Braves rotation features 3 in top 25 rankings for the rest of 2025

There’s no question about the strength of the Braves team, even if the lineup features the most star power. It’s undoubtedly the starting rotation that has and will likely continue to carry the club.

The loss of A.J. Smith-Shawver is a brutal blow. There’s no doubt about that. The rookie had finally gotten over the proverbial hump and was neck-and-neck with his own teammate, Drake Baldwin, in the Rookie of the Year race. Smith-Shawver was comfortably one of the best 4th starters in baseball before a UCL injury ended his season.

Nevertheless, the rotation is still as formidable as any in baseball, especially the top two of Chris Sale and Spencer Schellenbach. Add in Grant Holmes and hopefully, an ascending Spencer Strider, and whoever is on the mound gives the Braves a chance to win.

In fact, the top three were all ranked inside of The Athletic’s Eno Sarris’ top 25 rankings for the rest of the 2025 season, with Sale in the top 5, Schwellenbach just outside of the top 20, and Strider rounding out the group.

Chris Sale No. 5

In his most recent outing, the reigning Cy Young struck out 10 and allowed just one run to the Diamondbacks. The outing brought his season ERA down to 2.93, but it doesn’t quite do his recent stretch of play justice. Over five starts that spanned 32.1 innings in May, Chris Sale only allowed four earned runs while punching out 40 batters. He posted a 1.11 ERA, but the Braves only went 3-2 in those starts because of a pathetic offense.

Sarris sees Sale as one of the five best pitchers the rest of the way, which would seemingly put him in the conversation for another Cy Young.

“A couple of games early on had some worried that Sale wasn’t going to have a dominant season, but then he leaned into the slider, upped its usage and went off. Since he started throwing the slider more than half the time, he has a 1.62 ERA with 42 strikeouts and seven walks in 33 1/3 innings — and that includes a start in Coors! His pitch-type grades say that pitching backward is the right plan, but there could be some worry that the league adjusts to this new reality, or that the injury bug bites him again.”

Spencer Schwellenbach No. 21

Spencer Schwellenbach is coming off arguably the two best outings of his career. He matched a career-high 11 strikeouts and no walks over 6.1 innings against the Red Sox, which followed another outing that he notched 11 punchouts without issuing a free pass, becoming just the 16th pitcher to do so since 1901.

The performance lowered his ERA to 3.14, and similar to Sale, he had a dominant May, outside of the first outing against the Dodgers. In the other five starts, Schwellenbach totaled 33.1 innings with a 2.16 ERA while sitting down 34 and only walking four.

Most impressively, though, Schwellenbach has seemingly found another gear with his fastball. He hadn’t thrown a pitch harder than 98.9 mph before his last outing, but he threw 99 mph or harder 11 times through the first two innings and 13 times total during his 99-pitch outing.

“A bit of a kitchen sinker, Schwellenbach gets it done by throwing six different pitch types with command more than anything. He cuts his fastball a little to keep it from having a “normal” shape for his arm slot, and his splitter is becoming more and more of a weapon over time, but it’s really about how good he is at pitching, and keeping batters on their toes, than about blowing it by them with the biggest velocity. He may not have the top-end strikeout rates of the aces above him on that list, but he might also be a great bet to continue doing this for a long time.”

Spencer Strider No. 24

Spencer Strider was once one of the most talented pitchers in the game, and maybe he regains that form, especially when it comes to his velocity and control, but there’s still real concern in those areas.

Strider is coming off an outing against the Diamondbacks in which the Snakes racked up five runs over five innings. He allowed six hits, three of which were home runs, and a couple of walks to go along with just four strikeouts. It was a much worse outing than the one prior.

If we want to look at the glass half full, Strider entered last night’s contest coming off an outing in which he struck out seven Phillies hitters, allowing just one hit over 4.2 innings. Of course, that one hit was a double that led to a run, which is all Philly needed to top Atlanta’s pathetic offense, but I digress.

He’s healthy, and it’s been a bag of mixed results. Spencer Strider’s re-emergence is one of the most critical factors in the rest of the Braves’ season, and if he can be one of the sport’s top 25 starters, Atlanta would love that.

“The OOPSY projections say he’s still a top-10 pitcher, but Stuff+ says that Strider lost something in his last surgery. The radar gun agrees, too. He went from sitting 97-plus before, to maxing out at that number and sitting 95 now. Some use 85 mph as a “magic number” for sliders, where it’s hard to have a bad one faster than that, and it’s tough to have a good one slower than that. Strider’s slider went from sitting 86 in 2023 to sitting 84 this saeson. Maybe the velo will come back with time, but three starts of velo coming back from the injured list is very predictive of future velocity, studies have found.”