I know a lot of you are concerned about the Braves’ starting pitchers. Let me start by saying that every fan of ever team ought to be concerned about their starting pitchers every March. Even when the Braves had Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz, there were still concerns about the other two starters. And every pitcher is an ulnar collateral ligament away from an extremely well-paid vacation. And all of our top 4 pitchers have injury question marks of some sort, as do most of those in the wings.
You know who doesn’t? Bryce Elder. Instead, of course, the criticism directed at Elder is whether or not he sucks. He doesn’t. But before I get into that, a few preliminaries.
He’s the fifth starter, for Pete’s sake
That’s not Pete Alonso, by the way… it’s some saint. People spend an immense amount of time evaluating contenders for fifth starter, Obviously, should there be a bunch of injuries, fifth starters have a way of becoming de facto higher starters. And his All-Star year notwithstanding, a pitching staff led by Bryce Elder is a barely competitive MLB pitching staff. But that’s not his fault — it’s the fault of the guys who got hurt. Evaluating who the fifth starter ought to be is just not all that important to becoming a playoff team, and it’s irrelevant during the playoffs, as the fifth starter is the first guy relegated to long duty in the bullpen.
He’s been an average pitcher, and there’s nothing wrong with average
I’ve been playing with evaluating starting pitcher by mean and standard deviation of game score. There are a lot of things I like about it. But in his 79 career starts, he has an average Game Score of 49.4. 50 is average. I’ll discuss this more below, but Elder is not an objectively bad pitcher. He generates an average of just over 1 WAR per year. His ERA+ (92) is uninspiring, but not bad for a fifth starter.
Looking at him, people want him to be something he’s not
Elder is listed at 6’2″ 220. I actually think he looks bigger than that. People want him to throw like Roger Clemens and instead he throws like Mark Buehrle on a day when Buehrle’s control wasn’t quite there. That is yet another thing that’s not his fault. It is damned difficult to be good enough to be a starting pitcher in MLB; doing that while matching what your physique ought to do is dramatically unfair.
He is being compared to people who aren’t on the team
The focus on Elder is really a focus on Alex Anthopoulos. He is the visible symbol of deals AA hasn’t made. (The existence of such abandoned deals are simply assumed.) Yet again: not Elder’s fault.
Game Score
In a post last August, I discussed Game Score. I’ve been looking at since then and I’ve decided it’s a really good summary stat for starting pitchers. Bill James, who invented the idea, was not really enamored with it — and I’m using Tom Tango’s version (the one FanGraphs and MLB.com use) that James likes even less. But it has a lot of great features:
- It isn’t defense-independent, but it’s offense-independent, at least in an age where pitchers don’t have to be substituted out for pinch hitters.
- It is really simple to calculate, unlike WAR
- It is a counting stat at the game level, but a rate stat at the career and seasonal level
- The only other common stat used to evaluate the start, the Quality Start, is a very crude binary. The other binary stat, Win, is brutally offense-dependent, and gives you no extra credit for extra outs, giving no credit for saving the team bullpen innings.
- It lines up with the history of the importance of starting pitching. Here are the average Game Scores by decade, along with the correlations between pitcher Game Score and both the pitcher’s own win and the team’s win
| Decade | Mean Score | Pitcher Win Correlation | Team Win Correlation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1890 | 52.7 | 0.60 | 0.54 |
| 1900 | 60.2 | 0.56 | 0.49 |
| 1910 | 58.3 | 0.59 | 0.48 |
| 1920 | 51.6 | 0.61 | 0.50 |
| 1930 | 50.5 | 0.62 | 0.49 |
| 1940 | 53.3 | 0.62 | 0.49 |
| 1950 | 51.0 | 0.63 | 0.49 |
| 1960 | 53.8 | 0.59 | 0.47 |
| 1970 | 53.0 | 0.58 | 0.47 |
| 1980 | 51.5 | 0.55 | 0.45 |
| 1990 | 49.8 | 0.52 | 0.44 |
| 2000 | 48.8 | 0.50 | 0.45 |
| 2010 | 51.2 | 0.50 | 0.45 |
| 2020 | 50.3 | 0.49 | 0.42 |
Great Pitchers, Great Average Game Scores
As everyone points out when they discuss Game Scores, Kerry Wood’s 20 strikeout game is the highest game score ever. High individual game scores aren’t that critical to me. But when we look at pitchers who made over 200 starts (subsetting it to pretty good pitchers) the highest 5 average game scores belong to Ed Walsh, Addie Joss, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Cy Young. Getting past the ancient immortals, the top 5 since I was born are Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Jacob deGrom, Pedro Martinez and Clayton Kershaw. (There are surprises: Smoltz and Maddux are just below the top 100, and Glavine is just inside #300.)
What About Consistency?
Many of you will know the old joke about the three statisticians who go hunting. The first one fires three feet in front of the deer, the second fires three feet behind the deer, and the third one jumps up and say “Got it!” My new respect for the Game Score is the fact that the variance in Game Score is, I think, the best measure we have of starting pitcher consistency. This was the basis for my Elder evaluation last August, in which I produced this chart:
This was the graph of his appearances to mid-August. Now I can show his whole career:
2023 was excellent, 2024 was none-too-good, and 2025 was… up-and-down. But the point of the first chart was that Bryce Elder in 2025 had a very high standard deviation of Game Score: his highs were high and his lows were low. But after all, one year isn’t all that much data. Yet the variance is pretty high, even back in 2023 when he was good.
Before looking at that, a technical note: pitchers with low average Game Scores also tend to have higher standard deviations. This is because if you’re a bad pitcher with a low variance, you will find yourself in the minors. We can see this when we look over all pitchers: I took all the pitchers with 15 or more starts in a season since 2000. I divided them into quintiles of average Game Score and looked at the average standard deviation. (Each observation is a single pitcher-season with its own standard deviation.) Here is the result:
| Quintile | Average Standard Deviation of Season’s Game Score |
| 1: 32.3-45.8 | 19.2 |
| 2: 45.8-49.3 | 18.7 |
| 3: 49.3-52.3 | 18.6 |
| 4: 52.3-55.8 | 18.3 |
| 5: 55.8-75.6 | 17.8 |
So, Elder, who in his career has a 49.4 mean and a 21.7 standard deviation is unusually inconsistent. And that frustrates people. Heck, it probably frustrates Elder.
Whither Bryce?
But that’s the past. The current debate is whether Bryce, through consultations, has learned something. The hopeful point out that he had quality starts in six of his last seven starts in 2025. So what? I asked the question: what happens to pitchers who through their first 80 starts were within 1 of his average game score (49.4) and within one of his inconsistency (21.7). It turns out there were 49 such pitchers. Here is the complete list, ordered by mean score in their remaining starts, no matter how long.
| Remaining Starts | Mean Score | Std Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| id | |||
| Bobby Burke | 9 | 37.4 | 20.15 |
| Alfredo Simón | 13 | 37.6 | 21.95 |
| Jerry Augustine | 24 | 40.0 | 23.41 |
| Brian Bannister | 34 | 42.0 | 19.55 |
| Jeff Robinson | 37 | 43.5 | 20.85 |
| Bill Greif | 17 | 43.9 | 17.67 |
| Paul Wilson | 73 | 44.1 | 21.91 |
| Duke Maas | 11 | 44.2 | 20.21 |
| Hal Gregg | 37 | 44.4 | 21.01 |
| Percy Jones | 34 | 45.2 | 20.71 |
| Bud Daley | 36 | 45.9 | 18.68 |
| Socks Seibold | 55 | 46.2 | 22.42 |
| Roger Pavlik | 45 | 46.3 | 21.55 |
| Hank Johnson | 36 | 46.3 | 20.46 |
| Curt Young | 82 | 47.0 | 19.32 |
| Pete Broberg | 54 | 47.3 | 17.62 |
| Cliff Chambers | 33 | 47.6 | 18.04 |
| Al Milnar | 47 | 47.6 | 23.15 |
| Matt Young | 83 | 48.2 | 18.84 |
| Derek Holland | 153 | 48.2 | 21.32 |
| Brooks Lawrence | 47 | 48.6 | 20.60 |
| Kris Benson | 120 | 48.7 | 20.99 |
| Jeremy Bonderman | 123 | 48.8 | 19.85 |
| Tim Wakefield | 394 | 49.0 | 19.32 |
| Ray Kolp | 92 | 49.1 | 21.51 |
| Kenny Rogers | 403 | 49.3 | 18.77 |
| Pat Hentgen | 229 | 49.6 | 19.34 |
| Arnie Portocarrero | 37 | 49.9 | 21.58 |
| Cal McLish | 129 | 50.0 | 19.82 |
| Matt Harrison | 27 | 50.1 | 19.84 |
| Joe Genewich | 86 | 50.3 | 19.88 |
