Braves Tomorrow: Cam Caminiti and the Art of Being Different

The Braves aren't trying to build another Chris Sale. They're trying to build another outlier.

When the Braves acquired Chris Sale, they didn’t just add an ace to the rotation. They added a blueprint for what a dominant modern left-hander can look like.

A year later, one of the organization’s most important pitching prospects is starting to look...a little more like him.

If you were designing a “Chris Sale Starter Kit,” you’d probably begin with three things:

A lower arm slot.
A nasty slider.
A lanky left-hander with plenty of velocity.

The Braves happened to have the third ingredient when they drafted Cam Caminiti with the 24th overall pick in 2024.

Over the past year, they’ve quietly started adding the first two, reshaping one of the most intriguing arms in their system.

Let’s talk about it.

Lowering the arm slot

Caminiti debuted for Single-A Augusta at age-18 with a little bit of funkiness in the delivery already - a 40-ish degree arm angle and a crossfire finish that made for uncomfortable at-bats for lefties.

He’s leaned into that concept, at the direction of Atlanta’s player development.

Caminiti’s arm slot has dropped more than ten degrees, to 28°, and it’s done wonders to his release point. Caminiti now releases the ball at just 5.3 feet off the ground, lower than roughly 85% of major league pitchers.

It's not as extreme as Chris Sale, who sits around a 10° arm angle with a 4.8-foot release height. But the objective is remarkably similar: create uncomfortable angles to the plate.

And the extreme angles aspect manifests in multiple dimensions - while the low arm slot results in an extraordinarily low Vertical Approach Angle, which can help a fastball play up, Caminiti’s also taking advantage of the horizontal release point. Caminiti’s 3.4 ft horizontal release point is closer to first base than over 90% of lefties in MLB.

The advantages of a low, outside release point are obvious to anyone who has watched a Chris Sale start: most pitches come with more horizontal movement, as it’s easier to create sweep from such an outlier arm angle. The ball approaches the plate on a relatively harsh diagonal, making it harder to pick up out of the hand.

One of the concepts we talk about with pitching is “be different”, be it in your pitch mix, how you use them, or how they move when thrown. This is a different kind of different. Every hitter builds an internal library of release points and ball flights over thousands of plate appearances. Caminiti simply doesn’t look like most of those examples.

Once the arm slot changed, other changes became possible.

The slider

Lower slots often pair naturally with sweepier breaking balls, as the extreme horizontal release point provides an exaggerated break over a standard breaking ball.

This is a feature, not a bug, as Caminiti’s a natural pronator that struggles to generate spin on his own. The Braves didn’t simply lower Caminiti’s arm slot and hope for the best. They did it for a reason and gave him a breaking ball designed to take advantage of it.

The unique movement profile of a sidearm sweeper challenges standard bat paths, especially when paired with a fastball. And for Caminiti, his ability to zone the sweeper makes it more platoon-agnostic, capable of getting outs against batters of either handedness.

Yes, again, similar to Chris Sale. During his time in Atlanta, lefties have a .186 xwOBA and 48.2% whiff rate on the slider. For righties, it takes a small step back to a .219 xwOBA and 39.0% whiff rate.

The arsenal

None of these changes exist in isolation. Lowering the arm slot changes how every pitch plays. The slider becomes more horizontal. The fastball approaches from a different angle. His cutter, new for this season, serves to bridge between the four-seamer and the slider. Suddenly, the entire arsenal starts fitting together differently.

But despite the changes, the first thing that jumps off the page isn’t the movement profile; it’s the strike throwing.

Caminiti owns a 67.7% strike rate, good for the 95th percentile in the minor leagues, while his 57.1% zone rate ranks in the 94th percentile. For a pitcher learning a new delivery and incorporating a new breaking ball, that’s an impressive foundation.

Oddly enough, those elite strike-throwing metrics haven’t translated into an elite walk rate, which still sits around 10.7%. That’s a bit of a mystery, but it’s one the Braves would probably rather have than the alternative. Command within the zone is often easier to refine than simply teaching a pitcher to throw strikes in the first place.

The movement profile is starting to come together as well. The flatter fastball plays off the more horizontal slider, while the changeup still offers a completely different look with its depth. That changeup - the pitch that made Caminiti such a data darling in the 2024 Draft - has evolved, too. He’s throwing it harder now, more like a kick change, and because he doesn’t naturally generate much spin, it occasionally takes on splitter-like characteristics.

Together, the arsenal has produced a 53.7% groundball rate. That’s one area where the comparison to Chris Sale breaks down. Sale has built a Hall of Fame-caliber career around strikeouts and weak contact. Caminiti’s version may ultimately feature a few more balls on the ground.

And that’s perfectly fine.

The goal was never to create Chris Sale.

The goal was to build an arsenal that maximizes Caminiti’s own strengths.

Why Caminiti?

It’s important to understand that these changes don’t universally work for every pitching prospect. But for Caminiti, this is a set of adjustments to accentuate his strengths and mitigate his weaknesses.

He’s insanely athletic, playing as a centerfielder in high school when he wasn’t pitching, so asking him to learn a new pitching motion isn’t as hard as you’d think. And the very nature of a crossfire delivery helps the lead leg stay closed longer, which keeps the hips in line and the torso rotation in sync with the arm action. All of that allows the natural athleticism to generate power, allowing his athleticism to translate into velocity.

And that velo is important - as a pronator, it’s harder for him to spin the ball, so improving his pitches is down to either ‘hacking’ the spin, as the Braves have done by dropping the arm angle, or by adding velocity. Atlanta went with both approaches.

Bigger picture

Caminiti is another example of Atlanta’s evolving pitching philosophy. Rather than waiting for prospects to discover what works best, the organization increasingly seems willing to prescribe it.

The Braves didn’t draft Chris Sale.

They drafted Cam Caminiti.

But they also draft Spencer Strider and Herick Hernandez, as well as Carter Holton and Briggs McKenzie.

Over the past few years, Atlanta has repeatedly identified traits that make certain pitchers difficult to hit, and then looked for ways to amplify those traits throughout the organization.

That’s the common thread.

The goal isn’t to manufacture identical pitchers. It’s to create outliers.

Chris Sale’s impossible release point. Herick Hernandez’s elite ride and velocity. Briggs McKenzie’s unique movement profile. Cam Caminiti’s low slot and sweeping arsenal. They all arrive there in different ways, but they share the same underlying philosophy: don’t chase average. Find what makes a pitcher different, then lean into it.

Whether Caminiti ultimately becomes an ace won’t be determined by his arm slot or his slider alone. Development is rarely that simple.

But the changes Atlanta has already made tell us something important about how the organization views him, and perhaps about how it views pitching as a whole.

The Braves aren’t waiting to see what Cam Caminiti becomes.

They’ve already started helping him become the most difficult version of himself to hit.