The Atlanta Braves used a whopping 37 different relief pitchers over the course of the 2025 season. They also ended up using a franchise-record 19 different starting pitchers. Somehow, Scott Blewett fell into both categories. Of course, he’s primarily a relief pitcher, but he was also used as an opener in his Braves debut.
Granted, Brian Snitker didn’t really use him as an opener more than as a “guy who can just go out there and throw until the wheels fall off in the third inning,” but still, Blewett goes down as one of the many, many pitchers who participated in the cavalcade that was Atlanta’s 2025 deployment of pitchers. Now it’s time to see how Blewett’s short stint here in Atlanta turned out for him.
April was a busy month for Scott Blewett. He started the season with the Twins and didn’t last long in Minnesota before being DFA’d and claimed by the Orioles. Again, he had an extremely short stint with Baltimore before getting DFA there as well. The Braves officially picked him up in a trade after Baltimore DFA picked him up, while sending a cash consideration to pick up the now-journeyman reliever. This was actually Blewett’s second stint with the Atlanta organization – he spent 2023 as a member of the Double-A Mississippi Braves.
What were the expectations?
The Braves were already desperate for bullpen weapons at this early point in the season, and they thought Blewett could level with the Braves and gain a foothold in their relief corps. He brought his arsenal of slider, four-seamer and splitter to Atlanta in hopes of potentially becoming a reliable option for the Braves.
That said, he probably would have had to become an integral part of the bullpen to stay around, as he was already out of minor league options when he arrived to the Braves. In racing terms, it was “wreckers or checkers” for Blewett here in Atlanta – he would either stick around as a key piece of the bullpen or end up being traded or DFA’d again.
In 2025, Blewett hadn’t had much opportunity to pitch in the Majors, throwing just 28 1/3 innings over parts of three seasons, with a slim 52/93/110 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-). His two appearances with the Twins in 2025 were effective, but could not save him from a DFA; he was much worse with the Orioles and that DFA was a lot less surprising. In short, he was expected to be a replacement-level reliever on paper, and given his waiver adventures, that essentially came about in 2025.
Other than a few rough performances where he blew it (I’m sorry, but you all knew this would happen eventually), Blewett wasn’t completely terrible against the Braves while he was around. He ended up playing eleven games for the Braves and seven of them were of the scoreless variety. While his stats looked pretty bad when he was shipped out of town in early June as he finished his time here with a 5.51 ERA (130 ERA-) and a 7.36 FIP (133 FIP-), a lot of that was due to his final outing as part of an absolutely disastrous day for the Atlanta pitching staff (more on that later).
Granted, this isn’t to say that Scott Blewett was otherwise excellent, aside from those few rough performances. If he had, he would have stayed here much longer than he did. Which is to say, his time here wasn’t entirely nightmarish either. He had his ups and downs during the short period he spent here in Atlanta – it just so happens that the valleys were a lot deeper compared to how high his peaks were. Again, his lack of minor league options made the margin for error virtually nil. Scott Blewett couldn’t really afford to have blown performances and unfortunately for him, the Cardinals, Dodgers, Phillies and Diamondbacks all tried to make sure Blewett would have a bad time while he faced them.
Ultimately, Blewett finished 2025 with a 133/133/110 line; his time with the Braves was a scarier 130/180/109 experience. He “earned” -0.5 fWAR in 44 1/3 total innings (16 1/3 with the Braves, who accounted for the entire -0.5, which is what happens when you’re around 49 outs while allowing five home runs).
Outside of those bumpy performances against the aforementioned teams, Blewett wasn’t half bad. He had a three-outing stretch between May 8 and May 24 where he pitched six straight scoreless innings while giving up just two hits and two walks in that span. As you can imagine from the fact that he only got six innings in three weeks, it wasn’t like he was regularly called from the dugout to go out and make things happen while he was there. Still, he pitched two scoreless innings against the Reds on May 8 and followed up with another two scoreless innings against the Pirates a few days later. I would say this is the highlight for Blewett when he was here, but actually it was a little more than that.
You see, both outings came in overtime. So those four completely scoreless innings were not fair scorelessthey were scoreless even though they all started with a runner on second base. The Braves won both games – in the first he set up their walk-off in the 11th, and in the second he kept the game scoreless and then finished it after the Braves took the lead in the 11th. In three of those four innings, his opponents moved Manfred’s man/ghost runner to third base with one out, but none of those runners scored, thanks to a strikeout and some weak contact/handy fielding.