| Harry Byrd | 28 | 50.4 | 20.62 |
| Jack Fisher | 185 | 50.4 | 20.81 |
| Tom Gordon | 123 | 50.8 | 20.27 |
| Bill Wight | 118 | 51.2 | 19.72 |
| Milt Wilcox | 205 | 51.7 | 19.97 |
| Al Jackson | 104 | 51.8 | 20.63 |
| Floyd Bannister | 284 | 52.2 | 19.50 |
| Alan Foster | 68 | 52.6 | 18.24 |
| Melido Perez | 121 | 52.6 | 19.50 |
| General Crowder | 216 | 53.0 | 20.26 |
| José Guzmán | 106 | 53.1 | 18.01 |
| Bobo Newsom | 413 | 53.5 | 21.03 |
| Bob Klinger | 50 | 54.5 | 21.69 |
| Kelvim Escobar | 124 | 54.8 | 17.91 |
| Mark Langston | 349 | 54.9 | 20.20 |
| Zack Greinke | 483 | 57.1 | 18.70 |
| Chris Short | 228 | 57.1 | 21.11 |
| Larry Jackson | 349 | 57.3 | 20.34 |
There are things to note about this very diverse set of pitchers. Under half of them managed to produce an above-50 average game score for the rest of their careers. And most of those who did managed to reduce their inconsistency. Kelvim Escobar and Zack Greinke would be the best examples here. So for those who want to ditch Elder, you might be getting rid of an Escobar or Greinke. On the other hand, you only have a four percent chance of getting them. Much more likely is Socks Seibold or any of a number of pitchers nobody remember (although now that I’ve heard about him, I’m not forgetting Socks Seibold.)
Great analysis, JonathanF, thank you. Elder will be a perfectly fine fifth starter for the Braves.
Great stuff, Jonathan.
There’s something about Bryce Elder that draws the ire of random Braves fans on Twitter. I think when Charlie Morton left, they had to direct their anger at a new average innings eater because they simply don’t understand that eating innings is super important.
Ronald Acuna’s WAR the last 5 seasons:
2021: 3.5
2022: 2.3
2023: 8.4
2024: 0.0
2025: 3.0
Average: 3.4
I just don’t know how much you pay for that. If he’s fully healthy this year, then that average number will definitely shoot up. I’m expecting a 6+ WAR season from him this year. But even still, how much do you realistically pay for getting 6+ WAR every 3 years or so and a bunch of mediocre seasons in between?
When he’s in the lineup, he’s awesome. You cannot anticipate injuries and pay a player less even if they get injured fairly often. See Buxton, Byron.
Nice write up. Some good names in that table like Mark Langston and Pat Hentgen. I forget just how close to a HOF career Buehrle had. 60 pitching WAR is awfully good.
I want to push back against the claim that “people want him to throw like Roger Clemens”. That seems to say the average fan is delusional. Wanting our fifth starter to be replacement level isn’t that big an ask, and it certainly isn’t tantamount to expecting him to be a facsimile of the greatest pitcher of the modern era.
It’s not like Elder was trudging along posting a 4.5 ERA and eating unspectacular innings with regular quality starts, and unappeasable fans were unhappy because he lacked an elite fastball. Spanning over 2 full seasons and 233 IP, from 7/9/2023 to 8/19/25, he posted a 6.2 ERA. That’s not playable for more than an emergency spot starter.
Until his final 6 weeks of 2025, there wasn’t much to challenge the narrative that he’d been a flash in the pan, a fluky all star without major league stuff who succeeded with smoke and mirrors briefly but got figured out. His final 6 weeks give me a lot of hope because he didn’t need to just be more consistent. He needed to be better. His 2022 and first half of 2023 does a lot of heavy lifting in making his career averages look pretty good and those final 6 weeks make 2025 look almost decent.
