Unraveling The Riddle Of Braves’ Starting Pitcher Bryce Elder

If you would have told an Atlanta Braves fan on Opening Day that their favorite team would get a grand total of 10 starts and two wins from starting pitchers Max Fried and Kyle Wright combined in the season’s first two months, the assumption would be that the club would be residing near the bottom of the NL East. Well, that’s exactly what those pitchers have contributed thanks in part to injury, but the Braves are sitting pretty at the top of the division, thanks in large part to righty starter Bryce Elder.

The 24-year-old has only three wins himself, mind you, but you know what they say about pitcher wins. Elder hasn’t lost a single one of his 11 starts, and leads the NL in ERA at 1.92. Unfortunately, ERA doesn’t tell you much more about a pitcher’s performance than wins, and most of the analytics crowd has pronounced Elder as extremely lucky thanks to the loud batted ball authority he has yielded. Yes, there is a lot going on with Mr. Elder, and let’s try to wade through it and get a better feel for who he really is – and who he can be – as a pitcher.

Elder was a 5th round pick in 2020, the year that there was no minor league play due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He didn’t start his pro career until the next spring, and quickly established himself as a good but not great prospect. Each year I prepare an ordered list of top minor league pitching prospects based on performance and age relative to league and level, and Elder made my cut in both 2021 and 2022 at #82 and #183, respectively.

The ranking on this list shouldn’t be overly relied upon – making the list in and of itself is a solid enough accomplishment, but it’s fair to say that I was not expecting greatness from Elder, maybe ever and certainly not so quickly. Organization-mate Ian Anderson, for one, had a much higher peak on my list.

But Elder was more than solid in a 54-inning major league audition last season, posting a 3.17 ERA, leading up to his brilliant beginning to the 2023 season.

Now, I would think it’s pretty unanimous that the actual quality of his work this year doesn’t come close to measuring up to his gaudy ERA. It doesn’t take an “analytics guy” to reach that conclusion. But my concepts of Adjusted Contact Score and “Tru” ERA have generally done a pretty good job of measuring true-talent performance levels, even over relatively small sample sizes.

His actual numbers show a pitcher with a decent K/BB profile and elite contact management skill – a 77 UNadjusted Contact Score and a 76 component ERA. Like his current 81 FIP-, those numbers are quite good but nowhere near the neighborhood of his 43 ERA-. He’s had an incredible amount of sequencing good fortune.

And he’s also had a solid amount of good fortune on balls in play. As his critics say, Elder has allowed an awful lot of loud contact across all batted ball types. 90.5 mph overall average exit speed allowed? Nick Pivetta (90.7 mph) was the only 2022 ERA qualifier to allow a higher mark. His 97.4 mph average liner exit speed allowed? Far higher than any 2022 ERA qualifier. Ditto his 89.3 mph average grounder exit speed. While his 91.9 mph average fly ball exit speed isn’t nearly as extreme, it’s still about a full standard deviation worse than the 2022 MLB average.

So you think all of that would lead me to pronounce Elder a poor contact manager? Hardly. His batted ball frequency profile is pristine. That 57.6% grounder rate is higher than any 2022 ERA qualifier not named Framber Valdez. Even higher than Logan Webb’s 56.7%. This means that despite allowing loud exit speeds across the board, Elder has been an above average contact manager this season, posting a 94 Adjusted Contact Score, giving him a 3.88 “Tru” ERA (90 “Tru”-).

So yes, his ERA is obnoxiously low compared to his core metrics, and even his FIP overstates his performance a bit. But despite allowing extremely loud contact, Elder is a bit above average overall, and specifically with regard to contact management. And that’s a fairly big deal.

But that’s only the beginning. Let’s peel back another layer and grade out his pitches. Each season I grade the qualifying offerings of each pitcher with 135 or more innings pitched. a threshold Elder will certainly surpass barring injury. Each grade is based on both bat-missing and contact management compared to league average, with average pitches earning “B” grades.

As of today, Elder’s sinker (36.8% usage rate) gets a “C+”, his changeup (11.9%) a “B”, his slider (38.5%) a “B+” and his four-seam fastball (12.8%) an “A”.

Lot to unpack here. The sinker is suffering due to contact management shortcomings. It has a pitch-specific 122 Adjusted Contact Score, quite poor for that pitch type, and a typically low 5.5% whiff rate. And remember this is an offering that he uses a ton.

Elder has to be pretty happy with his slider. It’s his most oft-used pitch, and it’s logged a very strong 74 Adjusted Contact Score and a perfectly respectable average-range 15.8% whiff rate. Can’t say that I see a ton of additional upside for the pitch, in regard to either quality or usage rate.

But how about that four-seamer. I ran down the importance of an elite four-seamer in my recent piece on the Pirates’ Mitch Keller. Yes, it’s the least effective pitch in the game, especially with regard to contact management, and yes, its overall usage rate has been in decline throughout MLB, but a great four-seamer often makes you a great pitcher, or at least a very good one.

And the early returns say that Elder’s four-seamer is pretty great. 11.3% whiff rate? Over a standard deviation above average. 92 pitch-specific Adjusted Contact Score? Almost a standard deviation better. Plus, these numbers – especially the pitch-specific whiff rates – tend to stabilize pretty quickly.

The best part with regard to projecting Elder’s future? The four-seamer’s extremely low present usage rate. I feel very comfortable saying that it’s a better pitch than his sinker, and he throws the latter three times as often. If he flipped that script, or at least tightened up the differential, he’d take a substantial step forward.

So I like Bryce Elder quite a bit, though his present mainstream numbers greatly overrate him. The Astros’ Valdez is the best pitcher of his type – the extreme grounder guy who allows hard contact. He’s going to be a pretty tough guy for Elder to top given his otherwordly grounder tendency. There are others, like teammate Wright, the Rockies’ German Marquez and the Giants’ Webb. Elder could fit in at the top of that group, alongside Webb.

But if he dramatically increases four-seam usage without negatively impacting the pitch’s quality, he could post mainstream numbers close to what he’s currently producing that would be much more reflective of his actual talent level. The Braves’ player development machine strikes again.