The Atlanta Braves Hiring Jeremy Hefner as Pitching Coach is a Huge Deal
Atlanta has a new pitching coach, and it has the potential to significantly change the trajectory of several of the team's top prospects
This will be an offseason of change for the Atlanta Braves. They bid goodbye to longtime manager Brian Snitker, who shifted into an advisory role for his 50th year with the organization, replacing him with Walt Weiss. They are moving on from designated hitter Marcell Ozuna, who hit .265 with 148 homers during a six-year tenure in Atlanta.
A lesser heralded, but potentially impactful change came in Atlanta’s coaching staff announcement on Wednesday afternoon: Pitching coach Rick Kranitz is out, being replaced by former New York Mets pitching coach Jeremy Hefner.
And this could be a HUGE deal. Let’s talk about it.
Hefner’s part of the new age of coaching
Here’s what you need to know about Jeremy Hefner’s playing career: It wasn’t very long.
He was drafted in 2007 by the San Diego Padres in the 5th round out of Oral Roberts University, but didn’t debut until 2012. He made exactly 50 MLB appearances, all with the Mets across two seasons, going 8-15 with a 4.65 ERA.
His MLB tenure was cut short by needing Tommy John surgery late in 2013, causing the Mets to non-tender him and add him back on a minor league deal. He then needed a second Tommy John surgery in late 2014 and was just never the same. He pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals’ AAA affiliate in 2016 before finally calling it quits and retiring in January of 2017.
He immediately got back into baseball, becoming an advance scout for the Minnesota Twins and working his way up to assistant pitching coach after just two seasons. He then left for New York after the 2019 season and became their pitching coach, holding the role for six years before parting ways with the Mets this offseason.
In those six years, Hefner did a few notable things for the Mets, whose pitchers had the sixth-best ERA (4.02) during that span with the fourth-fewest hits and fifth-most strikeouts.
The first big thing is the “kitchen sink” approach. I’ve advocated for this before - if your four-seam fastball isn’t elite, throw multiple different fastballs. The Boston Red Sox are big advocates of this on the macro level (through their entire organization) and on a micro level, this was one of the big developments behind the breakout of Hurston Waldrep this season. Adding a cutter and a sinker allowed him to minimize usage of the dead-zone four-seamer and more reliably miss bats, getting him ahead in the count so that he could then unleash that deadly splitter on opposing batters. Hefner’s a big proponent of this theory and we’re likely to see multiple Braves prospects (and even some major leaguers) implement this over the next few seasons.1
The second is a mentality shift on the mound. Hefner-led pitching staffs focus on strikeouts, walks, and quality of contact. While pitchers inherently have more control over the first two than the third, a Jeremy Hefner pitching staff is usually one that throws a high percentage of strikes, using sequencing and highly-developed swing-and-miss offerings to avoid barrels and prevent hard contact. Develop a wide variety of pitches, deploy them based on what the data tells you is the most optimized usage for that hitter, and…profit?
“Hitting’s hard, extremely hard, and then you’ve got to cover like seven different pitches that are all really good? That feels like it’s a really good plan for a pitcher to attack with.”
This leads to a cultural change he instilled in the Mets, one that’s based on curiosity. He believes in collecting massive amounts of data and seeing where it leads you in development. The organization built a state-of-the-art pitching lab in their spring training complex in Port St. Lucie, FL, and Hefner has praised both the technology and the staff they hired to run it in helping to develop their pitchers into better versions of themselves, not just as prospects but even as major leaguers.
While Hefner admits he wasn’t watching every pitch thrown in Triple-A and Double-A, he did get reports on who threw the previous day, their pitch movements, and the milestones I mentioned earlier: Strikeouts, walks, and quality of contact. It was a collaborative effort by everyone in the organization to make those pitchers better so that they could contribute at the major league level.
