NEWS: Braves Starters Add New Pitches; Higher Rotation Ceiling? | Atlanta Braves Podcast

Multiple Brave starters have added or tweaked new pitches this winter. And come on, y'all knew we were going to talk about this. [music] Yes. Welcome on in to Braves Today, your daily source for news, notes, and updates on your Atlanta Braves. I'm your host, Lindsay Crosby, award-winning baseball writer and podcaster. You can follow me on social media at Crosby Baseball. You can find all my written work, bravestoday.com. That's the Braves Today Substack, as this is both a podcast and a newsletter. We're proudly part of the Believe Podcast Network and presented to you by FanDuel. Download the FanDuel app or go to fanduel.com to get started. We've seen quite a few Braves starters add or tweak what they're doing with their Arsenals this year. And I think it's worth talking about because yes, one of the questions about Atlanta's rotation, the big question arguably is health, right? All of these guys outside of Bryce Elder have had injuries recently, right? They've all missed time. 60 to AIL last year for a partial UCL tear for Grant Holmes, a shoulder issue for Ronaldo. Like, they've all missed time, but outside of that, there's effectiveness and consistency questions with a lot of these guys. And while Bryce Elder still just seemingly refuses to add the cutter I've been begging him to add, multiple Brave starters have talked to the media this spring about new things that they are trying to do in the game. And I think the one that I'm the most excited about is Joey Wentz. When you look at what he did last year, you could see, and I talked about this on the podcast, I talked about this in the newsletter, the first seven starts and the last seven starts for Joey Wentz were significantly different, right? First seven starts, 270 erra, 313 fit. He absolutely came in and stabilized the rotation. The last seven starts, or really, it was seven appearances at the beginning. He had one relief outing and then a start. Uh last seven appearances for the Braves, 767 erra. Not good. But here's the thing, it was a 378 fifth. It was still like from the erra estimators, right? What it should have been. And reminder, fielding independent pitching is the things that the starting pitcher directly controls. walks, strikeouts, home runs. You think about it, it makes sense. Any batted ball that's in the field of play is influenced by the defense. If you have a generational center fielder behind you, he can take away balls in the gaps that would be extra bases. If you had bad if you had bad defense behind you, a poor shorts stop, a poor right fielder, ask Chris Sale about what it was like with having Jorge Solair out there. you can run into a situation where things that should be outs or singles become doubles, right? So, FIP just measures what a pitcher has direct control over. It's not a perfect measure by any means. None of these are, but it's a useful erra estimator where you can learn a lot by the difference between the actual ERA and the FIP. And again, final seven starts for Joey Wentz. 767 erra 378 fib. We've talked about this. He had fatigue issues. He had uh you know co caused by workload. He had some bad luck. Bed average in balls in play was like 443. Way above the league average for that. But he's worked this winter to address some of his biggest issues that he had last year. And one of those was preventing damage to lefties. So I pulled his stats with just the Braves to see the issue he had with lefties and then to try to quantify talk about what he did to fix it. So just in Atlanta, not his time in Detroit, not his time in Minnesota, just in Atlanta. Right-handed hitters had a slash line. 259 batting average, 305 on base, 368 slug. A 673 OPS is absolutely something you are happy with. Okay, that was against righties. against lefties. They had a 305 batting average, a 397 on base, and a 475 slug. And this OPS is in the 800s, which is I don't have to tell you, not good. That's an 872. So, what did Joey Wentz work on this winter? he added like one he tried to tweak and improve his change up a little bit. Not a pitch that he really throws a ton and something where when you like when you watch what he does in a game when you look at the handedness breakdowns um he has a change up. He throws it less than 1% of the time to lefties. He throws it 5% of the time to righties. It's really not the tool he's trying to use against lefties. Against lefties, he has fast ball slider is the predominant choice of what he's throwing, right? Forcame fast ball and then he has the slider that is breaking away from a lefty. So if you're a lefty facing Joey Wentz, you know it's going to be fast balls up and sliders moving away from you. What did he do? He added a two seam fast ball. the the start that he pulled it out against Detroit conveniently was the start where Statcast went down. So, we don't have movement on it. We don't have the metrics and everything on it, but what we do have is the video of what it did. Shout out to Ken Sigura, friend of the program over at the AJC. He wrote all of this up. He talked to Joey Wentz. He's the one who pulled the video of this and uh he's facing a lefty. I believe it's prospect Max Clark and he just makes him look absolutely foolish and like it's it looks like it's coming in middle up in the strike zone and it just keeps coming in and coming in and coming in towards Max Clark. He ends up trying to check his swing while also bending out of the way of the pitch and he ends up falling to the