Atlanta Braves All-Star pitcher Spencer Strider returned to the mound Monday for the first time in almost a calendar year. In his 2025 Spring Training debut Strider threw 2 2/3 perfect innings against the Boston Red Sox, striking out six of the eight batters he faced. Strider averaged 10.13 pitches per inning, and earlier today The Morning Shift talked about how that’s the efficiency the flame-throwing right-hander will need to pitch with all season.
“The thing that you need from Strider is the efficiency that he showed yesterday, and it’s something you haven’t gotten from him in his career," Beau Morgan said. "It’s basically not being able to develop more than what two, two and a half pitches really, and then it being fouled off and what happens is that you get deep in innings and you don’t go deep in games.”
Early in his career Strider relied heavily on his fastball and curveball, but now he has slowly developed his changeup into a pitch he can mix in as well. Also to Beau’s point, early in his career Spencer wouldn’t make it past or out of the fifth or sixth inning because he would have those long innings due to long at-bats because guys would continuously foul off his fastball or curveball, and he would either run into trouble, run up his pitch count, or both.
In 2023, which was Strider’s best season, he was an All-Star and finished fourth in NL Cy Young voting. But he ranked 31st when it came to average pitches per inning at 16.61. In 2022 he averaged 17.29 pitches per inning. You compare those numbers to the 10.13 pitches per inning he averaged in his first spring outing, and that’s a big difference.
Now, nobody is expecting Strider to be perfect all the time, but finding a way to consistently eliminate those six or seven pitches per inning will be the difference in Strider being dominant and in the conversation as one of the best pitchers in baseball right now, to him being the easy NL Cy Young award winner in 2025, and being in the conversations about him potentially being an all-time great.