{"id":564266,"date":"2026-02-10T15:05:43","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T15:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/564266\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T15:05:43","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T15:05:43","slug":"what-will-grant-holmes-produce-in-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/564266\/","title":{"rendered":"What will Grant Holmes produce in 2026?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back when I was working on IWAG a lot, I noticed a dichotomy of sorts. For position players, IWAG did basically about as well as Steamer and ZiPS, which wasn\u2019t really surprising, given that it was made to try and replicate them. No matter what year I looked at, no system really beat the others, and IWAG was right there with them, generally with the same misses and successes. In unison or individually, the systems basically gave you \u201cthe right\u201d idea about what the position players you looked at would do, even when restricting yourself to a small group of names.<\/p>\n

For pitchers, though, it was all over the place. Sometimes one system clearly did better than the others, but more to the point, pitchers had breakouts and lost seasons that deviated from their central estimate (or even their distribution, insofar as I could generate or infer it) more often.<\/p>\n

Why this dichotomy? My guess \u2014 an educated guess based on me tinkering with IWAG to little avail \u2014 is that hitters playing through or affected by injury tend to just kind of look like less effective versions of themselves, but pitcher injuries completely upend both availability and effectiveness. On the flip side, I can\u2019t really confirm that a pitcher feeling \u201creally\u201d healthy can set a new performance baseline, so maybe that\u2019s just attributable to pitch design and mechanics cleanup things. Either way, though, pitchers were less predictable.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to Grant Holmes, the subject of today\u2019s post. There\u2019s a lot of uncertainty with Holmes! He went down with elbow troubles last year, but didn\u2019t have Tommy John Surgery. Is he going to be healthy enough to contribute? Well there be a rotation spot for him? He\u2019s out of options, so short of additional minor league rehab, there\u2019s not really anywhere to \u201cput him.\u201d He\u2019s already served as a reliever, but that shoved him into the rotation, and maybe he\u2019ll be forcibly shoved out of it by others, who knows. (And then, will other injuries pull him back in.) What\u2019s going on with his HR\/FB, which was to his benefit in 2024 but very much to his detriment in 2025? How many innings will he get, and how effective will be, depending on role and considering all of the above? Oy.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying every pitcher is Grant Holmes, but when you consider this laundry list of \u201cissues\u201d with thinking about Holmes\u2019 future versus that of your run-of-the-mill potential-starter-quality position player, you get where I was going with the intro paragraphs, hopefully.<\/p>\n

A first-round pick all the way back in 2014, Holmes spent seemingly forever in the minors until the Braves gave him a chance in the bigs last year. He pitched incredibly well for about five weeks as a reliever, then got a shot to start and kept up the good work. He transitioned back to a shorter-stint relief role and faltered, but finished the year fairly strong in his final four (and especially his final three) outings, most of which were starts. (He even did something pretty crazy, getting five outs in relief on September 29, before pitching four innings as a starter in a must-win-to-make-playoffs game for the Braves on September 30 \u2014 though the Mets were likely taking it very easy by that point.)<\/p>\n

All in all, Holmes had an 86\/81\/87 line (ERA-\/FIP-\/xFIP-) as a swingman in 68 1\/3 innings in 2024, which is an insanely good outcome considering he was a minor league journeyman who hadn\u2019t gotten a shot to that point. He still has under two years of service time, so the Braves have him for quite a while\u2026 provided they don\u2019t lose him to a roster crunch given his out-of-options status.<\/p>\n

Holmes made (and kept his spot in) the obliterated Braves\u2019 2025 rotation \u2014 at least until he was the last guy to go down when his own elbow started barking. He struggled out of the gate with some pretty clunky pitching in his first five starts of the year, but then got it together and had an awesome nine-start stretch that was marred only by the fact that he ran a HR\/FB over 20 percent in that span. That good run culminated in a 15-strikeout performance in just 6 1\/3 innings against the Rockies, but then he faded again, and he was really struggling by the time his season ended in late July. Specifically, by ERA-\/FIP-\/xFIP-:<\/p>\n

First five starts: 110\/141\/123Middle nine starts: 87\/98\/71Last seven starts: 95\/102\/120<\/p>\n

Put those things together with a single dominant relief appearance he had early in the year before making a start, and Holmes finished with a 94\/108\/98 line in 115 innings, good for 0.9 fWAR. If not for the HR\/FB, that would\u2019ve been solid #2ish\/#3ish starter production. (Alas, the homers were a problem, for him and many of his teammates.)<\/p>\n

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Forecasting for Holmes (and any other pitcher with an uncertain role) is tough. I theoretically should build in some module in IWAG about how to handle this separately, since it\u2019s not exactly a pure starter or pure reliever profile, but instead, I\u2019m going to shortcut it by assuming that Holmes completes roughly 80 percent of his 2026 innings as a starter. That can artificially inflate his WAR, since it\u2019s technically harder to be a starter than a reliever as far as replacement level goes, so just keep that in mind\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Basically, IWAG\u2019s point estimate is that Holmes is a guy capable of preventing runs at a roughly league-average rate when used as a swingman. If a lot of that usage is as a starter, that\u2019s about 1 WAR for 100 innings, which is not all that exciting but also far better than letting someone bleed value.<\/p>\n

As you can see from the projections above, this is not an off-kilter take on Holmes. Steamer has him at 0.8 WAR in 87 innings, mostly relieving. ZiPS is a little lower, but still in the same-range-ish, again, mostly seeing Holmes as a reliever. IWAG\u2019s higher WAR total is, in part, due to the assumption above about how much Holmes will start.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I would describe this curve as \u201ccute.\u201d An actual curve! Neat. Basically, the main question for Holmes is availability and usage. Which, yeah, we kind of figured.<\/p>\n

Alright, I\u2019ve given you the info. Well, some info. You may have your own info. With that, I ask you:<\/p>\n

Rounded to the nearest fWAR, how much will Grant Holmes produce in 2026?How confident are you in your choice? Go with a scale from 1-5, where 3 is \u201cI dunno, reasonably confident,\u201d 5 is certain, and 1 is \u201cI am participating but have no confidence in my choice and don\u2019t want the fact that it will likely be incorrect to affect my place in any theoretical standings all that much.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back when I was working on IWAG a lot, I noticed a dichotomy of sorts. For position players,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":564267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2394],"tags":[191,46,73299,4166,5,192,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-564266","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-braves","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-braves","10":"tag-atlanta-braves-discussion","11":"tag-atlantabraves","12":"tag-baseball","13":"tag-braves","14":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116046956645485918","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564266","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=564266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}