ground, losing his helmet. It was actually called a ball. He didn't even know it was a ball. If you watch the whole at bat when he takes ball four, he thought the count was three and one cuz he didn't even realize that pitch was a strike or sorry, he thought that pitch was a strike and it was a ball because it looked like it was going to be middle up and then it comes back towards his face kind of late in the movement. Wentz said on that specific one that he threw, quote, I liked it. I thought it got the reaction I would want to get from the hitter. And I mean, yes, Max Clark is a prospect. We saw how he struggled in the outfield while wearing 37 pounds of jewelry against the Braves, but he's also one of the top prospects in baseball. Like, he's a very good pitcher. I'm sorry, a very good hitter. Uh, so fooling him that badly is definitely a good thing. Some of that surprise, right? I don't think anybody knew that Joey Wentz was going to throw a two seamer before he threw a two seamer, but it's a sign that this is another weapon for Joey Wentz. And WZ gave a lot of the credit to this to Atlanta's new coaches, Jeremy Hefner, bullpin coach JP Martinez. Quote, "It's been really good. I mean, Heff and JP, I think they're both really smart when it comes to pitching, when it comes to kind of pitch design and shapes and stuff like that. I talked about the change from Rick Kran to Jeremy Hefner back in December or whatever it was when they announced the change, maybe late November. I don't think Rick Cran was a bad pitching coach. Atlanta's rotation, Atlanta's pitch as a whole in 24 was one of the best in baseball. But I do think Rick Cranets, every coach has strengths and weaknesses. And I think Rick's Rick Cranets's strength was getting veteran pitchers through their outings, understanding the right buttons to push at the right time, and motivating those guys to perform at their best. I don't think he's the right coach for a pitching staff that has some younger guys on it that aren't fully established in the majors that need to take that last step, that need to evolve a little bit and get a little bit better. And so bringing in Jeremy Hefner, bringing in JP Martinez, I feel like these are really good decisions for the Braves simply because they're they're more modern pitchers or more modern coaches who understand how to take a pitcher and make them better. Again, nothing against Rick Cranets, right? Even though he didn't notice AJ Smith Shaw getting hurt until Spencer Striker said something like nothing against Rick Cranets. This is laudatory towards Jeremy Hefner, towards JP Martinez. And like WZ talked about when he met with them after the hire, he specifically discussed he wanted to figure out something, an armside pitch. So for a lefty, it's a pitch that runs to the left side of the plate. If you're a lefty, it's going to If you're a lefty hitter, it's going to come in towards you. If you're a righty hitter, it's going to move away from you. One of the reasons why platoon splits are what they are is most breaking pitches that a lefty starter has are going to come in towards you. So either it starts off the plate and it's coming into your bat path and the hope of the starter is that you're going to take it thinking it's ball and it'll back door for a strike or they're throwing it over the plate and hoping there's enough break on it to bring it inside so that you swing and miss and it runs off of the plate away from your barrel for a strike. This gives him something he can aim towards the outside edge of the plate, get you to commit to swinging, and then it will run off of the plate if you're a righty. Or if you're a lefty, he can get you something that you think is going to be a hitable pitch up in the zone or down in the zone, whatever, and it's going to run in on your hands. It's just not a look that a lefty pitcher, a lefty hitter is used to seeing a lot. So big fan of this addition, big fan of adding this. Really excited to see what it looks like this year. He did a little bit of work on his change up as well, but I think this two seamer could be the difference between a good and a bad outing. The problem for me is I don't see where he threw any on Monday. He went behind Bryce Elder on Monday. Good outing. He walked a couple, but he struck out three. I don't think he allowed any hits or anything, but I don't see where he threw any of these. So, I'm hoping this is not a situation like Grant Holmes. Grant Holmes added a kit change last spring, but never really got confident enough to use it in a game, and he's still working on improving it now. And speaking of, we'll talk about that next right here on Braves Today. But first, today's episode's brought to you by our friends at IQ Bar. It is our exclusive snack hydration and coffee sponsor. IQ Bar protein bars. IQ Mix hydration mixes. IQ Joe Mushroom Coffees are the delicious low sugar brain and body fuel you need to win your day. The IQ Mix zero sugar drink mix. It hydrates with electrolytes and improves your mood and boosts clarity. The IQ Bar Plant protein bars. Smarter snack choice. Plenty of protein, tons of fiber, no added sugar, and all of the IQ Bar products. No gluten, no dairy, no soy, no GMOs, no artificial ingredients, and they have over 20,000 five-star reviews and counting. More people than ever are fueling their busy lifestyles with IQ bars, brain and body boosting bars, hydration mixes, and mushroom coffees. And guess what? The ultimate sampler pack includes all three. And right now, IQ Bar is offering our podcast listeners 