Rob, I also think the comparison to Charlie Morton is off. Morton was criticized because he wasn’t an innings eating 5th starter; he was paid to be a top of the rotation guy. The last 3 years he was here, he didn’t earn $20 million per season, either with his performance or durability. It seemed like that same $20 million could’ve been been put to better use for a team that struggled to field a rotation for the playoffs every year.
Charlie Morton was not paid to be a top of the rotation starter. $20M does not buy you a top of the rotation starter. Framber got $38M per, Cease for $30M per, Ranger Suarez got $26M per. These guys will end up making $8-15M per WAR for these contracts… if these teams are lucky.
Charlie was paid the following per WAR each year he was under contract with Atlanta:
2021: $5.1M
2022: $11.7M
2023: $6.6M
2024: $18.1M
Aside from the last year, the Braves got a fair-to-good deal on Charlie Morton, and they certainly didn’t pay him to be a TOR starter.
Is the average fan delusional? I’m not sure how I’d define the average fan, but I can safely say (from comment pages other than this one) there are plenty of delusional fans. As to his final 6 weeks last year, if he turns into Mark Langston, I will take the credit for lighting the fire under him with my August 18th post. Whatever he becomes, this post has covered just about all the possibilities.
Charlie Morton was our highest paid starting pitcher each year he was here. What Framber got paid 2 years later in the largest AAV pitcher contract of all time isn’t relevant. We weren’t paying Morton to be an innings-eater. We were paying him to be our #1 or #2. If we’d had 2-3 higher paid pitchers, I wouldn’t have cared what we paid Morton, and you’d have a point that we didn’t expect him to be our ace.
I liked the deal when he was first signed. The most contentious of those years, at least from my perspective was the last one, when I strongly disagreed with resigning him and apparently for good reason. That isn’t to say you can go sign an ace for exactly $20 million, but at the time, you could sign most of an ace for $20 million.
From 2022-2024, despite being our highest paid pitcher, Morton pitched exactly 2 innings of postseason ball in our 3 playoff appearances. That had something to do with our early exits.
No, he was our highest paid pitcher because the rest of our rotation had team control. He was the only decent pitcher we signed as a free agent.
Once again, top of the rotation starters costs $30M, not $20M. Just because we’re too cheap to pay for a TOR starter doesn’t mean that he’s one.
Well then, intentionally making an “innings eater” your second highest paid player and top paid pitcher is really stupid resource allocation.
Free agent innings eaters with a proven track record are really expensive. They also really liked the Veteran Presents he brought. And he was actually pretty darn good. That’s expensive.
If I were still a teenage boy, the name Connor Hujsak would be very inspirational.
https://x.com/gvedak/status/2028200437493412150?s=20
2 MPH increase. Their big issue with him was that he didn’t have elite stuff even though he had a 0.31 ERA in 29 IP at AAA last year.
Very funny with the Bill James link.
So I have a button I push which fills in BRef links for every player name. Normally, when I mention Bill James, I need to remember to go in and delink the Braves pitcher of 110 years ago. Sometimes I forget.
No prob, I was amused. I thought you were testing to see if anybody was following links!
Greetings from Key West…
Ran into a guy in a café the other night who was wearing a Braves cap & a red Braves alt-jersey w/ #13 & Acuña, Jr., on his back. I asked him if he’s ready for another 30/30 season. His reply: “Maybe just 30.”
Seattle Bill James… what a weird career.
I’m with the Key West guy. Fewer stolen bases from Ronald won’t bother me, as long as he slugs over 500 and has an OBP over 400. And stays healthy.
Yes, Seattle Bill had perhaps the greatest second half of a season in mlb history in 1914. But that work took its toll—his arm was shot and he was never again an effective pitcher. Too bad Doctor Jobe didn’t come along a half century earlier. (Although to be fair James’s dead arm was more likely his shoulder rather than elbow. Medical science still can’t seem to do as much there—see, e.g., Kyle Wright)
Sutcliffe in 1984 (splitting the season when he was traded) has got to be up there, even if his WAR & ERA+ aren’t as impressive as James’s. Does anyone remember what it was that caused him to flip the switch? Was the umpiring that different between leagues? 5.5 K/9 & 4.4 BB/9 with Cleveland but 9.2 & 2.3 with the Cubs. James also improved his K & BB numbers, and in the same league no less, but most of the improvement was in reducing BB & HBP. Yeah, wins are a flawed stat, but when you go 18-1 (James) or 16-1 (Sutcliffe), you’re doing something very right.
