale and Tarik Skubal, Skenes, Garrett Crochet and Tyler Glasnow. His 3.44 xFIP wasn’t quite as good as he was on the better side of some home run luck (see a pattern yet?), yet it ranked a measly (please note the sarcasm) 17th with Dylan Cease, Joe Ryan and Aaron Nola. What a season.
He finished tied for 20th with 3.5 fWAR, even though just two of the guys ahead of him had fewer innings. He made 25 starts and one relief appearance; across those 26 outings, a combination of his pitching and the defense behind him resulted in negative WPA just six times.
What went right?
Basically everything. As said in the lede, I’m not sure a person on earth could have predicted Reynaldo giving the Braves a sub-two ERA over 25 starts. Sure, he wasn’t quite that good based on his underlying metrics, but a top-20 FIP, xFIP and xERA all suggest he was fantastic, even if he was a smidge lucky at times. Even that luck thing is a little complicated: if there was a guy you were going to argue did have a way of avoiding the longball, it very well could be Lopez, who often runs large FIP-xFIP gaps, and whose career pitching line is now 91/96/107 (it was 48/74/85 for 2024).
He racked up a terrific 148 strikeouts over 135 2⁄3 innings and limited opposing batters to just 42 walks, placing him 20th in K/BB ratio. He also maintained a 0.66 HR/9 ratio; we could probably have a lengthy conversation on home run variance with pitchers, but there is also surely some skill at not leaving meatballs over the plate that hitters crush. Part of it also seemed to be that Lopez largely executed the thing that many pitchers talk about but few actually implement: he hammered the zone with no one on but threw more and more stuff to chase as the game got closer and/or guys started appearing on the bases.
Over 25 starts, he had just five with an FIP- above 100. Only nine had an xFIP- above 100. He had more than twice as many starts with an xFIP- below 75 (seven) than with it above 125 (three). That is ridiculous.
This also wasn’t a case of him catching on partway through the year or during the dog days — as early as April 16, his third start of the year, he was making a 1-0 lead stand up against the Astros, with a 7/1 K/BB ratio to boot.
What went wrong?
Performance wise, very little. His worst start in the WPA department — worst! — was a harmless game against the Reds in July in which he gave up four runs over six innings, with only one of the runs coming on a homer,
The only two real scares came in the medical office. Lopez was shut down twice with elbow and shoulder ailments, although neither prevented him from returning a few weeks later and pitching at a high level. There was some real concern about his health after nearly doubling his innings, but he made it through the year mostly unscathed. The Braves did a nice job giving him and Sale an extra day of rest whenever they could.
It’s possible that the forced rest actually helped him come back strong, though it’s hard to say either way. Lopez had consecutive four-walk games on June 26 and July 2, after walking just nine batters in his prior nine starts, which made it seem like he was possibly hitting a wall. But then he bounced back for a couple of outings, had the blah start against the Reds, left the start after that after three innings, and then missed about a month on the shelf. When he came back, he was en fuego once again, finishing the season with a 42/52/49 line in 31 innings.
2025 outlook
The Braves will hope for another prosperous and healthy season from Lopez in 2025. It remains to be seen exactly what “role” he’ll have next year, but in a perfect world, he’s more of the fourth- or fifth-best option in the rotation with the assumption that the Regression Monster may show up. This could be the best rotation in the game if health allows Sale, Lopez, Spencer Strider, Spencer Schwellenbach and whoever they might add this winter to do their thing.
Steamer forecasts Lopez as a full-time above-average starter, albeit one not pitching anywhere near as well as he did last year, i.e., 2.7 WAR in 171 innings. ZiPS, meanwhile, has Lopez more or less repeating 2024, just with some regression baked in, i.e., 3.0 WAR in 131 1⁄3 innings.