- Spencer Strider has made 21 starts this season after elbow surgery cost him a full year.
- Atlanta’s ace isn’t dominating the way he did before injury – but he’s good enough to adapt.
- Braves will miss the postseason, but Strider has pitched better down the stretch.
WASHINGTON — Spencer Strider’s first pitch came out of his hand at 95.6 mph, mirroring his average velocity this season, and it did not induce a feeble swing nor a helpless look at a called strike, but rather a hard-hit line drive to straightaway center field.
To the casual observer accustomed to the average Strider fastball touching 97.6 mph just a couple years ago, when he was striking out a stunning 13.5 batters per nine innings through his first three seasons for the Atlanta Braves, it might have seemed a little disappointing.
Counterpoint: There’s nothing disappointing about one pitch, one out.
That was the outcome Sept. 15 when the Washington Nationals’ CJ Abrams led off the game with a harmless fly ball to left. After six pitches, the inning was over.
And a couple hours later, Strider had bulled and finessed and rope-a-doped his way through seven solid innings, perhaps his best overall start as this season after his second Tommy John surgery comes to a close.
The reinvention of Spencer Strider might never be complete, and perhaps it is a bit overblown to suggest the 6-foot, 195-pound right-hander was a total teardown project. Nor is it impossible that Strider’s velocity reach those rarefied heights again, when he was punching out 281 batters in 186 ⅔ innings and winning 20 games for the 2023 Braves.
Yet after two elbow reconstructions, that guy might be gone for good. But this guy is well on his way to becoming a reasonable facsimile.
“It’s very encouraging that I struggled a lot and was able to make some adjustments and things are trending in the right direction right when I would’ve wanted myself to, specifically,” says Strider after striking out six and giving up one run over seven innings of an 11-3 win. “We’re not going to have that opportunity to pitch in the postseason.
“But trying to make something out of this year knowing I was going to be struggling and working through things is encouraging, for sure.”
Spencer Strider stats don’t tell the whole story
Indeed, the Braves are 67-83, after a raft of injuries to rotation and lineup alike. This will be their first October without baseball since 2017. Strider, in the cruelest black-and-white terms, is simply a dude with a 6-13 record and 4.64 ERA, whose win over the Nationals snapped his second five-game losing streak this season.
Yet the significance of his recent resurgence is not lost on the Braves.
“It’s not easy,” manager Brian Snitker says of a second Tommy John comeback. “You talk about it all the time – you miss a year and it takes a long time to get back.
“You have to stay with it. He has. And he’s made really good adjustments, and indicative with how well he threw.”
In fact, Strider’s last two starts each produced career lows in fastball usage: 41.2% in his Sept. 9 start vs. the Chicago Cubs, and 39% – just 35 of his 96 throws – against the Nationals.
Again, if you’ve slept on Strider, that might be startling. He threw his heater 62.1% of the time from 2021 until that day in April 2024 when his UCL again failed him.
They say the hitters will let you know, and they certainly told Strider something quite loudly: They slugged .262 against his fastball in 2022. This year? It’s .482.
So Strider, truly, is a four-pitch guy now, even if his changeup comes and goes and his curveball remains a work in progress. And as his fastball continues to be a sidelight, it’s hard to argue with the results: He’s given up three earned runs in 13 innings, striking out 15, in his last two outings.
Strider blew out his arm as a Clemson undergrad yet battled back to become the K king of the major leagues just four years later. Yet 2025, he knew, would a journey.
“My anticipation this whole season was that I was going to have some rough patches and then have to continually work to make adjustments,’ says Strider, who’s in the third year of a six-year, $75 million contract. “To try to put myself in a good position to help us when games mattered most and we were competing for a postseason berth, and playing in the postseason.
“That didn’t happen, largely due to my own failures this season not being able to tread water well enough for us, giving us a chance to win games while working through that stuff I knew I’d inevitably have to do.”
Oh, Strider’s inconsistencies were far from the Braves’ biggest concerns, not in a year that began with an 80-game PED suspension for newly signed Jurickson Profar and season-ending injuries to pitchers Reynaldo Lopez, Spencer Schwellenbach, Grant Holmes and A.J. Smith-Shawver, along with All-Star third baseman Austin Riley.
Sure, it didn’t help that he toted a 5.24 ERA through his first 17 starts, but the Braves were probably sunk regardless of how well he threw. Still, there was just enough onramp for Strider to finish on a superior note.
“He’s getting better and better every start, keeping hitters off balance, changing up speeds and changing locations,” says rookie catcher Drake Baldwin.
Perhaps the final step is gaining the utmost confidence in his newer, slower fastball. Strider enjoyed six-, eight-, 12- and 10-pitch innings against the Nationals. And in his biggest jam, a bases-loaded, one-out spot, he threw three curveballs at Nationals right fielder Dylan Crews before getting him to chase a fastball out of the zone.
The little nubber turned into a 2-3 inning-ending double play.
“That’s a trend I’ve seen three of my last four starts – (the fastball) is playing the way I want it to be,” he says, “which affords me so much room for error. I can attack the zone and be convicted behind it and get a lot of fly balls. It opens things up for me when I can do that.”
Now, the end is in sight. Strider should have two more starts before season’s end, and to some extent, it will be a relief for Snitker. No worries about rehab, or ramping up, or how hard to go once spring training begins.
Heck, maybe he’ll find a little more kick on that fastball – even if he knows he can live without it.
“The day after the season ends,” says Snitker, “I want him to be able to make his next start. And if we can do that, that’s going to be a success.”
(This story has been updated with additional information.)