AJ Smith-Shawver just turned 23. Literally, he turned 23 a couple weeks ago, on November 20. Given that he pitched in Atlanta in both 2023 and 2024, it always breaks my brain a bit to remember how young he is, even though he’s got parts of three MLB seasons under his belt.
Selected in the seventh round of the 2021 draft, the young righty still got nearly a million dollars in signing bonus. He got a very brief taste of the Complex Leagues that summer where his control was … atrocious. But the general idea there was more just to get into the swing of things in terms of being a professional athlete.
The following season, Smith-Shawver pitched the entire season in Low-A, and while the walk rate was rough (13 percent), the strikeout rate (34 percent) and stuff were eye-popping, putting him on a number of prospect lists.
His stock soared the following summer, rocketing through the top three levels of the minors in two months (?) before getting six appearances in the majors. His control had improved (?), but the Triple-A stop should have been blaring warning bells. Michael Soroka was struggling, though, and the Braves (I guess) figured why not?
Expected metrics differ on how that first season went. His xERA was 3.59, but his xFIP was 5.71. It doesn’t ultimately matter, but while the stuff was fun, he clearly needed more time on the minors.
2024 was a wild ride with him going back to Triple-A, doing okay, and getting a start in the majors. He strained his oblique and missed the next two months. But, even so, there he was starting Game 1 of a playoff series against the San Diego Padres. It … did not go well, but the Braves didn’t have a lot of options.
I just told you. He was drafted in the seventh round of the 2021 draft. We’re all victims of this format, in the end.
What were the expectations?
The expectations rose when his stuff popped in Spring Training. He was in a competition with Ian Anderson and Bryce Elder got the fifth spot in the rotation, until Anderson got traded to the Los Angeles Angels and Elder was sent to Triple-A.
I wouldn’t say anyone expected him to be an ace, but there was a tangible excitement. He’s certainly talented, and getting to the majors at 20 is a good indicator that you’ll do well (barring health). The question was if everything would click, and there was a wide spectrum of how this could go.
At this point, they really just needed solid innings. As noted, there wasn’t really any MLB track record to suggest he was going to do so, but MLB track records of fewer than 30 innings aren’t exactly useful for a guy rapidly developing, either.
It was a bit of a mixed bag, as you might expect from a 22-year old, but overall, he had a solid strikeout rate (22 percent), an unpleasant walk rate (11 percent), and his groundball rate ticked up a bit from putrid to not great. He came out of it with a 3.86 ERA. Expected metrics flipped on him here with xERA at 6.31 and xFIP at 4.36. The sample, at around 44 innings, was still too small to really learn all that much.
His first couple of starts were pretty meh against the Padres and Marlins, but he had a solid start against the Rays on April 12, going 5 innings along with 7 Ks, 2 BBs, and 2 ER, and was able to keep it close enough for a late Michael Harris home run (a rare sighting in the first half) to win 5-4. All three of those games featured horrific, .400+ BABIPs for the opposing team while he was pitching, but he didn’t exactly shine.
A few starts later on May 5th, he took a no-hitter into the 8th in the way to a 4-0 Braves victory. He did walk four, but he looked amazing in some ways, while also looking really lucky to get a no-hitter so deep in others, given that he had just a 5/4 K/BB ratio in eight frames. (It was actually his worst xFIP in a start in a season, to that point.)
He went on to make two more unequivocally excellent starts against weak competition (Pirates, Nationals) before things went south against the Nationals later in the month.
Against the Philadelphia Phillies on May 29th, he heard a pop, there was a kerfuffle about whether Spencer Strider noticed a problem before anyone else in the dugout did, and, in the end, he underwent Tommy John Surgery a week and a half later, ending what was looking like a young hurler potentially figuring it out.
Um, well, he looked better. Looking at those three mid-May starts, we were all starting to believe. The early-season look that he seemed uncomfortable was giving way to a more confident young pitcher. All of that is narrative, but it looked like he was turning a corner.
Statistically, he was basically a lot of what he had been to that point. He added a slider, but it was only used four percent of the time. He had lowered the usage of his four-seamer and increased the usage of his splitter, and I’d say that was probably a good idea.
In 2023, his command was about as unrefined as possible, which makes sense given his age and lack of practice. By 2025, he showed much better consistency with his fastball and curveball, though his splitter remained a “throw it towards the plate and hope” offering. The actual location of his fastball wasn’t any good, and it got absolutely creamed, but the mechanical cleanup was nice to see and gives him a lot to build off of. The splitter had a .232 xwOBA-against and a whiff rate of nearly 40 percent; the curve had an xwOBA-against around .300 and a whiff rate over 30 percent. If he had figured out the fastball location, too, he’d have been unstoppable before he went down.
He blew out his elbow. While not a ton went right for him, not a lot went bad for him at a high level, either. The contact management was so poor as to be nonexistent, but a lot of that was because the pitch he threw about half the time was basically repeatedly offered down the middle. It still set up his other stuff really well, but you can’t get away with that for long.
He started of the season a bit shaky, but like we’ve said, he was figuring it out. We were definitely interested in seeing the season play out, but his elbow robbed us of that.
The whole elbow injury saga was also very weird. Smith-Shawver was struck with a comebacker, stayed in the game, maybe appeared to be overcompensating on his next few pitches in some way, and then apparently there was an audible pop, and that was all she wrote for his 2025 season. Even if the issue wasn’t Smith-Shawver staying in after getting buzzed, he also wasn’t right in his prior start against the Nats (while dominating them in his prior outing), so it’s possible there was something going on there. His velocity had steadily climbed in every game throughout the month of May, so… who knows.
I want able to find much on his recovery from surgery, but I’d expect him to re-emerge someone in the second half of 2026. When it comes to Tommy John Surgery, pitchers generally make good recoveries these days, but as we saw with Spencer Strider, that’s not guaranteed or immediate.
Projections are likely not terribly helpful here, either. There are really too many variables, including even the timetable for his return.
So, the outlook for 2026 is just to get back healthy. The Braves will need pitching in the second half. You can basically guarantee that for any team. He can be the proverbial “Trade Deadline addition that isn’t a trade.” Until then, he might be really good when he gets back, but it’s not something anyone can rely on. As was said, too many variables.