20% off all IQ Bar products, including that ultimate sampler pack. Nine IQ bars, eight IQ Mix Sticks, four IQ Joe sticks. So, 20% off plus free shipping. Text MLB to 64,000. That's text MLB to 6400. That's MLB to 64,000. Now, measures and data rates may apply. See the terms and conditions for details. Welcome back to Braves today. Lindseay Crosby. On the note of Grant Holmes, we saw Grant Holmes also work on some tweaks to some pitches in spring. And reminder here, I wrote about this on the newsletter midFebruary or so, and I'm actually kind of proud of the headline for this article because the title of this right before Valentine's Day, Grant Holmes and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad fastball. If you have kids, you'll get that reference. If you were a kid once, you'll probably get that reference. But what we have to understand, Grant Holmes's four seam fast, he only threw it about 25% of the time last year. I'm sorry, about 30% of the time, one-third roughly. But even holding it back to just onethird of the time, it was still one of the worst individual pitches among any qualified starter in baseball. On an accumulation basis, you're looking at run value minus4. It was the eighth worst individual pitch by overall run value among all qualified starters in baseball last year. And here's the thing, run value is an accumulation stat. The more you throw, the more negative run value you can get from a bad pitch. If you look at it on a rate basis, run value per 100 pitches, it goes from the eighth worst individual pitch in baseball at minus14 to the seventh worst at minus 2.2 run value per 100 thrown. I'm not really a believer in taking a hitter's stats off of a specific pitch to get like overarching stories of the effectiveness of that pitch, right? And that's simply because there's so many other variables in the app at, right? There's what is that hitter good at hitting. There is the sequencing, the situation as far as runners on bases, number of outs, all of those things. But it is just noteworthy to point out the stats for opposing hitters off of Grant Holmes's four seam fast last year. 330 batting average 651 slug. I'm sorry. Anybody who's hitting 330 with a 651 slug, we're calling that dude one of the best hitters in baseball. And in essence, when Grant Holmes threw a dude fast, a forcing fastball, they became one of the best hitters in baseball because of that pitch. 87 were put into play, 10 were home runs, five more were doubles. The hard hit rate on that fast ball was 48.3%. [snorts] And this wasn't like a bad luck thing, okay? The expected batting average, remember, it was an actual batting average of 330. The expected batting average, what it should have been based off of the launch angle and exit velocities and direction of the batted balls, was a 300. The slugging was a 651. The expected slugging was a 604. He was slightly unlucky with it, but even if he wasn't going to be unlucky with it, it was still a pretty bad pitch. So Grant Holmes has been trying to work on that with trying to work on that this winter thanks to of course Jeremy Hefner. One of the things that he said the issues on the pitch were it came down to the induced vertical break. Those of you who follow pitching all of this stuff, you've heard a lot of this in the context of Spencer Strider. We've been talking about how last year he was kind of average at 16 inches in change of induced vertical break. And when he was at his best in 2023, he had better velocity, but he had like 18 inches of induced vertical break as well. I broke that down on yesterday's show. He looked better over the weekend, right? Grant Holmes last year was at 15.4 inches of induced vertical break. just a below average number. And the problem here is like you can survive with below average induced vertical break if you have really good horizontal movement. You'll see these sometimes called cut ride fast balls. It's not a true cutter, but it's got both decent induced vertical break and decent horizontal movement. It's kind of been the sweet spot between a cutter, which is mostly horizontal movement, not a ton of induced vertical break, and a forseam fast ball, which is mostly induced vertical break, and not a ton of horizontal movement. Again, cutride fastballs. If you want to see a cutride fastball, go watch the Cubs. The Cubs love a good cutride fastball. That's Kate Horton. That is his thing is he's throwing cutride fastballs. Grant Holmes had below average induced vertical break like half an inch or an inch. Not a huge deficit, but still a significant one. But on his horizontal movement, he was closer to a standard forseam fast ball than a cutride fastball. He had about 5 in of horizontal movement. We don't do induced on horizontal movement because gravity doesn't pull the ball left or right. Gravity just pulls the ball down. He had about five inches of horizontal movement. The average for seam fast ball is almost 8 in. So he had both bad ver induced vertical break and bad horizontal break. And what happens in this in this scenario, it's called a dead zone fast ball. talked about this a little bit on the show before, but the gist of this is every hitter kind of naturally in their head just knows what a pitch on average should do. Right? When you look at where a guy releases the ball and his arm angle, mentally, subconsciously, a hitter just kind of fills in the missing details based on every pitch that they've seen in the past. And that spot where they expect the pitch to be, if your actual pitch ends up