Spencer Strider shows invisible fastball and devastating slider for Atlanta Braves

Spencer Strider has put together a strong rookie campaign going into the All-Star break. (Photo: Brett Davis / USATODAY)

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Mon Jul 18 08:00:06 GMT-04:00 2022

Despite a loss in the first-half finale Sunday at Washington, former Clemson right-hander Spencer Strider leads the odds for NL Rookie of the Year. His head coach at Clemson, Monte Lee, said it was easy to tell Strider would be special even when he was a freshman at Clemson.

Strider took the loss Sunday against the Nationals and ended the first half with a 4-3 record and a 3.03 ERA. He’s 10th in the league in strikeouts with 114 (tied with teammate Charlie Morton for that honor)

Strider was drafted in 2020 by the Atlanta Braves after showing improvement after sitting out the previous Clemson season due to arm surgery, going 0-0 with a 4.50 ERA and 19 strikeouts against just three walks in 12 innings over four starts that season.

Strider earned freshman All-America honors in 2018 with a 5-2 record and 4.76 ERA over 22 appearances (six starts). He was picked in the fourth round in 2020 by the Braves.

Lee told SportsTalk recently how Strider turned into a Tiger.

“I'll certainly have to give credit to Andrew See and Bradley LeCroy,” Lee said. “It was kind of a group effort in the recruiting process for Spencer. I had gotten wind of Spencer from a good friend of mine named Mike Gwynn, who coached a team that was based out of the Knoxville area. And Mike’s team had come down and played at the College of Charleston when I was there, and I had recruited some of his guys from there. And he always had good players, and he told me about Spencer.

“So Andrew and Bradley really liked him. When I got a chance to meet Spencer, the first thing that stood out is he is incredibly intelligent, an incredibly independent thinker, very worldly, very smart, and just a great human being. When we got him on campus, the things that stood out when I first saw him pitch was he had an invisible fastball. That was the thing that really stood out to me, just seeing him as a true freshman, he was a long reliever for us. He actually started for us at the end of the year as a freshman, and he was just one of those guys that he threw a plus fastball, a good slider, and threw his fastball right at the top of the strike zone.”

Strider regularly hits triple-digits for the Braves, velocity that he didn’t have at Clemson.

“He didn't have the velocity that he has now. At that time, he was more like 91 to 94, but you could see that he was going to be a guy that was going to be the real deal,” Lee said. “Unfortunately, his sophomore year, he got hurt literally the week before opening day. He was going to be our Friday night starter as a sophomore. He got hurt and that really hurt us in the 2019 season. So 2020, the COVID season, unfortunately, was cut short. Spencer was still on a 50-pitch count limit and really was unable to show the scouts everything that he could do.

“I feel like if that season would have kept going, he probably would have been a top-two-round type draft pick, because I remember his last start against South Carolina on Sunday, he was touching 98 miles an hour. So, it was starting to come back. It was starting to make that jump to where he is now. And obviously the Braves were smart. They saw enough in that shortened season to write him up and take him. I think they took him in the fourth round of a five-round draft. And look at him now, he's a big leaguer and he's one of the best starters in the game.”

Strider’s “invisible” fastball and slider are a deadly combination.

“You can take the data and the analytics and basically define the characteristics of a fastball. So, what we would call a high rise, high spin fastball is a forcing fastball that has a flat plane and it stays at the top of the zone,” Lee said. “The spin of the ball stays true, so it's straight, it's flat and it's firm. And then you see guys that have what we call a low spin fastball, and those are your sinker guys. So their ball is going to dive more to the arm side or straight down. So Spencer has a high ride, high speed fastball. When he got to professional baseball, they said, look, with the characteristics of your fastball, if you throw your fastball at the belt of the hitter, they have no chance of hitting it. You can tell them it's coming and they won't hit it. And sure enough, if you watch Spencer pitch, he just throws his fastball at the top of the strike zone and he'll pitch away with it some.

“And then he'll throw that devastating slider, really in the same tunnel as his fastball. And it's eight to 10 miles an hour slower than his fastball. And they just chase it. They swing and miss. And that's why he strikes out so many hitters, is because he has a fastball that is very difficult for a hitter to get on plane with the barrel of the bat on his fastball. If you watch him pitch, hitters never swing over his fastball. They always are underneath his fastball. That's what I mean by the invisible fastball.

“It's incredibly hard for a hitter to hit a rising fastball that has that type of ride and spin to it. It's very difficult. You literally have to think about swinging one ball above it to be able to actually hit it. Otherwise you're going to be underneath it and you're just going to miss it completely.”