Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- One MLB team’s relief corps stands out as the most dominant group in baseball this season.
- Advanced metrics and traditional stats both confirm their dominance in high-leverage situations.
- The bullpen’s ability to neutralize inherited runners could prove decisive in the postseason.
The Atlanta Braves have the best bullpen in baseball, that’s a fact. But before we prove that, I’m going to lie to you.
Atlanta has the second-best bullpen ERA, but only trail the New York Yankees by .02. They have the best reliever in MLB by ERA: Robert Suarez. They have four of the top 30 relievers out of 173 qualifiers by ERA: Suarez, Dylan Lee, Didier Fuentes and Raisel Iglesias. That is an absurd level of top-end relief pitching for a single franchise, and a bullpen that should carry them through the postseason. And before the 'pen even arrives, they also have a top-10 starting rotation in the sport … by ERA.
But ERA is a liar, and all that was a lie. Underlying data shows their starting rotation is fairly mediocre beyond Chris Sale, and Suarez has a titanic gap between his 2.44 FIP (a more accurate ERA estimator) and his moderately ridiculous 0.56 ERA. Suarez is not the best reliever in baseball — in fact, he’s not even the best reliever on his own team. Yes, Atlanta’s bullpen ERA is deceiving, but not because it makes them look good.
It doesn’t make them look good enough. So it’s time for some real nerd behavior to understand just how good the Braves bullpen is. Spoiler: It’s really something.
ERA doesn't come close to telling you how good the Braves' bullpen is
Atlanta has five main relievers: Suarez, Lee, Fuentes, Iglesias (the closer) and Tyler Kinley. Of course, the doldrums of a bullpen also matter quite a lot, but you’re not really using more than five relievers in close games if you can help it. Lee in particular has been stupid good (honestly deserves a deep dive of his own), and even Kinley — whose ERA is far worse than the other four — has serious value in that he simply does not allow loud contact. That’s super-duper important, and here’s why.
FIP and its friends (xFIP, SIERA, the whole gang) are pretty good at evaluating pitchers in the abstract; but bullpens do not exist in the abstract. They appear in high-leverage, high-stress situations, often with runners on base, runners who would not count toward their runs allowed total. So avoiding hard contact is of paramount importance, and somewhere Atlanta has excelled. They are fourth-best in bullpen barrel rate and third-best in home run rate; Kinley in particular has incredible hard-hit numbers, and Fuentes has a downright elite 2.3 percent barrel rate. One does not simply hit the ball hard against the Atlanta Braves bullpen.
Advanced and traditional data tells you the Braves' bullpen is beyond elite
But we can go even nerdier. Relief pitchers deal with inherited runners which, for some reason, do not get counted against their stats at all if they score — despite said relievers’ entire job usually being to stop that exact thing from happening. Enter my new best friend for relief pitching evaluation: RE-RA9, invented … less than a month ago by FanGraphs’ Ben Clemens. Basically, if you assign a run expectancy value to each inherited runner and then subtract their actual runs allowed per nine innings, you much more accurately account for relief pitcher performance. It’s super complex, but negative = good. Clemens also asked for name ideas, for which I suggest "RERUNS." How does our Atlanta fivesome look?
Ever wondered how the five main Atlanta Braves relievers would look if you better accounted for inherited runners with @_Ben_Clemens's RE-RA9 stat? Me too. pic.twitter.com/M2j5gQAFXO
— Oliver Fox (@oliversfox) July 14, 2026
If you fell asleep five stats ago, I get it, but stick with me here: Atlanta’s bullpen leads the Majors in lots of traditional and advanced stats — both types of WAR, ERA-, win probability added, all that Statcast hard-hit stuff I just discussed. It’s a glorious marriage: what we see with our eyes and/or manual scorecards has joined in holy matrimony with the stuff you need expensive cameras and tracking software to figure out.
So I guess I could have just … used simple stats and told you how good they were. But that would not have painted the whole picture, a glorious relief-pitching mural that shows Atlanta is even better positioned to go deep in the postseason than we already knew they were. Plus, it was super fun! It was fun, right guys? Guys?
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