Spencer Strider's Evolution Is Taking Shape

The velocity hasn't fully returned, but Atlanta's 'second ace' may be developing into a more complete pitcher than ever before.

John Smoltz is a witch.

Not for his ability to go from a Cy Young-winning starting pitcher to a lockdown closer (and back to a starter), as he did in his playing career, but for his ability to curse Spencer Strider.

Back in 2025, as Strider was coming back from his elbow surgery, Smoltz went on Atlanta-area radio to address the youngster’s growth as a pitcher.

“I wish, for his sake, he didn’t feel like he had to throw 100 every time,” Smoltz said. “He has special stuff, but it's about locating it, not overpowering everyone.”

And with that wish, the monkey’s paw curled.

Strider couldn’t throw 100 mph anymore. The righthander averaged ‘just’ 95.5 mph last year, and with two fewer inches of induced vertical break than in his dominant 2023 season.

That same season that he broke Smoltz’s single-season strikeout record of 276 punchouts¹ with 281, Strider was averaging 97.2 on his four-seam fastball with 18.4 inches IVB.

Strider’s high-90s average velo hasn’t returned in 2026. But in some ways, he’s a better pitcher than he was in 2023. Let’s talk about it.

Sequencing matters

2023 Spencer Strider was a marvel. 97 mph four-seam fastballs with fantastic carry, supplemented by a gyro slider that was one of the best individual pitches in all of baseball.

He was also pretty simple because that’s mostly all he did. Those two pitches combined for 92.7% of everything he threw, supplemented only seldomly by a changeup that, frankly, wasn’t very good.

And Spencer knew it. As he told me after a spring training start in 2024, “As I’ve learned more about my body and biomechanics, I’ve come to understand that [the changeup] is not an easy pitch to throw, mechanically. […] I think the ceiling for it is where it is, and it’s not something I can throw 50% of the time.”

We saw the struggles that a limited arsenal could present in the 2023 postseason. Against Philadelphia, the Phillies deliberately sat on the slider and chose to foul off heaters until they got a breaking ball they could drive. Strider attempted to disrupt the game plan, ramping up his fastball velocity to nearly 100 mph in an attempt to mess with their timing, but Strider gave up three solo homers in a 3-1 Atlanta loss in game four of the NLDS. He just didn’t really have any other options - if they were going to sit on a breaking ball, they’d be roughly on time for a pitch that moves even less in the changeup.

Strider’s since adjusted, adding a curveball ahead of his abbreviated 2024 season. And he’s kept changing since returning from injury, currently throwing his fastball a career-low 49% of the time. The extra usage has gone to the curveball (15%) and changeup (9%), with the curve roughly equal to the slider in usage against lefties.

But despite the deeper pitch mix, Strider is still vulnerable to left-handers. The righty is allowing left-handers to hit .206/.308/.500, with five of his six homers allowed coming off of southpaws. And that slug is the problem - the batting average and on base are both within five points of his record-setting 2023 season, but with nearly 150 additional points of slug attached to them.

Diving into the specifics of the five homers, they were all pullside shots, but that’s where the similarities end. The three homers off fastballs all came from different parts of the zone, while one came on a slider middle-down and one came on a curveball off the plate down that Kyle Stowers dropped the bathead to get underneath and golf out of Miami’s loanDepot Park.

Strider’s always been a bit flyball and homer-prone; both of those conditions are worse this year. Strider’s flyball rate is a career-high 52.2%, coinciding with a 4.7% homer rate that is worse than the one that led to 2025’s disappointing 4.45 ERA.

It’s a concerning picture, especially in light of last year’s struggles.

When Estimators Fight

But sample sizes matter, right? And the sample sizes say that Strider’s been exceptionally unlucky in a few different areas.

The first is that the batted ball results on some of his individual pitches don’t line up with the expected results. This is mostly manifesting in the slugging numbers; Strider’s fastball is allowing 49 more points of slug than the ‘expected’, while the slider is carrying 238 more points of slug over expected and the curveball has 206 points more.

Some of this is due to the batted ball profile - remember, pulled fly balls in the air put up the most slugging percentage of any type of batted ball - but a lot of it is just due to sample size shenanigans. There have been just eleven batted balls each for the slider and curveball, while the fastball’s only seen 43 put into play.

It’s a reason that Strider’s expected ERA of 2.90 is almost a full run lower than his actual ERA of 3.77.

The walk rate of 13.4% is a bit misleading, as well, influenced by his first start in Colorado. At elevation and unable to command the fastball or slider as a result, Strider walked five in his 3.1 innings. Since that Coors Field appearance, Strider has 12 walks in 27.2 innings; still not a great mark at 11.1%, but a full 2% lower than his listed season average.

It’s safe to assume the walks will come down the farther he gets away from Coors. The home runs likely will, assuming a more standard batted ball distribution - Strider’s 28.6% pulled air rate is in the bottom 15 in all of baseball. Not percentile, but total. MLB average is 16.8%, and he’s hovered right around that in his best years.

“But wait,” the rhetorical device says, allowing me to explain something else. “His FIP is really unsightly at 4.66. Don’t all ERA estimators matter?”

Just like the inhabitants of Animal Farm, some ERA estimators matter more than most. The problem with using FIP to evaluate a small sample size for Spencer Strider is that the stat is designed to isolate the exact things he’s struggled with, as FIP considers only aspects that the pitcher directly controls: walks, strikeouts, hit-by-pitches, and home runs. When you’re suffering from both an outlier home run rate and an altitude-influenced walk rate, your FIP is going to be naturally inflated.

Just correcting for the home run rate, as xFIP does, shows an immediate reduction to 3.78, almost exactly in line with his actual 3.77.

If you think this is a lot of different ERA estimators, we haven’t even touched SIERA, Deserved ERA (dERA) or Deserved Run Average (DRA), Forecasted Run Average (FRA), and Predictive Classified Run Average (pCRA), which is sadly no longer available as the creator was hired by an MLB team and everything he had created became proprietary.

So, what should we expect from Strider going forward?

Setting proper expectations

This current version of Strider straddles what he used to be in 2023 and what he was last season, where he finished with a poor (for him) 4.55 ERA.

The fastball’s not averaging 97 like in 2023, but it does have the same shape from an induced vertical break perspective (if you throw out the Colorado start).

He’s not missing as many bats with his slider as he was in 2023, but he’s supplemented with a curveball that sports similar whiff rates (51.7%) to that previous slider (55.3%).

Strider’s walking more batters than in 2023, but he’s also allowing a lower batting average and a lower hard-hit rate at less-optimal launch angles.

The version of Spencer Strider that struck out 281 hitters may never fully return. Pitchers don’t undergo elbow surgery and simply rewind themselves back to an earlier version.

But that doesn’t mean Atlanta needs that version.

What Strider appears to be becoming is something slightly different: a more complete pitcher.

The 2023 version was built around overwhelming hitters with a fastball-slider combination that bordered on unfair. This version uses four pitches. He’s changing speeds more often. He’s creating different looks against left-handed hitters. He’s learning how to navigate outings when the fastball isn’t sitting 98.

The strikeout totals may never reach 281 again. The fastball may never average 97.2 mph again.

But if the walks normalize, the home-run rate regresses toward his career norms, and the expanded pitch mix continues to develop, the Braves could end up with something almost as valuable.

Not the most dominant version of Spencer Strider, the most complete one.

And that’s a pretty terrifying thought for the rest of baseball.

1. So we’ve established both motive and opportunity for Smoltz, at this point