Collecting that detailed biomechanical information is useful not just for making players in the organization better, it can even help attract players to the organization. Griffin Canning, who was designated for assignment by Atlanta shortly after being acquired from the Los Angeles Angels in the Jorge Soler deal last offseason, signed with New York because of the presence of the pitching lab. And he was excelling this spring and early this season before an unfortunate Achilles tear ended his 2025 campaign.2
So, why move on from Kranitz?
Here’s the question we likely won’t get answered, at least not directly from Alex Anthopoulos or Walt Weiss. We can speculate, but unless Kranitz talks to someone and explains, we likely won’t find out for sure.
But let’s establish something, Kranitz wasn’t a bad coach. He spent seven seasons in Atlanta, finishing with a Cy Young winner (Chris Sale, 2024), a Cy Young runner-up (Max Fried, 2022), and a fourth-place Cy Young finish (Spencer Strider, 2023).
He’s just a different style of coach. Kranitz is known for getting the most out of his major leaguers and understands the ‘art’ of pitching. He’s good at instilling an attacking mindset and knowing when to push them on the mound. He understands swing paths and likes to help prep his pitchers based on that information.
Hefner, by contrast, is known best for improving his players and developing them into the best versions of themselves through an understanding of the science of pitching. And if you look at where Atlanta is with their pitching staff, they’re about to embrace the youth movement with their arms.
The rotation for next season, pending additions this offseason, has 37-year-old Chris Sale, 32-year-old Reynaldo López, and a bunch of youngsters in Spencer Strider (27), Spencer Schwellenbach (25), and Hurston Waldrep (24). Behind them are a rehabbing AJ Smith-Shawver (23), sinkerballer Bryce Elder (27), and a bunch of young prospects in Didier Fuentes (20), JR Ritchie (22), Owen Murphy (22), Blake Burkhalter (25) and Lucas Braun (24).
See how having a younger, more data-savvy coach would align with the makeup of the rotation in the next few seasons?
Again, Kranitz wasn’t a bad pitching coach, far from it. This just wasn’t his thing. When Chris Sale was throwing extra bullpens earlier this season, the person with the tablet in the bullpen helping him understand why the things he was doing on the mound weren’t translating into the movement he was looking for wasn’t Kranitz; it was Spencer Schwellenbach. “He’s a guy that can take some of the technology stuff and turn it into performance stuff,” Sale said at the time, per my notes. “He doesn’t get too lost in this. He doesn’t get too lost in that. He knows how to blend them very well together.” Grant Holmes played a role in it, as well, as someone who toiled in the minors for ten years before finally breaking into the major leagues, thanks to using data to improve his slider.
Back in 2021, Kranitz, on the record, agreed with a writer that some pitchers were paying too much attention to their Statcast data, worried more about “blindly throwing the ball as hard as they can” in hopes of getting whiffs rather than “making their pitches” with good command.
Again, not bad, just different.
It’s part of a wholesale embrace of youth and data among the new coaching staff. Out is manager Brian Snitker, who is 70, Kranitz (67), first base coach Tom Goodwin (57), and third base coach Fredi Gonzalez (61). By contrast, new manager Walt Weiss is 61, Hefner is 39, and new first base coach Antoan Richardson is 42.
‘OTHER NEW COACH’ SIDEBAR: Richardson is an AMAZING hire, one I’ve been asking the team to make. Despite the Mets being the slowest roster on average in the league, he had them as the 2nd-best baserunning team in all of baseball, per Statcast. Juan Soto, he of the 13th percentile 25.8 ft/sec sprint speed, stole 38 bags in 2025. Get your stock in the inevitable Matt Olson 30/30 season while you still can.
Between Weiss’s answer about analytics yesterday and his follow-up on the radio yesterday, plus these hires, I’m increasingly confident we are going to see an uptick in the application of data into the coaching staff’s decision-making moving forward.
Now, if only they’ll go ahead and build that pitching lab.
Yes, I plan to do an offseason deep dive on which prospects would most benefit from this.
He’s likely to miss some of 2026, as well, so maybe signing him to a two-year deal to reunite with Hefner and rehab with Atlanta isn’t the worst thing in the world?