there, you have a dead zone fastball. The pitch moves the way the hitter instinctively thinks it's going to based on every other thrown pitch they've seen in their lives. And that is a bad thing. We talk about in pitching all the time. What you want to do is be unusual. You want to do something different or unexpected from what the hitter is thinking. Maybe the pitch movement is different out of your arm slot than normally out of that arm slot. Maybe your arm slot itself is weird. Chris Sail is a sidearm guy. There's not a ton of sidearm guys, but because of it, nobody really feels comfortable facing his fast ball and then he pairs a really good slider off of it. Right. Grant Holmes throws from a perfectly ordinary slot and the pitch does exactly what you think it's going to do. Again, I put this piece up back in midFebruary, like February 12th or so. And in there, I actually put a chart. Shout out to Max Bay. He is a senior quantitative analyst with the Los Angeles Dodgers, but he has a model. You can plug in pitch information and see the dead zone of a pitch. And he gave me access to it. And I put Grant Holmes's fast ball into that. And if you go to the article, you can see there's a circle like the like the red circle is the landing point for the fast ball. The blue circles are where the hitter thinks the pitch is going to end up based on the arm angle and the release point. And those two circles just are on top of each other. Again, the goal of pitching is to be unusual. Grant Holmes wasn't doing that. So he's tweaked the fast ball. He got the suggestion from Jeremy Hefner. Oftent times when you're throwing a forseam fastball, it's called one, it's called a forseam fastball because of the orientation of the seams. A two seam fast ball, your fingers are literally on two seams. A fourseam fast ball, you are covering multiple seams with the pressure points from your fingers. But a lot of guys when you're throwing the forcing fast ball, your index and your middle fingers are spread and so it creates like the pressure on the seams is different. Jeremy Hefner said, "Hey, put your fingers together instead of separate. It's still a fourseam fast ball, but the pressure on the seams is different, which impacts how the ball flies. Grant Holmes said, "Hey, felt weird. I kept trying it. It looks good. It feels good. The results are there." He's also tried to work on getting back to the confidence he used to have in his cutter. He's also tried to work on that kick change. Again, I mentioned he added the kick change last spring in spring training. I wrote all about it. I podcasted about it. and then he threw like 20 of them over the course of the season. Like he barely used the pitch. He's trying to get more comfortable in both of those and especially the kick change. He's really worked on that kick change. The cutter in his past has been a very, very good pitch for him. But the kick change is something he was never really confident enough to legitimately use it as part of his arsenal. Quick reminder on a kick change is you throw it like a standard change up, but one of the fingers, typically the the the index, or sorry, the middle finger, you have the finger pulled back so that the tip of your middle finger is on the seam and your knuckles up in the air. And what that does is as you release the pitch, the last thing to touch the ball is that middle finger. And so it being on the ball an extra fraction of a second after your other fingers have come off ends up slightly adjusting the spin of the pitch. That's the kick in a kick change. And so because of that, it moves differently. You're also supposed to throw it like it's a fast ball, right? Same intent, same arm speed. And kick changes typically have more velocity than a normal change up. A normal change up's like 10 mph difference from the fast ball. That's the goal. A kick change might be four or five mph difference, but the movement is more drastic on a kick change than a standard two seam grip change up. Grant Holmes is working on getting more comfortable with that. And he actually said of Jeremy Hefner, quote, he's great, really good actually with pitch shapes and grips and stuff. Again, nothing against Rick Cranets. He's a different type of pitching coach than Jeremy Hefner is. And we're seeing these results. And it's not just the major leaguers. We're seeing results with the prospects as well. We'll talk about that next right here on Braves Today. But first, today's episode's brought to you by our friends at Grand Slam Getaways. If you're looking for the perfect vacation this summer, Grand Slam Getaways is the place to go. Grandlam getaways.com. They have three vacations this year. They're going to Florida in May. They're going to the Midwest in June. They're going to the Northeast in July. All of these trips include multiple Braves games with field level tickets. It's a motor coach out of Atlanta. You also get games in other ballparks. Again, field level tickets for everything. Three star hotels with breakfast, fun outside excursions on different days, giveaways and raffles, four major league players making appearances during the trip. Tons of fun. Go to grandlam-getaways.com to place your deposit now. Again, Florida in May, Midwest in June, Northeast in July. All of these will go to at least two Braves games and at least two other games in notable parks on the trip. Great vacation if you're retired. Great vacation if you're a baseball nut. Great vacation for a parent and a kid on summer vacation. Again, grandlam-getaways.com. That's