Well, it\u2019s not really a solution to a perceived need for additional heft in the starting pitching department, but it\u2019s a move anyway:<\/p>\n
A 14-year MLB veteran, the Venezuelan left-hander has 17.1 career fWAR across over 1,630 career innings. His career pitching line (ERA-\/FIP-\/xFIP-) is 100\/103\/107 \u2014 basically a fourth-ish starter over the arc of a decade and a half. That said, Perez had a career year in 2022 (3.9 fWAR on a 74\/81\/96 line), but has fallen on hard times since. He\u2019s thrown 332 2\/3 innings after that season, never exceeding 0.8 fWAR in a season, and with a moribund 104\/115\/114 line, which is basically fifth starter territory. He\u2019s pitched for four different teams in that span, and missed a bunch of time last season due to a (gulp) shoulder strain.<\/p>\n
Given that he\u2019s aging, Perez having the worst xFIP- of his career last season isn\u2019t really surprising. His success generally relies on not getting smashed by HR\/FB, but he doesn\u2019t seem to have any propensity for actually limiting homers (groundball pitchers often have high HR\/FB rates because the fly balls they allow are crushed at a greater rate). The Braves probably don\u2019t need to be adding additional risk exposure via HR\/FB rate given what happened last year, but they\u2019re probably not going to rely on Perez all that much anyway.<\/p>\n
On the plus side, Perez is a sinker-changeup-cutter guy who showed good command of the first two last year. If he carries that over and stops relying on his cutter so much (as it has been consistently crushed in 2022), there may be something there. For now, though, this is just pure depth \u2014 just amassed in the offseason, as opposed to in a panic a la the Carlos Carrascos and Cal Quantrills of yesteryear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Well, it\u2019s not really a solution to a perceived need for additional heft in the starting pitching department,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2290],"tags":[4206,5],"class_list":{"0":"post-546965","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-baseball","8":"tag-atlanta-braves-news","9":"tag-baseball"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115987360332916153","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}