What the Atlanta Braves saw in Rafael Montero

The Braves have acquired yet another Houston Astros reliever this spring, this one coming off a season that was so rough that he was designated for assignment in August

Alex Anthopoulos and “buy low” reclamation projects - name a more iconic duo.

The team’s President of Baseball Operations completed a mid-game trade with his former lieutenant Dana Brown, now general manager of the Houston Astros, during last night’s game.

The Braves received veteran reliever Rafael Montero and cash in exchange for a player to be later. Per a report from Charles Odum of the Associated Press, Atlanta’s getting $7.7M in salary to offset Montero’s $11.5M owed this year. When you factor in the $804k that Montero’s already been paid by Houston, the Braves are on the hook for just under $3M.

The trade finally wipes Houston’s books of the terrible deals signed by owner Jim Crane while the team was without a general manager following the departure of James Click - his contract expired after the 2022 season and despite the team coming off of a World Series win, it was not renewed.¹ (He’s now an Vice President in baseball ops for the Toronto Blue Jays.)

Why would the Braves go out and get a 34-year-old reliever that’s coming off of a two-season run where he put up a 4.94 ERA and was so bad that he was designated for assignment by a playoff team in August?

Let’s talk about it

What went wrong?

Montero’s 2022 season was fantastic, as he went 5-2 with 14 saves and a 2.37 ERA in 71 appearances and 68.1 innings. It was earned, too - his Fielding Independent Pitching was 2.64 and his Expected ERA was 2.70. He struck out 73 and was among the league leaders in several popular contact quality metrics:

• Barrel rate of 2.9%, a 99th percentile mark

• Hard-hit rate of 32.6%, an 89th percentile mark

• Average exit velocity of 86.3 mph, a 91st percentile mark

• Ground ball rate of 52.9%, 89th percentile

Montero’s always had good fastball velocity - he averaged 96.2 mph that year and had good results on his fastballs (+7 Run Value combined on the four-seam fastball and the sinker) - but this was all driven by his changeup.

Coming in at a 91st percentile +6 Run Value, the changeup was the 11th-best offspeed offering by Run Value/100, a rate stat that’s ostensibly fairer to relievers than just looking at aggregate Run Value (which is an accumulation stat).²

So what happened in 2023 and 2024?

He used the changeup wrong.

It went from a batting average allowed (BAA) of .133 in 2022 to a .307 in 2023 and a .273 in 2024. While it lost some vertical movement from 2022, it wasn’t an egregious amount - it was already below-average on drop but made up for that in horizontal movement:

2022 = -1.6 vert, +0.7 run
2023 = -2.6 vert, +0.6 run
2024 = -2.8 vert, +1.4 run

No, what it looks like to me is that the pitch suffered from subpar locations - specifically, he left it in the zone too much - and that only happened because he tried to throw it at the wrong time.

In 2022, he threw a total of 60 changeups in the strike zone to lefties across 27 at-bats, allowing three hits for a .111 batting average.

In 2023, it was 91 changeups in the zone across 36 at-bats and 14 hits, a .389 average. 2024 wasn’t much better, with 43 changeups across 24 at-bats in his shortened season resulting in nine hits and a .375 batting average.³

I think some of this was intent - in 2022, the most common counts for Montero to throw a changeup were 0-2 (24.1% usage), 1-1 (21.6%), and 2-1 (20.3%). Those are all counts you can afford to throw a changeup for a ball and try and get some chase, right?

Not the same case in 2023. His most common changeup counts were still neutral or advantage counts, like 2-0 (27.5%) or 2-1 (27.3%), but right behind that was putaway counts like 1-2 (23.8%) and 2-2 (23.5%) as well as the ultimate “I’ve gotta have a strike” count, 3-2, where he used it 20.5%.

Essentially, he tried to take what was working and did it even more, but not in the same situations where it actually worked - situations where you can leave it out of the zone to get chase off of it. Instead, he was throwing it for a strike more (because of higher usage on 3-2 counts) as well as counts where the hitters were inclined to try and hit pitches in the shadow (two-strike counts).

Here are his batting averages by zone for 2022 and 2023 - see if you can guess which is which:

If I have two strikes, I’m swinging at a changeup down and away when I may have been inclined to take it on a one-strike count instead of waiting for something more hittable.

Montero’s changes this season

Montero passed through waivers last season (no one wanted that contract) and accepted an assignment to AAA Sugar Land in lieu of electing free agency. And over the offseason, he made a significant change to his arsenal, scrapping the changeup completely.

Instead, Montero’s throwing a splitter. And while the sample size is incredibly small - he’s literally thrown 20 of them⁴ - the usage is back to 2022’s changeup usage: 0-1, 1-1, and 2-1 counts.

(Credit to Braves broadcaster CJ Nitkowski for compiling this.⁵)

He’s also used it occasionally in 1-2 and 2-2 counts, for the record, but this splitter features a significant difference from the old changeup: more vertical drop. This splitter averages 35.1 inches of total vertical drop, eight more than his old changeup. His locations on all of those two-strike counts have almost all been out of the zone⁶, too, and in situations where you can afford to throw a ball to avoid hard contact.

While he’s not all the way back to 2022 numbers - he’s gotten hit pretty hard in this limited sample and traded groundballs for whiffs - it’s a promising start. I’m confident he can be better than he was the last two years, simply because his arsenal now matches how he wants to use it.

1. For those of you who have read ‘Winning Fixes Everything’ from Evan Drellich, Click had this coming. He was…not great to work for in Houston, to put it mildly.

2. #10 in 2022 on that Changeup RV/100 chart? Raisel Iglesias, who has a very similar arsenal to pre-2025 Montero.

3. You can see this same trend when running the BAA numbers for changeups in the shadow zone to lefties for those three years - a BAA of .111 in 2022, a .351 in 2023, and a .269 in 2024.

4. And yes I watched all of them this afternoon

5. I did the work to compile them all in MLB Film Room and he just…tweeted it out

6. He got two swinging strikes, two foul balls, and a double to San Fran’s Jung Hoo Lee on a splitter that caught too much of the zone.