Right-handed pitcher Bryce Elder has now spent parts of four seasons with the Atlanta Braves, and there have been quite a lot of ups and downs — with a notable amount of downs — in his career so far. Braves fans are probably pretty split when it comes to their feelings about Elder as a pitcher: he’s simultaneously a source of frustration as a not-that-great plug-and-play option when injuries have struck, but also has been workmanlike rather than horrific, like many other fill-in arms the team has resorted to over the last few years. With the collapse of the rotation in 2025, Elder got prominent billing, which probably helped damn him by association. Nonetheless, he was around for most of 2025, making 28 starts and lasting 156 1/3 innings on the mound, eating innings when no one else was really around to do so. Let’s take a look at how he fared this year and what to look forward to in the 2026 season.

How acquired

A fifth-round pick in the shortened 2020 MLB Draft, Elder flew through three minor league levels in 2021 and has been up-and-down since. Amazingly, despite making 31 starts for the team in 2023, and 28 in 2025, he has not yet made a Braves Opening Day roster. In 2025, he was recalled even before March was done, but then went down to make room for Spencer Strider in May. But, injuries forced him back up about two weeks later, and he spent the rest of the year as the consistently-present member of Atlanta’s tattered rotation.

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What were the expectations?

Well, they weren’t very high, given that the Braves didn’t include him on the Opening Day roster, again. He was basically the main “in case of injury depth arm,” and unfortunately for the Braves, he was needed early and often.

Elder has been consistently available, but his career has been anything but consistent. At the tail end of 2022, he had ten decent outings against weak competition. That helped set him up for a 2023 where he started great and even made an All-Star team, before collapsing partway through the summer and ending the season with an aggregate line befitting an innings-eater. The Braves didn’t use him nearly as much in 2024 — just ten starts — and he had a weird line with an inflated 157 ERA- and 114 FIP-, but the best xFIP- he had posted to date (97).

Basically, through 2024, Elder had a career 98/104/102 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) — essentially a third or fourth starter, but one the team didn’t really want to run out there all that much, suggesting more sporadic usage and less overall production. Still, the Braves kept him around, and he started the season in Gwinnett, staying ready for… getting called up almost immediately after his first minor league start of the year.

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2025 Results

Would it surprise you to learn that all in all, Elder was basically just Elder in 2025? He put up 0.9 fWAR in 156 1/3 innings spanning 28 starts; his pitching line was 125/112/98. He had a nice three starts in May before going to the minors, and really picked things up down the stretch, when the pressure was more or less off and there wasn’t much to pitch for other than to get through the year.

What went right?

Pitching deep into games became an asset for the team, if only to help the season hurry up and finish. In a darkly comedic turn, the Braves’ management team that kept praising Elder for being around and eating innings essentially got a heaping dose of the thing they praised: Elder being around and eating a lot of innings. He led the team in starts (28) and innings pitched (156 1/3, next-closest was Chris Sale at 125 2/3). He lasted seven or more innings six times, four of them coming in his final six starts of the year.

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Without him being around to nom nom nom frames, maybe the Braves are still mercifully trying to get enough outs to end the season at this point.

That said, there are a few other things that could be talked about — maybe not things that went right, unequivocally, but worth a note. As the season became meaningless, Elder started to heavily work in the four-seam fastball he had tinkered with earlier. It wasn’t a great offering, and his command of it was not all that exciting, but it gives him another look for the future. Around the time he altered his arsenal to actually work in a four-seamer, his overall performance improved — he had a 96/87/90 line in August and September. And, he also had a 106/122/96 line in April and May, where he wasn’t throwing the four-seamer quite as much, but more than he did in June and July (192/142/111). It’s not clear that Elder wouldn’t be a league-average-ish run preventer given enough runway, anyway, but the additional pitch in his arsenal seemed to help a bit.

He also had that masterful outing in San Francisco — a 12/0 K/BB ratio in eight innings, the only run coming on a solo homer. It was not just his best pitching of the year, but definitely, and by far, the best pitching performance of his career. The Braves lost anyway.

What went wrong?

Inconsistency — as usual. As noted above, it’s been a recurring problem for Elder in his career, and 2025 was no different. April was bad, May was good, June and July were a nightmare, and then he rebounded. To the extent the native Texan found his footing, it was too little too late, when it didn’t matter. If he were stronger early on, or during the early summer, maybe the season could’ve gone differently in some fashion.

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More broadly, Elder’s ceiling just looks fairly limited based on his arsenal. His slider and sinker have decent but not exciting shape; his four-seamer and changeup are nothing all that interesting and mostly just a change of pace to keep him from getting too predictable. His command is less “pinpoint” and more “it’s gonna be somewhere in the zone, hope it doesn’t get whacked.” In 2023, he was able to bamboozle hitters with some really irritating, and definitely uncommon, spin deflection on both his sinker and his slider; his slider mechanics were a mess in 2024 and he couldn’t replicate it. 2025 looked a lot like 2024 in this regard, as the slider continued to have issues, even as his sinker had some crazy spin deflection.

Put this together, and it seemed like, at times (if not most of the time), Elder’s success or failure had a lot to do with whatever was going on with him mechanics-wise and almost nothing to do with his opponents. He was touched up by the White Sox, and had very poor outings against teams like the Rangers, Marlins, Rockies, and Angels, all of which hit poorly this season. Meanwhile, he had a number of good outings against good-hitting teams too (Cubs, Athletics, Dodgers).

But, we also need to touch on the elephant in the room, and the thing that tanked not just his season, but that of many of his teammates, and really, the team as a whole to some extent: HR/FB. Nearly 16 percent of the fly balls hit against Elder went for homers. Only one player with more innings pitched than Elder had a higher rate. Only four players with at least 100 innings pitched had a higher rate. Only 24 with at least 60 innings pitched had a higher rate. Elder had no specific HR/FB issues until 2024, where things went berserk in a smaller sample. That then carried over into a much larger sample in 2025. If the inability to stem the homers is a real thing for Elder, he’s going to be barely-playable going forward because, as a pitch-to-contact guy, he’s already going to have the “murdered by BABIP” outings anyway — he can’t afford a different way to lose fairly often. All of this brings up his doomed start against the White Sox in August. Elder didn’t actually pitch all that poorly, with a 3/2 K/BB ratio. But, across the third and fifth innings, the White Sox got a bunch of seeing-eye grounders and just-enough liners to dump eight runs on Elder’s ledger, with no ball in those frames traveling more than 270 feet from the plate.

2026 Outlook

The magic word may as well be “consistency” at this point. (Another magic phrase would be “please have a lower HR/FB rate this time, thanks.”) It’s not really clear what Elder is going to do at any point when he takes the mound — or any month, or really, any season. His profile is already prone to inconsistency because he relies on his defense; relying on fly balls not leaving the yard is just another pain point. Maybe he builds on integrating his four-seamer and cleans up the slider mechanics and has an early 2023-esque renaissance. Maybe he just repeats 2024 and 2025 again, with an okay pitching performance ruined by way too many homers. Maybe he does something in between, or maybe he somehow flames out completely. Who knows? Projections-wise, Steamer sees him as a generic swingman at this point; ZiPS has him as a generic starter that won’t go deep into games.

Maybe the Braves move on, since he’s out of options. Maybe this is the year he makes a Braves Opening Day roster. We’ll see.