Another day, another Bryce Elder start. If you feel like there have been too many Bryce Elder starts in 2025, well, guess what? After his most recent outing, Elder now leads the 2025 Braves in starts, innings pitched, and batters faced. That’s a lot of Bryce Elder, and, well, that’s not really a good thing.
On the season, Elder has a stupid line. He has 0.0 fWAR, which is terribad for a guy who leads the team in existing on the pitching side. That his 145 ERA- is far worse than his 123 FIP-, which is already mind-scarring, is just cosmically problematic. And then, you get to his 101 xFIP- and it dawns on you that Elder is still just Elder. He’s just cursed, like most of his pitching staff teammates. Yes, Elder does very little to actually neuter the rate at which fly balls become homers. He doesn’t throw hard, and his nature as a groundball pitcher means that when he executes, it’s generally not a fly ball at all. Still, he had few homer issues in 2022, and even when he struggled in 2023, his HR/FB was fine and identical to his first set of starts, where he was legitimately good. The HR/FB crept up substantially over his ten-start performance in 2024, and here in 2025, well… his 18.7 percent HR/FB is the highest of anyone with more than 72 innings pitched so far this season.
Does Elder “deserve” his HR/FB? It’s hard to say. His xERA is horrid and actually slightly worse than his FIP, which is at least a partial (very partial, given how pitchers influence their xERAs less than the batters they face) vote towards “yes.” That said, a lot of that xERA is driven by his strikeout and walk rates, which are baked into xFIP. The contact quality he’s allowed has been bad, to be sure, but it’s not like, worst-in-MLB levels, while his HR/FB is. If you want to blame it on specific pitches getting grooved and crushed, that doesn’t make sense either, as his meatball and meatball swing rates are pretty similar to 2022-2023. He’s also gotten a bit unlucky in that four of his 20 homers allowed were severely park-aided.
None of that really matters, though. Elder is largely present because he’s still standing while everyone else has peaced out to the Injured List, and he’s going to be present through roughly six innings or 100 pitches tonight because, well, this is the Atlanta Braves.
One thing Elder really needs to do is stop walking guys. He’s had multiple walks in every single start since July 9, and he simply doesn’t strike out enough guys to make that okay. You can at least try to live through a solo homer here and there, but walking guys and allowing homers is just sad, even if the homers are more prevalent than you’d expect given the pitching quality. Still, it doesn’t bode well when the Phillies just hit a Quantrillion homers in the series opener, and are now going to be facing Elder, whom they crushed for three homers in two innings (along with Elder’s 2/4 K/BB ratio) earlier this year in easily his worst outing of the season. Elder and the Phillies just broadly don’t get along — his only good start against them, ever, came in June 2023, and it’s been defective turtles all the way down otherwise.
On the flip side, the Braves will try to do something against Ranger Suarez, who is in the midst of another very good season. Suarez has 3.5 fWAR on the year and a 71/73/87 line. He’s benefited substantially from sequencing and is running a very low HR/FB, so he’s like the anti-Elder in pretty much all respects. Suarez has already dominated the Braves twice this year — once in Philadelphia in May, and once in Atlanta in June, and is currently in what is likely his best two-start stretch of his career (combined 21/0 K/BB ratio over his last 13 2/3 innings), so, uh, yeah. Have fun playing out the string on Friday night tonight, Braves. Please find Bryce Elder a new home.
Game Date/Time: Friday, August 29, 6:45 p.m. EDT
Location: Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia, PA
Radio: 680 AM/93.7 FM The Fan