As for blowing out James’s arm, even if Stallings had understood the risk, he might have gone ahead anyway. Flags fly forever, and especially in those days there was no guarantee that James wouldn’t have had a career-ending injury the next year anyway.
Another topic for Jonathan to look at when he’s bored: Players with the same first and last names, especially if they were contemporaries at similar positions like the two Bill Jameses and & the more recent pitching David Robertsons. Maybe which of the second best of the two players was the best, something like, “The two William Wilsons, Willie & Mookie, are the only two players in MLB history with the same name who played the same position in overlapping years and each earned more than X WAR.” Might get messy dealing with Latin American players who use both patronyms and matronyms.
I did a piece once on Battery Bros: pitchers and catchers with the same last name. And of course there’s the homer Will Smith hit off Will Smith.
And then of course there’s Fausto Carmona: one of the few players with two different sets of names
Here’s the spreadsheet of triple-surname-at-bats, not updated since 2020. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ip59qQ-mEykQthTflnK5QT3NW4fTZofrb5HsNh1fJRY/edit?usp=sharing
Doyle Alexander’s seven weeks in 1987 after the Braves traded him to the Tigers belongs in the conversation. 9-0 with a 1.53 ERA in 11 starts–and he earned 4.4 bWAR. Even so, I think we all agree the Braves got the better end of that deal.
We should’ve unretired Mike Stanton when Giancarlo was still boring old Mike. I feel good about the younger Mike Stanton’s chances to go yard.
Elder and Wentz today said “neither one of us is backing down in this 5th starter’s race.” Here’s to hoping we don’t need both of them in the rotation come the start of the season. My money is on Elder. Not buying Wentz’z rebound. Ritchie is probably better than either one even now, but I will be surprised if he breaks camp with the big league club unless those two combust.
https://x.com/codifybaseball/status/2028498543359729884?s=46&t=WSNPrB2JyUoeKSn2PZsXZg
We continue to have the second-highest odds to make the playoffs even with the injuries. I think they clearly agree that we have a ton of organizational pitching depth.
One of my biggest issues with Elder is that Snit never seemed to see what the rest of the world apparently could see…the magic act that Elder sometimes has to do starts to wear out the second or third time through the order(hitters quit chasing off the plate and Elder had to throw strikes) and Snit would just roll with it until it was bases loaded, one out and two runs in before anyone got up in the pen. I think Elder is a fine fifth starter if we have someone ready to go once he starts the 3rd time through the lineup at the very least.
This may be the best thing I’ve seen here on the subject. I don’t care if Elder goes five or has “quality start” as long as the Braves win. I’m not sure if a good strategy might be to split the save opportunities between Iglesias and Suarez. One of Snit’s biggest failings was a slow hook and an intransigent use of bullpen resources.
Profar suspended the full season
https://x.com/JeffPassan/status/2028880474949492839?s=20
You’ve got to be kidding me, Profar.
What in the HELL is the excuse for juicing when you’re guaranteed $14 million this year and is still under contract next year!?
Is he related to Emmanuel Clase?
How the hell can you still get paid when you fail a SECOND PED test? This is insane.
So let me get this straight.
This guy has gone from being able to play middle infield to bitching about having to DH while failing PED tests in a span of 5 seasons. How do you go from being a serviceable middle infielder to a PED freak and not being able to play the field so quickly? And how was none of this known by the FO because giving him a 3-year deal? Dude F this guy
This has got to be a case of someone not knowing what’s in their supplements. I refuse to believe anyone would have that kind of hubris.
Great signing, AA!
So who is available who can DH and play some left field? I liked the Yaz signing, but only if he never sees a left handed pitcher. Eli White is not someone who should get a lot of AB’s. And how much should the Braves be willing to deal in terms of their young pitching prospects to get a right handed hitter?
I was mistaken here. Profar will not be paid.
