For the past few years, the Braves have aimed to have something like the league’s top bullpen. It may not look quite like that in 2025.
At this point, it might as well be a meme, except for the fact that no one’s managed to make a particularly catchy one: the Atlanta Braves, the epitome of discipline when it comes to free agent spending and roster construction broadly… absolutely love spending on the bullpen. It’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t make any sense were it not blatantly true, like a quirk from a bygone era of serialized nonserious detective shows, like a psychic detective who’s not actually psychic, or something.
And yet, things look a little different this year, at least as we sit right now, on February 10, about seven weeks from Opening Day. You’ll see why from the table below:
You can trace the Braves’ evolution during their current competitive run at least partly through their intensity of focus on the bullpen. The team was expected to be the bad kind of pants in 2018, which also applied to the relief corps. It was not said relief corps that took them to the playoffs that year, despite a couple of really good performances from A.J. Minter and Daniel Winkler. 2019 featured a mediocre bullpen rebuilt on the fly midseason; the Braves seemed to turn the lessons of the agonizing spring and summer where it was Luke Jackson and problems into a hefty investment ahead of 2020. (The asterisk on the table above indicates that Tyler Matzek and Chris Martin probably would have hit 1 fWAR in 2020 had the season not been curtailed.)
2021 was maybe the first “weird” season with regard to bullpen investment and performance. Mark Melancon’s hefty contract slid off the books, and despite a strong forecast, the bullpen took a step back because Martin and Will Smith, who were projected to be really good, ended up being fairly generic, while a trio of Shane Greene, midseason acquisition Richard Rodriguez, and speculative offseason add Nate Jones were all horrible.
The Braves reacted to their 2021 by adding Kenley Jansen to the mix, delivering the team’s best bullpen forecast and performance of the run so far. They then doubled down on the strategy by adding Joe Jimenez ahead of 2023, only to have the other “weird” season during this run. The 2023 bullpen forecast had Minter as a dominant presence, and above-average contributions from Collin McHugh, Jimenez, Dylan Lee, and Raisel Iglesias. The reality wasn’t that different, especially insofar as both Minter and Iglesias killed it, but 2023 had a bunch of teams with crazy-good bullpen performances and the Braves crushed teams so often that the bullpen was often an afterthought. Not to worry: amid offensive inconsistency in 2024, the Braves needed better bullpen performance in 2024, and they got it.
So, that brings us to 2025, and things are different. The preseason forecast, at this time, has the Braves as barely in the top ten in bullpen performance. I don’t think of this as an actual reflection of the team’s future bullpen performance, but more just a sign of an interesting discontinuity between the Braves fervently shoving their resources into the bullpen for most of the past half-decade, and easing up a bit this offseason. Some of the disconnect likely has to do with Jimenez: had he not gotten hurt, the Braves’ bullpen projections would be better. But, the Braves haven’t exactly replaced him on the depth chart, either.
As it stands right now, the Braves have two standout relief projections: Iglesias and Aaron Bummer, with Pierce Johnson and Lee having above-average marks as well. The rest is pretty much a generic bullpen bundle. No team above them in the rankings actually has more than four relievers projected for 0.6-plus WAR, anyway (in fact, no team has it at all); the difference between the Braves and the teams ahead of them is largely that after Johnson and Lee, you’ve basically got a carousel of mystery boxes — and while all relievers are really mystery boxes, there’s some degree of difference between Iglesias, and, say, Angel Perdomo — not so much in what they will do with a season’s worth of relief appearances, but in how confident you can be that they’ll be above replacement level.
Of course, the funny thing about all this is that central estimate projections being what they are, the Braves can easily shoot up the team ranks by just signing David Robertson (0.7 WAR central estimate) or Kenley Jansen (0.5 WAR central estimate). Robertson is old (age-40 season incoming) and barely played from 2019-2021, but has been good since and was one of the best relievers in baseball last year. The Braves may not want to deal with him at his presumed price tag given his age, but maybe that price has come down given that it’s February? Jansen’s peripherals have been uninspiring in Boston and he’s had shoulder woes, but he’s made it work and hasn’t had a sub-1 fWAR season since 2018 (excluding 2020), which is kind of insane given his age.
Even guys like Dylan Floro, Luis Garcia, Joe Kelly, and Scott Barlow would basically kick the Braves handily into the top five; to be clear, I’m not concerned about any bullpen whose difference between “pretty good” and “one of the best” is a Dylan Floro. It’s more that this is kind of a weird place for the Braves to be, given how stuffed their bullpens have been with redundancy going back to the 2019 Trade Deadline, and how comparatively unstuffed the depth chart looks now.
Maybe this is a sign that the times are a-changing — like the Tim Hyers hire at hitting coach and the signing of Jurickson Profar to probably not trade z-contact for oomph, the Braves might be shifting their approach. I’m not mad about the lack of a trade to eat up even more budget on relievers; quite the opposite. It just feels weird, like when you’ve been hate-watching Lost for two seasons and then it drops “The Constant” on you and you go, “Wait, was this show just good for 45 minutes?” Of course, now that I’ve said this, maybe the Braves will just announce a reunion with Jansen for over $5 million tomorrow, and things will feel entirely back to normal. But for now, the Braves appear poised to go into the 2025 season with a slightly off-kilter bullpen situation — likely made so by Jimenez’ unfortunate injury — but off-kilter nonetheless.
So stay tuned for when they inevitably trade for Camilo Doval and make this all null and void, is what I’m saying, I guess.