What Changed Inside the Braves' Pitching Lab?

The Braves once appeared focused on finding the right pitching formula. Their newest wave of prospects suggests a more individualized approach.

When prospect analyst Gaurav Vedak joined the Braves Today podcast recently, one comment stood out.

Asked about several of Atlanta’s breakout pitching prospects, Vedak described what sounded like a significant philosophical shift inside the organization’s pitching development program.

In previous seasons, he said, the Braves often appeared focused on a fairly specific formula. This year?

“Throw everything and we’ll figure out what works.”

That may sound like a small difference, but for pitching prospects, it could be enormous.

Because if Atlanta has truly changed its approach, the next wave of Braves arms may end up looking very different from the one that came before it.

Let’s talk about it.

The old model

The Braves previously had a very obvious and clear development plan for just about every pitching prospect: shelving secondary pitches in favor of a slider.

If you didn’t have one, now you did. If you already threw one, you were about to throw it a lot more.

Think of it as the pitching equivalent of language immersion. What’s the best way to get comfortable with a slider? Throw it constantly, even when it doesn’t always make sense to use it.

And despite the blanket development milestones given to many of Atlanta’s pitching prospects, that approach wasn’t handed down on stone tablets as a finished plan.

I’ve personally spoken with prospects and sources close to them who described the organization pushing pitchers from gyro sliders toward sweepers, only to later abandon the sweeper experiment almost entirely.

Sometimes the player knew from the beginning that the pitch wasn’t a natural fit. Maybe they had already experimented with it. Maybe they knew their arm action would make it difficult to throw effectively, like a pronator trying to harness spin that didn’t come naturally to them.

But when they pushed back, they were often told the same thing:

Everyone in the organization was trying it.

When players are confused about the answer, it’s often because the organization is still searching for it.

You can see evidence of that evolution in the development path of AJ Smith-Shawver.

When Atlanta drafted him, the scouting report centered around a four-seam fastball and a curveball. By the time he had become the organization’s top prospect, most public evaluations highlighted a hard gyro slider as his primary secondary pitch. The curveball had largely disappeared from the conversation.

Then it came back.

As Smith-Shawver continued developing, the curveball re-emerged, the changeup evolved into a split-change variation, and his arsenal became much more diverse than the relatively straightforward fastball-slider combination that initially defined his prospect rise.

AJ’s journey wasn’t unusual.

It was emblematic of an organization that appeared to be experimenting in real time with what it wanted its pitchers to become.

This year looks different

Things are working differently in Atlanta’s organization now. In previous years, it was essentially four-seam & sweeper or slider development. This year, as Gaurav explained, it's "throw everything and we'll figure out what works."

You can see the change most clearly in JR Ritchie.

Ritchie returned from Tommy John surgery in 2024 as a fairly traditional four-seam/slider/changeup pitcher. This season, he has shown all three fastball shapes, leaned heavily on a curveball, and continued using the changeup to generate ground balls.

That’s a dramatically different developmental picture than the one Atlanta was often painting a few years ago.

Teenager Briggs McKenzie, who is on his first full professional season, has already started tinkering with a sinker. 2024 first-rounder Cam Caminiti has both dropped his arm slot and gone from a two-seam/changeup foundation to more of a Chris Sale-esque four-seam/slider base, while playing around with a kick-change. IFA Davis Polo is still on a three-pitch arsenal, 4S/slider/changeup, but frequently pitches ‘backward’ by only using the four-seamer 18% to 20% of the time. Carter Holton, who was known as a 4S/changeup dominant pitcher at Vanderbilt, is now throwing both a four-seam and a two-seam fastball, as well as locating the improved curveball and slider in the zone and still pulling out the changeup when needed.

The common thread here is that…there doesn’t appear to be one common thread.

And that’s the point.

For years, outside observers often described the Braves’ approach as stripping pitchers down to a four-seam fastball and slider, refining those pitches, and then gradually adding other weapons back into the mix.

The current version may be far less prescriptive and more individualized.

Why this makes sense

Pitching development across baseball is becoming more individualized.

Not every pitcher should throw a sweeper.

Not every pitcher should throw a riding four-seamer.

Not every pitcher should chase the same movement profiles.

The best development programs increasingly start with: “What does this pitcher do well already?” instead of “What do we want every pitcher to become?”

The Braves may have realized their greatest advantage isn’t creating one pitching model; it’s helping each pitcher discover his own.

Look at all the names we mentioned above: Briggs McKenzie, Cam Caminiti, Davis Polo, Carter Holton. They all do things differently, and that’s okay.

Not all of them will become stars. But they all look different from each other, and that matters. A development system produces ‘families’ of pitchers - think about St. Louis’s 2010s strategy of sinker-heavy starters that specialized in groundballs and pitching to contact (Adam Wainwright, Lance Lynn), or Cleveland leaning into command monsters (Corey Kluber, Zach Plesac), or Houston’s riding four-seam fastballs paired with big breaking balls (Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander).

Development systems often produce families of pitchers.

The Braves’ newest wave increasingly looks like a collection of individuals.

For years, the question surrounding Braves pitching development was whether Atlanta had discovered the right formula.

The more interesting possibility is that they may have stopped looking for one.