The first winning streak of the season is finally underway for the Atlanta Braves. The club improved that mark to four games with their comeback victory over the St. Louis Cardinals last night. The game felt at hand after Sean Murphy blasted a three-run homer in the eight, but the Cardinals rallied to score three runs in the ninth off of Raisel Iglesias. Thankfully, Atlanta's closer was able to finish the game off by getting Nolan Arenado to weakly groundout in front of the plate.
It's clear we've yet to see the same dominant Iglesias we saw late in games last season. Just nine games into the season Iglesias currently owns a 6.00 ERA, 7.48 FIP, and -0.5 fWAR. As we dive into his underlying metrics in this article here, we learn that many of his trends are concerning.
Braves closer Raisel Iglesias is giving up a ton of hard contact to begin 2025
Over the past decade there's been very few relievers as consistently good as Raisel Iglesias. Since the 2016 season, Iglesias has posted a single season ERA in the 2's or better every year except for his 2019 campaign. His Braves tenure has been top notch, recording 72 saves since coming over from Los Angeles.
Sadly, 2025 has been a much different story thus far. Iglesias has inexplicably given up a ton of hard contact to begin the season. Even more worrisome is the fact that he's allowed four homers already this year, matching his season total from last year. One could argue his usage has been a bit questionable thus far. Using him in a four run game and making him pitch in three straight games last night is one example of that.
However, with the Braves injury luck in both the rotation and bullpen, Iglesias is normally one of the few guys Brian Snitker can lean on in troublesome predicaments. To be fair Iglesias has given up homers to Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper so a small sample size will obviously look pretty bad after facing those two sluggers.
Sadly, the rest of his expected numbers rank towards the bottom of baseball. Iglesias sports an xERA of 7.18 in the fifth percentile in baseball, average exit velocity of 93.8 mph which is in the third percentile, and a groundball rate of 24% the fourth percentile in baseball. In summary, Iglesias is giving up a ton of hard contact and a lot of it is in the air, thus the home run problems in 2025.
Iglesias' actual stuff doesn't signal this steep of a decline thankfully. All of his offerings (Fastball, slider, changeup, sinker) is down about 1 mph from last season. Not really big enough to think he can no longer get good big league hitters out. Hopefully, as the season rolls on Iglesias can figure out how to start getting some more groundballs and turn his season around alongside the Braves. However, should he continue to give up these rockets and turn Braves' wins into losses, the club needs to be ready to make a significant bullpen addition.