The Atlanta Braves Have Assembled the Best Bullpen in Baseball

With the additions made this offseason, the Atlanta Braves have put together one of the best bullpens in all of baseball going into 2022. 

There is no question that a lot of the early struggles in 2021 could be directly attributed to the Atlanta Braves bullpen.

The three big lefties they were counting on to fortify the back-end of games in Will Smith, Tyler Matzek, and A.J. Minter were not fantastic to start the year.

Chris Martin was great in May but then started to decline rapidly leaving Luke Jackson as the only dependable righty in the bullpen.

There was not a ton of depth, and the problem became when a game was close late, the lower-leverage relievers would allow the other team to get add-on runs and move the score out of reach for the offense.

Alex Anthopoulos has clearly made it a point this offseason to not let that happen again.

Braves Have Best Bullpen on Paper

While everyone is claiming who is the best at this-or-that on paper, I think it’s time Atlanta claims the best bullpen on paper going into the season.

Bullpens can be a hard thing to predict year-to-year.

But if the Night Shift looks anything like it did in the 2021 postseason, along with the additions of Kenley Jansen, Collin McHugh, Kirby Yates (later in the year), and possibly a healthy Darren O’Day, it’s hard to imagine any bullpen in baseball competing with that bullpen depth.

That doesn’t even include bullpen options like Tyler Thornburg, Sean Newcomb, Jay Jackson, Jacob Webb, Dylan Lee, William Woods, Brooks Wilson, Indigo Diaz, Touki Toussaint, and Spencer Strider.

There is a ton of depth here that will likely get used throughout the season — especially in the first month of the season when starters will likely be limited and rosters could be expanded.

And it’s also become very balanced. While Smith, Matzek, and Minter are more than capable of getting out righties and lefties, it’s nice to have some more right-handed arms in the pen along with Jackson in the additions of Jansen and McHugh.

This will give Snitker some more options to play matchups late in the game depending on who is coming up for the opposing team.

And While Jansen will serve as the team’s closer, there are plenty of players with experience in the closer’s role.

Jansen is second all-time among active players with 350 saves. Will Smith has 86, Jackson has 19, Minter has 20, and Yates has 57.

At times in the past few years, it seemed like the Braves had a good bullpen but not a dominant bullpen built for success in the postseason.

You can’t say that anymore with the number of strikeouts this group will likely put up.

The big six (Jansen, Smith, McHugh, Matzek, Jackson, and Minter) are all projected to finish with an ERA between 3.42-3.97 and with 68-86 strikeouts, according to FanGraphs.

Again, bullpens are the hardest to predict year-to-year, but hopefully this group will give us less heartburn late in games than last year’s group.