Atlanta Braves 2022 Season Review: AJ Minter back to his best

By all metrics, 2021 was AJ Minter’s second-worst season as an Atlanta Braves player. In 2022, he managed to flip those numbers around and turn in an elite season.

AJ Minter, with the exception of 2019, has been a reliable and productive arm at the back end of the Atlanta Braves bullpen. That was precisely the case in 2022 where Minter pitched more innings in 2022 than any other year of his career at a flat 70.0, signaling just how much Brian Snitker relied on him to shut opposing hitters down.

And shut opposing hitters down he did as he posted a 2.06 ERA, 2.13 FIP, 0.91 WHIP, 12.09 K/9, and 2.1 fWAR. In fact, Minter’s season was judged to be the fifth-most valuable out of all relievers in 2022 according to FanGraphs.

Aside from Minter’s ridiculous 2020 where he stranded an unreal 93% of runners on base, posted a 0.83 ERA, and induced a 50% ground ball rate, there really aren’t any seasons that Minter has had that were better than his 2022. The question remains, then, regarding what changed between 2021 and 2022 that made Minter so drastically more effective.

Why was AJ Minter’s 2022 with the Atlanta Braves so effective?

A large and obvious part of it was cutting down on his walks. Minter, with the exception of his first 15 innings in the big leagues, has consistently had a BB/9 of over 3.2, and it was 3.4 in 2021. In 2022, his BB/9 was an impressive 1.93. Cutting down the walks wasn’t the only thing fueling Minter’s success, though. He struck out the most batters in his career with 94, giving him a 7th-best-in-baseball 29.2% K-BB ratio.

This kind of success doesn’t just appear out of thin air. Minter was able to increase his strikeout rate and decrease his walk rate by doing what he should have always had the confidence to do: attacking hitters early and often.

Minter mixed his fastball and changeup into his three-pitch arsenal more than in any other season before, throwing them a combined 68% of the time, resulting in a career-low rate for his slider/cutter at 32%. This methodology clearly worked, as Minter not only hit career-high speeds on his fastball velocity at 96.6, but he also generated the lowest contact rate on pitches inside the zone in his entire career.

Using the slider/cutter less helped the effectiveness of that particular pitch too, resulting in a whiff rate increase of 6% and a drastic spin rate increase.

Minter’s percentage of swing-and-miss strikes went from 14.3% in 2021 to 15.7% in 2022, and his first-pitch strike rate increased from 63.8% to 66.1%. If anything, Minter’s incredible increase in effectiveness is a sign that ground balls aren’t everything. He saw a career low in his ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio at 0.86, whilst last year that number was 1.31.

If you dig a tad deeper, Minter’s expected stats look fantastic too. He was in the top 4% of the league in xBA, xWOBA, and xERA, comfortably displaying that luck was not involved in his success.

The Atlanta Braves desperately need the AJ Minter of 2022 to return in 2023. If he can, the back end of one of the league’s best bullpens will once again be impenetrable, and AJ could potentially see himself as one of the many options at closer.