What will Grant Holmes produce in 2026?

Prior entries:

• Matt Olson
• Michael Harris II
• Ozzie Albies
• Bryce Elder
• Austin Riley
• Drake Baldwin
• Ronald Acuña Jr.
• Chris Sale
• Spencer Strider
• Jurickson Profar

Back when I was working on IWAG a lot, I noticed a dichotomy of sorts. For position players, IWAG did basically about as well as Steamer and ZiPS, which wasn’t really surprising, given that it was made to try and replicate them. No matter what year I looked at, no system really beat the others, and IWAG was right there with them, generally with the same misses and successes. In unison or individually, the systems basically gave you “the right” idea about what the position players you looked at would do, even when restricting yourself to a small group of names.

For pitchers, though, it was all over the place. Sometimes one system clearly did better than the others, but more to the point, pitchers had breakouts and lost seasons that deviated from their central estimate (or even their distribution, insofar as I could generate or infer it) more often.

Why this dichotomy? My guess — an educated guess based on me tinkering with IWAG to little avail — is that hitters playing through or affected by injury tend to just kind of look like less effective versions of themselves, but pitcher injuries completely upend both availability and effectiveness. On the flip side, I can’t really confirm that a pitcher feeling “really” healthy can set a new performance baseline, so maybe that’s just attributable to pitch design and mechanics cleanup things. Either way, though, pitchers were less predictable.

Which brings me to Grant Holmes, the subject of today’s post. There’s a lot of uncertainty with Holmes! He went down with elbow troubles last year, but didn’t have Tommy John Surgery. Is he going to be healthy enough to contribute? Well there be a rotation spot for him? He’s out of options, so short of additional minor league rehab, there’s not really anywhere to “put him.” He’s already served as a reliever, but that shoved him into the rotation, and maybe he’ll be forcibly shoved out of it by others, who knows. (And then, will other injuries pull him back in.) What’s going on with his HR/FB, which was to his benefit in 2024 but very much to his detriment in 2025? How many innings will he get, and how effective will be, depending on role and considering all of the above? Oy.

I’m not saying every pitcher is Grant Holmes, but when you consider this laundry list of “issues” with thinking about Holmes’ future versus that of your run-of-the-mill potential-starter-quality position player, you get where I was going with the intro paragraphs, hopefully.

Career-to-date, status

A first-round pick all the way back in 2014, Holmes spent seemingly forever in the minors until the Braves gave him a chance in the bigs last year. He pitched incredibly well for about five weeks as a reliever, then got a shot to start and kept up the good work. He transitioned back to a shorter-stint relief role and faltered, but finished the year fairly strong in his final four (and especially his final three) outings, most of which were starts. (He even did something pretty crazy, getting five outs in relief on September 29, before pitching four innings as a starter in a must-win-to-make-playoffs game for the Braves on September 30 — though the Mets were likely taking it very easy by that point.)

All in all, Holmes had an 86/81/87 line (ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-) as a swingman in 68 1/3 innings in 2024, which is an insanely good outcome considering he was a minor league journeyman who hadn’t gotten a shot to that point. He still has under two years of service time, so the Braves have him for quite a while… provided they don’t lose him to a roster crunch given his out-of-options status.

Recent performance

Holmes made (and kept his spot in) the obliterated Braves’ 2025 rotation — at least until he was the last guy to go down when his own elbow started barking. He struggled out of the gate with some pretty clunky pitching in his first five starts of the year, but then got it together and had an awesome nine-start stretch that was marred only by the fact that he ran a HR/FB over 20 percent in that span. That good run culminated in a 15-strikeout performance in just 6 1/3 innings against the Rockies, but then he faded again, and he was really struggling by the time his season ended in late July. Specifically, by ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-:

• First five starts: 110/141/123
• Middle nine starts: 87/98/71
• Last seven starts: 95/102/120

Put those things together with a single dominant relief appearance he had early in the year before making a start, and Holmes finished with a 94/108/98 line in 115 innings, good for 0.9 fWAR. If not for the HR/FB, that would’ve been solid #2ish/#3ish starter production. (Alas, the homers were a problem, for him and many of his teammates.)

Forecasting

Forecasting for Holmes (and any other pitcher with an uncertain role) is tough. I theoretically should build in some module in IWAG about how to handle this separately, since it’s not exactly a pure starter or pure reliever profile, but instead, I’m going to shortcut it by assuming that Holmes completes roughly 80 percent of his 2026 innings as a starter. That can artificially inflate his WAR, since it’s technically harder to be a starter than a reliever as far as replacement level goes, so just keep that in mind…

Basically, IWAG’s point estimate is that Holmes is a guy capable of preventing runs at a roughly league-average rate when used as a swingman. If a lot of that usage is as a starter, that’s about 1 WAR for 100 innings, which is not all that exciting but also far better than letting someone bleed value.

As you can see from the projections above, this is not an off-kilter take on Holmes. Steamer has him at 0.8 WAR in 87 innings, mostly relieving. ZiPS is a little lower, but still in the same-range-ish, again, mostly seeing Holmes as a reliever. IWAG’s higher WAR total is, in part, due to the assumption above about how much Holmes will start.

I would describe this curve as “cute.” An actual curve! Neat. Basically, the main question for Holmes is availability and usage. Which, yeah, we kind of figured.

Your turn

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

• Rounded to the nearest fWAR, how much will Grant Holmes produce in 2026?
• How confident are you in your choice? Go with a scale from 1-5, where 3 is “I dunno, reasonably confident,” 5 is certain, and 1 is “I am participating but have no confidence in my choice and don’t want the fact that it will likely be incorrect to affect my place in any theoretical standings all that much.”