Ben Gamel is having a pretty good spring and has a career .724 OPS against RHP. He could certainly be a good candidate to DH against RHP. I could see Nacho getting some ABs against LHP.
Lucas Giolito is still available. Max Kepler may be able to hit RHP. Wilmer Flores is out there as a candidate against LHP. Tommy Pham has historically hit LHP well but hasn’t the last couple years and he’s probably cooked.
But dropping Profar to get a SP with what’s happened with Schwellenbach and Waldrep could be a blessing in disguise.
This is what I was thinking. It’s probably more important to sign Littell or Giolito than to get an outfielder. Profar was going to DH mostly anyway and once we get Murphy back we can just pivot to the full time catcher/DH platoon we all envisioned before we signed Yaz.
I just wish we could cut cut him for breach of contract. What a yutz.
I’ll bet this is what Gamel was signed for. Kepler has a PED suspension on his resume. Pham could have been signed last year but he is considered a clubhouse cancer.
Yea, why even bother with year 3 at this point. DFA him. He just has to be incredibly stupid–too stupid to continue employing.
https://x.com/Ken_Rosenthal/status/2028896158861672612?s=20
Plot thickens.
The Org needs to cut him, NO MATTER WHAT the financial implications are, if for no other reason than he’s an abject fool. Someone this dumb doesn’t deserve a spot. He’s probably washed, anyway.
One of the early spring training games, I forget which, Profar murdered a ball, and Ronald was playfully squeezing Profar’s muscles, like he couldn’t believe it. He was all too right.
I guess Profar will be out of the WBC as well. Not looking good for the Netherlands.
I’m one of those “it’s fun for me to guess whether players will be a HOFer no matter how early it is in their career” guys.
Based on what you know today, RAJr a HOFer?
I’m going to go with maybe trending to no, which is down from a yes a couple years ago. He simply hasn’t shown the ability to be able to remain healthy,
Paul Skenes – Yes
Skubal – Maybe – he’s older – 54 career wins at 30 isn’t going to do it.
Nick Kurtz – No although I would guess he flirts with 500 HRs.
Drake Baldwin – No (LOL)
Roman Anthony- Yes, weakly while holding my breath and squinting. .292 AVG and .400 OBP as a 21 year old portends well
Acuna is tough because you don’t know if he can stay healthy. If he continues to average 3 WAR per year even with the injuries for the next 10 years (age-38 season), he’ll be at around 58 WAR. Can he have a few monster seasons between now and then? Maybe. This year could be one. Will he be broken down and out of the league by age 33-34? Probably. So I agree he doesn’t make the Hall.
Skenes – Yes
Skubal – No. Too late of a start to his peak. He might have 6-7 more seasons of 5-6 WAR, which means he’s only at as little as 45 WAR by age-35. He would have to win at least a couple more Cy Young’s to offset the lack of counting stats/WAR accumulation.
Baldwin – No
Kurtz – Way too early, but if he could somehow get remotely close to his 1.000 OPS last year, then certainly. If he can keep this going for 10 years somehow, he would have 50 WAR by age 33. That gives you a length decline phase to accumulate WAR.
Anthony – No. He’s not well-regarded as an OF already. He will likely decline physically fairly quickly and be a DH.
If we’re going really early, then you need to have a conversation about Wyatt Langford, unless you think he’s going to keep having 3 pulled obliques every year like he did last year.
What about Elly De La Cruz? Hell, he could be 400/400 on HRs/SBs at SS. His sister died last year, and he still put together a really good season.
Jackson Churio? 21 years old, already at 6 career WAR. He’s another potential 400/400 guy.
James Wood? 500 HR potential. Could age into a Fred McGriff-type with even more power.
My brother and I play this game all the time. Lol. He’s obsessed with the Hall of Fame. He texts me a random 32 year old once a week asking if he’s a Hall of Famer. Most of them are no.
I think Mallex Smith could be a Hall of Famer. #IYKYK
Hmmm, I am no on all but Skubral with 2 cy youngs already has the best chance. Acuna has all the ability, but gotta get a few more MVP caliber seasons in.
And with Profar, if he gets suspended, then we cut, does he get the money? some reason I think he does, but i can absolutely be wrong.
Wish I had faith that AA would make a move to fill a need.
New post: feel free to repeat your posts from here as necessary