As you might guess, the change in extra innings rules creates a bit of a nightmare for WPA, putting pitchers (and teams) in an unfortunate position from the start. But if we go by what’s recorded on FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference and the like, Blewett recorded two pretty absurdly high single-game WPAs in those two contests. In fact, his performance on May 10 against the Pirates was the highest single-game WPA earned by a relief pitcher in an appearance this yearand his performance on May 8 against the Reds was the 10th highest. It’s probably a safe bet that no relief pitcher has earned more WPA in a three-game span. That May 10 game was the highest WPA for any reliever in a game since 2023, and the highest for the Braves since Cristhian Martinez pitched six scoreless innings in the infamous 19-inning game… which also featured the Pirates as an opponent.
Here’s Blewett’s highest WPA game, which wasn’t real are play, but you get the idea. He will take victory where he can get it:
Anyway, that’s how Blewett finished with the fourth-worst fWAR among 2025 Braves pitchers… but the fifth-highest WPA. Go figure.
Other than those two amazing extra-inning efforts, you can’t give up many home runs and maintain a decent pitching line, which is what the Braves learned in 2025. Blewett had a 42 percent HR/FB as Brave, which seems like a typo but isn’t. But it’s not like he otherwise dominated and just suffered because he was at the plate too much – far from it, as he posted a walk rate of around 14 percent with the Braves. That’s terrible considering he retired just 18 percent of the batters he faced with the Braves.
Atlanta’s bullpen had some absolutely awful moments in 2025, and the nightmare of June 5 here in Cobb County certainly qualified as one of those low points. Atlanta had a 9-3 lead in the eighth inning and ultimately lost 11-10 – without extra innings, mind you. Blewett started that game in the eighth inning and faced ten batters between the eighth and ninth inning, giving up almost as many home runs (three) as he had outs (four). Blewett left three hangers in the zone against Ketel Marte, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Alek Thomas, giving up three home runs and helping spark an incredible comeback for Arizona. Blewett’s line at the end of the day was 1 1/3 IP, 3 hits, five runs scored (all earned), two walks and one strikeout. That was the end of Blewett’s time with the Braves, as Atlanta sent him back to Baltimore in another bullpen reshuffle.
In the same vein of “boy, this random fill-in reliever had a wild season,” Blewett didn’t even lose that much WPA for his blowout against the Diamondbacks, because it was off time, and Raisel Iglesias probably shouldn’t have messed up the game anyway… except he did. Instead, Blewett’s worst WPA game of the season came…against the Braves, when he loaded the bases with no outs by giving up a single to Nick Allen and then walking two, then yielding the go-ahead run in the form of a Jurickson Profar groundout. (The Braves ended up losing the game anyway.) But as a Brave, his worst WPA performance came during his first outing as a Brave — he did fine the first time, was pushed to a second time, and promptly gave up a two-run homer. It took a leadoff walk in the next inning for the Braves to mercifully remove him from the game, which ended up being a huge loss. Oops.
Shortly before the season ended, the Orioles sent Blewett to their Spring Training Complex. Blewett ultimately elected free agency at the end of the season, but not before spending two months on the 60-day Injured List due to an elbow injury suffered relatively early in his return to Baltimore. However, this isn’t the first time Blewett has found himself in this situation, so it’s probably safe to say he’ll simply try to join an organization somewhere on a minor league deal with an invite to Spring Training.
It’s hard to see where he’ll stick in the future, especially since his lack of minor league options gives teams less flexibility to potentially keep him around on a regular basis. His three-year projections via ZiPS had him projecting a 4.52 ERA and a 4.53 FIP for 0.3 fWAR in 2025 – but again, he ended up finishing with -0.5 fWAR in 2025. He’ll likely be projected for replacement level, or perhaps lower, for 2026, given his pretty awful homerfest in 2025.
While relievers are always volatile and he can potentially bounce back, all of the above adds up to a pretty big hill for Blewett to climb to become a successful reliever. After a few mediocre big league seasons with a brief stop in Taiwan over the course of his career, I think the book is now over on Scott Blewett.
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