Is This the Last Chance for Jarred Kelenic?

The Atlanta Braves now have three outfielders signed to multi-year deals. What does Jarred Kelenic need to do to guarantee himself a role on the roster moving forward?

On the surface, it made sense.

Last offseason, the Braves executed a dizzying series of trades that left them with $17M in dead money and a former top prospect outfielder, one Jarred Kelenic. He flashed greatness, but the Mariners were frustrated with the up-and-down youngster.

Seattle acquired him as the primary prospect return in the Robinson Canó deal with the New York Mets, but the former 6th-overall pick in the 2018 MLB Draft had spent three years up and down from Seattle’s MLB roster to AAA, struggling in Seattle while appearing to be too good to remain in Tacoma.¹ Being acquired by the Braves was a chance for a fresh start: sitting in left field and the bottom of the lineup, it was a way for the mercurial talent to focus on playing his best baseball without the pressure of being asked to carry a lineup.

But the 2024 season in Atlanta didn’t go the way Kelenic expected, with the young outfielder batting just .231 on the season and seeing his playing time taken by waiver-wire pickup Ramón Laureano down the stretch.

What went wrong for Kelenic, and can he make a case to open 2025 that he needs to be given everyday playing time? Let’s talk about it.

Starting hot and a mid-season heater

Ten games into 2024, Kelenic had made eight starts in left field and was batting .462 with a 1.094 OPS, going 12-26 with four runs scored and three RBI. Even those two non-starts were productive, with the lefty entering for defense in the 8th inning and going 1-1 with a double, a run scored, and a walk.

See if you can spot where the trouble started on the full-season chart:

Courtesy of FanGraphs

If the answer is “almost right away”, you’d be right.

Kelenic sat for two straight games² in the season’s third week, both started by lefties (NYM’s José Quintana and MIA’s Trevor Rogers). When he came back, he went into a slump, hitting just .184 with a .530 OPS across the next month and a half.

Short of a brief but dominant run³ when he took over centerfield and leadoff for an injured Michael Harris II in mid-June, Kelenic never really flashed anything more than league-average (at best) the rest of the season. From July 2nd through the end of the season, Kelenic hit .175 with a .559 OPS and got into just eight starts in the month of September.

But, like, what happened?

Some bad luck and abandonment of his approach

Kelenic, like many of his Braves teammates, dealt with some underperformance as compared to his batted ball metrics last season: A .241 xBA and .412 xSLG against an actual .231 BA and .393 SLG. It all adds up to a .294 wOBA against a .309 xwOBA, so a little regression to the mean might help a bit.

But the key words there are “a bit”.

The bigger issues were Kelenic changing his approach and then…abandoning what was working.

Here’s a plot of Kelenic’s xwOBA, broken down by month and pitch type:

His summer hot streak coincides with improved performances against all three pitch types, but then it tails off.

Kelenic’s early struggles were because he was more aggressive against fastballs than anything else, essentially sitting on heaters at the expense of both breaking and offspeed pitches. Right around his June 15th promotion to leadoff, he made the big adjustment by backing off of his fastball hunting, pulling the trigger more often on both breaking pitches and offspeed.

And then he just…stopped.

Opposing pitchers aren’t entirely blameless in this - he started swinging at breaking pitches a lot less after June because he was seeing significantly less of them - but it’s not like those breaking pitches became heaters (which he had stopped hunting). They became offspeed pitches, and he still wasn’t performing that well.

He never rebounded to his early success against heaters, but he also wasn’t succeeding against soft stuff. It genuinely feels like he was just in between both extremes, which is obviously a place no professional hitter wants to stay.

It lost him his job in 2024.

There’s hope here for the future

Remember what we’ve talked about ad nauseam with new hitting coach Tim Hyers? He wants guys to be more aggressive about swinging at their pitch.

Fastballs are Kelenic’s pitch. 18 of his 47 career homers are on four-seamers, with no other pitch accounting for more than six.

(Fun fact: His homers off of fastballs travel an average of 402 feet, the 2nd-highest of all pitch types⁴, so he not only hits a lot of them but he hits them FAR.)

Just as recently as 2023, he hit .324 with a .556 slug off of heaters. I really think that’s the key here. Combine fixing that with some better luck and Kelenic’s back to be an everyday player, even if it’s no longer likely that he ends up as the star he was once expected to be.

Can he clean up the defense?

Alex Anthopoulos has gone on the record as liking Kelenic’s fit as a backup centerfielder, discussing his strong arm and good speed/range.

But last season, despite the physical tools, he graded out negatively on defense with a -2 OAA.

Half of that was just…careless mistakes. He lost one OAA on 2+ Star catches, with the other lost OAA coming on 1 Star catches. MLB’s definition of 1 Star catches are plays with a 95% Catch Probability.

From what I can tell, it appears to be his reads.

Here’s one, where he breaks back instead of in against the Mets and doesn’t get there:

Here’s another one, again coming versus a New York team, where he misreads the ball just short of the warning track and doesn’t complete the catch:

(It’s important to note that both of those were in road parks in a position he wasn’t expecting to play until he was thrust in there mid-season, but they’re 95% Catch Probability plays for a reason.)

He’s not a bad outfielder, per se, even if he didn’t grade out positively on defense last season. His arm is a legit weapon and his speed lets him make up ground in a hurry when he starts the play off on the wrong foot.

I’d be comfortable with Kelenic manning centerfield if Harris were to miss time this season, although I’d much rather have Harris (who I have discussed as a potential 25/25 or 30/30 breakout guy this year) both offensively and defensively.

But if Kelenic can figure it out? It unlocks a lot of options for this Braves team.

Depth will always work itself out

While having Kelenic playing well enough to need everyday playing time feels like a problem when Ronald Acuña Jr. is back and ready to play, I’d argue the opposite.

Depth will always work itself out.

Atlanta used 12 different outfielders last season, and while the injuries to Harris and Acuña resulted in extended absences, it’s not just 2024 where the team cycled through defenders on the grass. The 2023 roster was remarkably healthy and they still used seven different outfielders⁵. 2022’s probably a better corollary to 2025 - Acuña returning partway into the season from a knee tear - and the team still used ten different outfielders that year.

Additionally, it’s entirely likely that the designated hitter spot will be open in 2026, as incumbent slugger Marcell Ozuna’s playing on a club option for this season. If the team wants to save $16M and build in the ability to either cycle in Drake Baldwin’s bat or a quasi-day off for the regulars, Kelenic breaking out as an everyday player makes it much easier to take an outfielder’s glove away for the day and have them just hit.

But again, it all comes down to Kelenic’s bat. Help us, Tim Hyers, you’re our only hope.

1. Over 126 games, Kelenic hit .302 with a .941 OPS and 28 homers.

2. For the record, I’m not saying it was the fact he sat for two games, just explaining why he sat for two games.

3. .350/.403/.633 with five homers in fifteen games. Brief, but dominant.

4. He has three homers off of splitters with an average distance of 405 feet. Surprisingly, two of the three came this year.

5. Remember Opening Day leftfielder Marcell Ozuna?