You’re Probably Underrating Dylan Lee

One of my favorite article genres to produce is “you’ve never heard of this reliever, but he’s great now.” Generally speaking, it’s either some dude who has been in the majors for a while but recently learned something new, or someone who burst onto the scene with some quirky pitch, delivery, or approach. Today, though, I’m trying a slightly different variation. You probably have heard of Dylan Lee. He’s appeared in the majors for six straight years and racked up more than 200 innings pitched in that time. He’s not doing anything particularly new in 2026. But he’s great, and somehow we’ve basically never written about him, so I think it’s time to rectify that shortcoming.

In 19 2/3 innings of work this year entering Wednesday, Lee has posted a 0.92 ERA and 1.08 FIP. He’s striking out a third of the batters he faces and barely walking anyone. And while no one is that good in the long run, Lee’s career stats are very solid, as well. He has a career 2.65 ERA and a 3.24 FIP (2.92 xERA, 3.19 xFIP, 2.79 SIERA). Sure, it’s over only 224 innings, but those numbers are superb. He has the 10th-best ERA of any reliever since his debut, and every other run prevention estimator is similarly situated toward the top of the table.

The simplest way to describe Lee’s game is that he throws a gyro slider as often as possible, plus a fastball and changeup when he needs to switch things up. He’s throwing that slider 56% of the time this year, which is narrowly a career high, but he’s thrown 52.5% sliders in his career, so this is hardly a complete sea change. He leans especially hard on the slider against lefties, using it more than three quarters of the time. But even against righties, he throws 46% sliders and spots his other two pitches off of his breaking ball.

While sweeping sliders are all the rage these days, Lee doesn’t throw one. His slider is most remarkable for how little it breaks. He’s not quite Tatsuya Imai out there, but in 2025, his average slider moved about an inch to his arm side, the “wrong way.” This year so far, it’s moving about an inch to his glove side. Unlike many slow, straight sliders, Lee’s has a tiny bit of induced vertical break; the pitch falls about four inches less on its flight to the plate than your average mid-80s gyro slider.

That sounds terrible, right? “Hey, I throw my slider kind of slow, and also it doesn’t slide, and also it doesn’t have any downward break.” Anyway, on an unrelated note, here’s a leaderboard from 2026:

Huh.

Pitching models aren’t quite sure what to do with Lee’s slider, and I sympathize with their plight. PitchingBot thinks it’s a hair below average. Stuff+ thinks it’s a hair above average. Neither sees it as one of the best sliders in the game. But the models are just doing fancy versions of pattern matching, and Lee’s slider doesn’t behave much like anyone else’s. The closest match is probably Robbie Ray, another lefty with a funky, model-defying slider. Brock Burke has a similar offering. But many pitchers throwing this style of gyro slider are slinging it from low arm slots and using it to complement sinkers and sweepers that move a ton horizontally. Many more are throwing it from a very high slot, complementing a north/south arsenal. But Lee’s sits in a weird middle ground, and that strangeness matters.

His slider’s quirkiness isn’t apparently evident to the eye. When I watch this video, all I see is a lazy breaking ball:

But a lot of Lee’s sliders look like that, and a lot of them get similar results. The numbers almost don’t make sense, and not in an “it’s still only May 14” way. Over the last three years, Lee has thrown 337 sliders right down the heart of the plate. He’s drawing whiffs 24.1% of the time when batters swing at them, the second-best mark in baseball behind Steven Okert, another lefty with an oddball slider. Even when opponents make contact with those slow, low-movement, middle-middle cookies, they’re producing an xwOBACON below league average. On similarly located sliders, 88% of pitchers are allowing hard-hit contact more frequently than Lee.

In other words, Lee’s slider has been elite across a multi-year sample, even when he locates it about as poorly as you can. That brings me to Lee’s other superpower: He has pinpoint command. There are a few ways to measure command, all of them approximate. You could use pitch models – Lee’s 64 PitchingBot Command is 10th-best among pitchers with 10 or more innings pitched this year, and 15th over the last three years (minimum 100 innings). If you’re more of a Stuff+ guy, Lee’s 112 Location+ is tied for 19th in baseball this year and 55th (out of 358) over the last three years. The models think Lee’s command is somewhere between pretty good and elite, and better this year than before.

Don’t like to base your opinion of a pitcher’s command on a model? Maybe you’d prefer walk rate. Lee has walked two batters this year, a 2.9% walk rate. He has a career 5.8% mark. Only six relievers in all of baseball have done better than that since his debut, and only Raisel Iglesias pairs a lower walk rate with a higher strikeout rate. Lee hits the edges of the zone more than average and misses badly less than average. While Lee’s slider is hard to put in context, his command is pretty straightforward: It’s great across multiple ways of measuring it.

Lee’s other offerings complement his slider well. His fastball is also fairly north/south, particularly after accounting for his arm angle. His changeup, which he exclusively throws to righties, fades and rides so that it diverges heavily from his slider even with similar velocity:

Between the excellent command and the three outlier pitches that batters simply don’t see very often, Lee is putting opponents in consistently difficult positions. Everything is painted. Nothing moves the right way. Believe it or not, Lee is fifth among all relievers in swinging strike rate since he debuted. The guys ahead of him are Mason Miller, Josh Hader, Edwin Díaz, and Andrés Muñoz. Is that something you might be interested in?

In fact, the strangest thing about Lee’s statistical record is that he isn’t pitching in high leverage as much as you’d expect. In 2026, four Braves relievers are entering in higher-leverage situations on average. He’s yet to have a season where he’s one of the team’s top two relief options. He has exactly two career saves. He’s 10th in reliever ERA since his debut and 73rd in average leverage when he enters the game.

I think Atlanta is just fine with that. While Lee hasn’t displayed enormous platoon splits, he’s a lefty who relies on a breaking ball as his primary pitch, and the Braves have consistently invested in elite relievers to anchor their bullpen. Keeping Lee as a third banana with outrageously good results lets the team deploy him flexibly and also keeps his outlier game from overexposure.

Don’t let his role and his weirdness deceive you, though. Lee’s pitches might not jump off the page, but his results do. Not many good pitchers succeed in the same way as Lee, but that’s a big part of why it works so well. He’s been doing it long enough now that you can’t really argue with the track record. I might not be able to tell you precisely why Lee is so tough to hit – but I am quite certain that he is tough to hit. What a delightfully weird and effective reliever.