The Braves have turbocharged their bullpen
Prometheus brought fire to mankind. Reynaldo López and friends are bringing heat to the Braves relief corps.
Reports of the 2023 Braves bullpen’s demise were greatly exaggerated. Sure, the ERA was mediocre (11th) and the unit swooned in a largely meaningless September, but the FIP (7th) and xFIP (4th) tell the story of a unit doomed more by luck and sequencing than anything.
But as good as the bullpen was, it was missing something.
The 2023 Braves’ velocity deficit
I pulled up Savant and sorted teams by average bullpen fastball velocity.
The Braves are 24th. But average fastball velocity doesn’t tell us everything. A team can employ a couple of relievers who sit 98 and also keep Darren O’Day around as a change-of-pace option or an innings-eater. O’Day will drag the unit’s average velocity down, but he doesn’t make the fireballers less effective.
So let’s ask a different question. The Braves’ season leader in average FB velo (min. 1 inning)1 was Daysbel Hernandez (96.0 mph). How many teams had at least one reliever who averaged more than that? The answer? Every other team. That’s right. While the 2023 Braves were a low-but-unremarkable 24th in average fastball velocity, they were dead last what I’ll call “highest average velocity.” Every team in baseball had at least one reliever who threw harder than the Braves’ hardest thrower.
I’ll make the obvious caveat here that high-velocity relievers suck all the time and low-velocity relievers are sometimes great. Carlos Hernández sat 99 for the Royals this year and was unremarkable (5.67 ERA/4.28 FIP); 2022 Collin McHugh sat 91 and dominated (2.60 ERA/2.71 FIP). But there are hitters who struggle against high velocity, and so having at least a reliever or two who can blow hitters away with pure, unadulterated heat is valuable.
So the Braves went and got one of those guys.
The 2024 Braves’ velocity infusion (or, “Boy, I really hope Reynaldo López is a reliever)
This is a video of something no Braves reliever managed to do last year.
That’s Reynaldo López throwing his 19th pitch of an outing at 100.1 mph. Every 2023 Braves reliever combined threw two pitches above 98 mph (both by Raisel Iglesias, topping out at 98.2 mph).
The home crowd doesn’t murmur. The commentators don’t break from their script. That’s partly because triple-digit velocity is part of the modern game, and partly because this was the 67th 100+ mph pitch Reynaldo López threw in 2023.
Why don’t we watch a few more together?
Yeah, that’s the stuff.
It’s not all López, though. With the exception of Aaron Bummer (94.4 mph), every reliever the Braves have acquired or re-signed this offseason had a 2023 average fastball velocity of at least 95.3 mph. In total, if you take the average fastball velocity of the projected 2024 Opening Day bullpen (Iglesias, Minter, Bummer, Johnson, Jiménez, Kerr, Matzek), weighted for how many pitches they each threw in their last healthy season (2022 for Matzek, 2023 for everyone else), the Braves’ average fastball velocity would jump from 94.0 mph to 95.7 mph, which would have been third highest in baseball last year.
The Takeaway
You know what they say about the best laid plans. It’s possible that López ends up in the rotation and someone loses a tick on their fastball and suddenly, the fire-breathing dragon turns into Mushu from Mulan. But on paper, the 2024 Braves bullpen looks primed to do something the 2023 unit couldn’t really do, even on its best day: throw gas.
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This caveat bumps Taylor Hearn out of the top spot, but for the record, Hearn’s inclusion would only change things marginally.