It was a tumultuous season for Raisel Iglesias in his contract walk year. While his results eventually balanced out into something akin to his expected production, his struggles with home runs early set the tone for a disastrous Braves season overall.
How acquired
The Braves acquired Iglesias from the Angels back at the 2022 Trade Deadline, sending pitchers Tucker Davidson and Jesse Chavez the other way. (Chavez returned to the Braves later that season.) At the time, the Braves had Iglesias as a set-up guy for Kenley Jansen, but with three years remaining on his contract, he slid right into the closer role when Jansen departed after the 2022 season.
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What were the expectations?
Iglesias had a really strong 2024 campaign, albeit one where his tendency to outpitch his xFIP on both an ERA and FIP basis was exaggerated. For his career, Iglesias had a career 70/77/79 line coming into 2024 (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-). In 2024, he earned 1.6 fWAR on the back of a 47/67/83 performance; the xFIP- was his worst since 2019. Still, with 4.1 total fWAR since signing his four-year deal ahead of the 2022 season, Iglesias was projected to be a top closer, one of the few relievers with a 1ish WAR projection, heading into 2025. His year-over-year declines in strikeout rate were a little problematic, but there was no reason to figure he wasn’t going to be an effective reliever, especially since his xFIP was never even meh at any point, even as it kept increasing.
2025 Results
In total, Iglesias finished with 1.0 fWAR in 67 1/3 innings across 70 appearances. His final line was 76/82/92. It was his worst ERA- since 2019, his worst FIP- since 2019, and his worst xFIP- since 2016. His xERA was in line with his 2022-2023 performance. His WPA was still pretty positive (above 1.00), and his shutdown-to-meltdown ratio wasn’t great, but still pretty good, and roughly consistent with his performance after 2019.
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But, all that belies the fact that Iglesias’ season was the sum of some very different parts, and perhaps less than said sum given when he struggled versus when he succeeded.
On the season as a whole, Iglesias finished with 29 shutdowns and 11 meltdowns. Shutdowns and meltdowns are a bit of a misnomer stat, since they accrue with WPA gained/lost, and a pitcher’s WPA imputes what their defense does behind him. In any case, through June 5, Iglesias somehow managed more meltdowns (nine) than shutdowns (eight), including two meltdowns against the Diamondbacks in back-to-back games in early June. He also had a stretch of three straight appearances with a meltdown in early-mid May. The longest stretch he went without a meltdown was five appearances, which occurred as the Braves played pretty well after their losing streak to begin April.
This wasn’t just a WPA thing. In April, Iglesias had a pretty horrid 135/190/103 line, victimized by a HR/FB rate of nearly 30 percent. Things improved in May to 144/103/81, but the HR/FB was still elevated and, as you can see, the runs kept piling up despite good peripherals.
After those games against the Diamondbacks, the Braves took a semi-aggressive move and had Iglesias work in lower leverage; he responded by basically dominating up until he got his closer’s role back. From late June through the end of the season, he put up a 32/52/92 line with a HR/FB of under two percent. Basically, the HR/FB went from sky-high to essentially nothing, and Iglesias looked near-automatic as a result, despite a few hiccups on the walk front. Unfortunately for the Braves, their fate was largely already written by that point, and they didn’t deal Iglesias away at the Trade Deadline in the midst of his great run, either.
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What went right?
If you go with the adage that it’s not how you start, but how you finish, then Iglesias’ season largely went right. He dominated for much of the year, grabbed a Reliever of the Month accolade in August (13/0 K/BB ratio!), got his 250th career save, and ultimately largely rescued his line from the ravages of HR/FB and all the other junk that he had to deal with for the first two-ish months of the season. He was even able to pull off stuff like slamming the door on a crazy 12-11 win over the Reds by throwing a scoreless tenth. Even amid his struggles, he managed an inspired outing here and there, like a May 4 game where a leadoff single turned into a the tying run on third with one out, but the Braves won because Iglesias ended up striking out the last three batters of the game.
His non-slider pitches all had xwOBAs-against below .300 for the season, including both of his fastballs. He continued to pound the zone, miss bats in it, and get a lot of chases as well. Only 59 relievers finished with 1.0 fWAR or more, and he was one of them.
What went wrong?
Despite all that, though, his pitching issues and his HR/FB really tanked the team early on. Iglesias amassed a stunning -0.6 fWAR by the time April ended; he was still sitting there by the end of May. Of the eight homers he allowed over the course of the season, six came on the slider, and five of those came during the first two months of the year. He seriously de-emphasized the slider after April (though there was an uptick in July, when he allowed the sixth homer on his slider).
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Iglesias has never been a huge command artist, as he’ll generally be fairly consistent with about one pitch out of his four-pitch arsenal. In 2025, his command was messier than usual, but the real killer was that his slider often hung in the middle of the zone. The pitch had a .461 xwOBA-against even though batters whiffed on it over a third of the time — no Iglesias pitch-season has had a worse mark in the Statcast era (even though his fastballs came close-ish in 2018 and then again in 2023).
It was really the combination of HR/FB and all sorts of other stuff that doomed Iglesias early on. June 5 was the nadir of his season, as he combined with Scott Blewett to turn a 10-4 ninth-inning lead into an 11-10 oss. But in that outing, there were a bunch of balls in play that weren’t caught, as well as an infield single. The first two hits against him in that game had hit probabilities below 30 percent, and a third was a weakly-hit flare. The pitch that turned the lead into a deficit wasn’t even a strike:
The nightmare of Iglesias’ start ended eventually, but it was kind of too late at that point, as the injuries piled up and things never really improved for the team as a whole. Through June 5, Iglesias’ WPA sat below -2.00 — since each team gets .500 WPA to win a game, this is essentially Iglesias and his defense shedding four full wins of win probability in about a third of the season. Take that away, and the Braves are 31-30 on June 5; do more than just take it away and somehow add another three wins by sheer providence to reflect the rate of WPA contribution of Iglesias-and-defense over the remaining games, accrued over those first 61 contests, and you get the Braves at 34-27, an improbable seven-game swing that maybe would’ve brought more reinforcements down the stretch and could have led to a playoff berth, even with the team’s terrible, 8-17 July in tow. Sure, it’s not realistic to expect that, but Iglesias’ struggles, as well as the bad stuff that happened when he was on the mound in terms of HR/FB and otherwise, really put the team in a hole they essentially weren’t going to dig out of short of a miracle, and that miracle never came.
2026 outlook
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The Braves did not trade Iglesias, and, in the end, they reunited with him early in the offseason on a one-year, $16 million deal that essentially just extends the terms of the four-year deal he finished out in 2025. Iglesias still projects as fairly productive — somewhere in the 0.5-1.0 WAR range depending on where you look. Still, you have to hope the Braves aren’t setting themselves up for getting burned here, as he’s going to be 36 and has seen his xFIP increase every year from 2021-onward (the xFIP- was the same from 2022 to 2023). The Braves are paying a fairly steep price for familiarity and what they hope is consistency; another two-month stretch like he had befall him in 2026, however, could once again prove disastrous.
