What will Spencer Strider produce in 2026?

Sigh, this is a depressing one of these to do. Everything about Spencer Strider was, in theory, so awesome, that it didn’t seem like a little thing like a year-long layoff due to elbow troubles was going to derail his career. Surely someone so diligent in being in tune with his body and mechanics could hit the ground running, right? Well, not exactly. After an uneven 2025, Strider’s outlook is uncertain, and pretty fraught.

Drafted in the fourth round of the shortened 2020 MLB Draft, Strider pitched at five different levels (including MLB) in his first professional season. He started 2022 in the big league bullpen, but transitioned to the rotation at the end of May, and well, it seemed like the rest would be history. A hilariously dominant 2022 season could’ve earned him Rookie of the Year honors had his teammate, Michael Harris II, not taken that piece of hardware. (Strider actually had barely more fWAR than Harris, 4.9 to 4.7, though he was pitching in the bullpen while Harris was in the minors.) Strider then spent a full year in the rotation in 2023, and “hilariously dominant” still applied. His 5.5 fWAR that year was second only to Zack Wheeler’s 5.9. All in all, including his time in the bullpen, Strider put up 10.3 fWAR in 318 1/3 innings in 2022-2023, with a 79 ERA-, 59 FIP-, and 63 xFIP-. While perhaps not video game numbers, they were essentially dominant reliever numbers, but from a guy who was close to six innings a game as a starter.

Disaster struck fairly quickly after that, though. Strider looked like himself in his first start of 2024, but not so much in the second, and then missed the rest of the year with an elbow issue that let him avoid Tommy John Surgery, but not missing about a year of action anyway.

Even before his 2023 gave serious credence to the possibility of him being the best starter in the game, the Braves inked him to a $75 million, six-year extension in October 2022. It was, at the time, the highest average annual value for a player with between one and two years of service time. The extension gave Strider relatively low salaries through 2025, but bumps his pay up to $20 million for 2026 and $22 million for the two years thereafter, along with a $22 million club option for 2029 with a $5 million buyout. At the time, it was a move in line with the exuberance of the moment. In 2023, the only concern was that he might eventually get injured. In 2024, well, he got injured. What came after has basically become the antithesis of that exuberance.

2025 was a problem for the Braves, and with regard to Strider’s outlook even moreso than just the mess that was that calendar year for the organization. The main problem, as I’ll get into a bit below, wasn’t that Strider was rusty — it was that rather than improving, he more or less fell apart as the season went on. Maybe it’s not right to have expected rust removal or improvement with experience post-elbow procedure, but given that the proverbial ship seemingly unrighted itself after he had regained a level of decent performance, there are certainly a lot of concerns for Strider heading into 2026.

To be more specific, Strider struggled a fair bit in his first five starts back, though this was not surprising given the layoff and the fact that a hamstring injury actually forced him to take another monthlong break from active duty after his first start of the year. He then reeled off a seven-start stretch where no one would fault you for thinking that Strider was back: in 42 2/3 innings, he put together a 60 ERA-, 61 FIP-, and 66 xFIP-. Nor was this an artifact of facing weak teams, as five of those seven games came against teams that finished in the top ten in wRC+, including the top-finishing Yankees. (Even without the Rockies, the line goes to 70/74/76.) Unfortunately, and here’s the rub: he didn’t keep it going.

There was a two-homer game against the Giants, a poor-peripherals game against the Royals, and then another two-homer game against the Brewers. Whether you want to include those in the “Strider was fine/good” or “Strider was bad” column isn’t really the point, because after that, things just got awful. Strider’s final eight starts of the season featured eight homers, but leaving HR/FB concerns aside, he had a garbage-quality 124/133/125 line. I’m not going to use this projections post to talk about the specific issues he had (see his season review, among other things, for that), but the point is that Strider got worse and never really showed he could un-get worse after those dreadful seven weeks.

All in all, his 2025 involved 0.9 fWAR over 125 1/3 innings with a 105/111/102 line; the okay-ish xFIP could be offset by the fact that his xERA was much worse than his xFIP, assuming you give any weight to xERA as a measure of pitching effectiveness.

Same brief disclaimer: once upon a time I built a projection system to try to mirror/get at the workings of Steamer and ZiPS. I called it IWAG. You can figure out what that means, maybe. I’m bringing it back for this series of posts. Here’s Strider, for 2026.

This is probably the most fraught point estimate of this series. It makes Strider out to be an above-average starter with health issues. But… we know things are a little different. Namely, this is an average of his possible divergent outcomes, with some discounting of his availability given that he missed quite a lot of time in 2024-2025.

Steamer has Strider at around 3.4 WAR per 200 innings, with a point estimate of 161 innings and 2.7 WAR. ZiPS is at 3.2/200 and a point estimate of 2.2 WAR in about 138 innings. IWAG is more conservative on all fronts, but not really all that different (which makes sense because it was built to understand Steamer and ZiPS). So, no discrepancy, but…

Is Strider good or not? I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone knows. Maybe he’ll go back to pre-injury form. Maybe he’ll look like 2025. It’s possible he ends up somewhere in the middle, I guess, but we haven’t seen much middling performance from him at any point, so I’m not sure where that would come from. One of the two poles seems more likely at this point. And, there’s a huge competitive swing for the Braves depending on which of the two you get. I have a headache now. Who’s next on the list? Jurickson Profar? Well… that’s only somewhat less fraught. What a stretch of guys with variable performance we’ve been privy to.

Alright, I’ve given you the info. Well, some info. You may have your own info. With that, I ask you: