Throwing fastballs and sliders 93 percent of the time, and sprinkling in the occasional change up is all Spencer Strider needed last season to lead Major League Baseball in strikeouts. But now the Braves’ ace is trying to perfect a new pitch in Spring Training, and if he does it will be scary hours for MLB.
Our Braves Insider Grant McAuley says Strider’s new pitch is a “different variation of his slider” that has some “curveball tendencies.” His electric fastball and his new pitch look the same coming out of his hand, and that is what makes the potential of this new pitch so scary.
Strider’s fastball is a pitch opposing batters have to get out in front of to even have a chance to hit it, but if the batter guesses wrong, and he’s actually throwing his new curveball, sweeper, slider, cutter, slurve whatever you want to call it, that batter is going back to the dugout after looking foolish swinging at a pitch that probably finishes out of the strike zone.
“Kind of, I mean, we’re working on a couple things, just like playing with different shapes of the slider," Strider said when asked if his new pitch is specifically a curveball. "The terminology, you know, on all this stuff — sweeper, slider, cutter, curve, slurve, who knows what anything does? I think it’s just manipulating the ball a little more, seeing what kind of different shapes I can get.”
No matter what the pitch is, if the Braves young hard-throwing right-hander can perfect it and can consistently execute it, trying to get a hit off Spencer Strider will become that much more difficult.
