Atlanta Braves All-Decade Team of the 2010’s

Atlanta Braves All-2010s Team

STARTING PITCHER:  JULIO TEHERAN

• 2011 – 2019
• At least 174 IP in 7 straight seasons
• 110 ERA+
• 2 All-Star selections

OK, so it’s not the sexiest choice, but when you look at the last 10 years of Atlanta Braves baseball, good and bad, Julio Teheran was there.  He pitched his first full season in Atlanta in 2013 and has since been a staple in the Braves rotation.

His career 3.67 ERA is pretty solid, but his 4.23 career FIP tells a more middling story of his performance.  He’s never been known as a great strikeout pitcher (his career-high of 186 came in 2014 over 220 Innings pitched), he doesn’t throw hard (often not escaping the 80’s in velocity even on his fastball), but the thing about Julio is that when the team needed him to take the ball every 5th day, he did.

In the transient world of contemporary baseball, consistency is becoming further and further away from commonplace, and to do it all with one team is even more remarkable.  In 2019, Teheran was bought out of the final year of his contract and thus enters free agency for the first time in his career.  It was the right move, and the Braves could bring him back on a smaller dollar deal, but Julio is a free agent, and I gotta be honest, as a life long Braves fan, it would just be weird seeing him in another uniform.

That’s what makes him a member of this team.