grandlam-getaways.com. Final segment of Braves Today, Lindsey Crosby. We're going kind of long on pitching nerd stuff. I just put out a survey, by the way, on Braves Today, both the podcast and the newsletter. What you guys want to hear, what you guys don't, what you want more of. And one of the most common podcast things was you guys like the 30 to 45 minutes, not the 25 to 30 minutes that I usually try to stick to. So, I don't feel too bad about this going a little bit longer, but if you have thoughts about what you want to see on the newsletter, what you want to see on the podcast, what you don't like, what you do like, and a free gift at the end, the link is in the episode description, link is in the show notes, and it's on my social media to take the Braves Today survey for 2026 so we can figure out how better to give you the Braves news, notes, and updates you want on your favorite baseball team. Okay, it's not just Joey Wentz and Grant Holmes that made changes. Ronaldo Lopez worked on some stuff. Jr. Richie worked on some stuff and Lopez, his wasn't really that extreme. He was working on his change up, right? Jeremy Hefner was helping and it was changing the grip. Change ups are the weird pitch where there's like three or four different ways to throw them and it's all different. You can use a four seamer grip. You can use a two seamer grip. The circle change is called a circle change because you literally your thumb and your index finger make a circle on the side of the ball. You can do what's called a Vulcan change where you have a split. I can't even really do it with my left hand. I never was good at this. But a Vulcan change is where there's a split between your ring and your middle fingers on your throwing hand. Similar to how the Vulcans on Star Trek, we do live long and prosper. So Jeremy, so Ronaldo Lopez working on a new grip. We don't know what that grip is. I went to his last outing and tried to pull the video and slow it down and zoom it in to look and see if I could tell what the pitch grip was. and it really wasn't great. Um, I'm gonna try again the next time he's out there. I'm going to try to look the MLB research tool. Uh, it's a great tool that MLB gives anybody who's or gives people who were in the credentiing system and it gives us a lot of for any single pitch in a game. It gives us alternate views. It gives us all the additional measurements from a play. So, like when I tell you, hey, Ronald threw that ball at 93 miles an hour or whatever, you know, the home to first time for Shawn Mur for for Austin Riley was X or whatever, that's all coming from the research tool. They give us alternate angles of every play. We can see the open side from the pitcher, the close side, we can see the high home, we can see the uh the center field camera and all of that. But I just in spring training, not all of those views are available and I couldn't get a good shot of the Ronaldo Lopez change up. I'm working on it. But we do have news about what what J.R. Richie is working on because Richie, just like Wentz and Lopez, is working on his change up and specifically he's trying to get better with the drop on the pitch. Right. So he has modified it a bit and this this is really kind of like fine minut changes, right? But one of the options for a change up. I mentioned it in the last segment, the Vulcan change, right? You're doing the live long and prosper Star Trek thing and the ball kind of goes in the middle and the way that I was always told to do it was you have the two fingers that are open on the seams, right? But he's throwing this. He calls it a Vulcan split. It's kind of a difference. It's kind of a in the middle between a Vulcan change and a splitter. And again, very fine difference here, right? The Vulcan is it's kind of more like a standard Vulcan change is more fading action, so horizontal movement. Whereas the splitter is more vertical drop and it's kind of like late dive. It typically has more velocity. It typically has less spin. A good splitter is less than 100, less than a thousand RPM on the way to the plate. Michelle splitter actually is one of He's one of the few guys that has a high spin breaking ball and a low spin splitter. It's really hard to do both. You're usually really good at spinning the ball or you're really bad at spinning it and so things like splitters work well for you because your spin rates are so low. AJ Spishov is the weird dude that does both. Also, if you're still listening while your son while your grandson's hurt, shout out to AJ's mom. I know you were a big listener to the podcast for a long time. I hope you're still here. So Richie is doing more like a Vulcan split. And the reason for this is there is a very clear and open like obvious gap in his pitch plot. Okay. So when you look at what J.R. Richie does, he throws six pitches. He has all three fast balls. He has a force aimer, a sinker, and a cutter. He also throws a curveball, a sweeper, and a change up. So, think about what these are going to do from a righty. Okay? If 000, think about a like a standard pitch plot with the four quadrants. Z is think of it as dead center of the plate, right? Middle middle, you're grooving a pitch down the middle. Okay? anything like the force seamer is going to be on the arm side because it flies mostly straight and it's coming out of the right hand, right? The sinker is going to have a little more drop off of the four seamer and it's going to move a little more away from the plate. Okay, the change up that Richie had was below the sinker. So, you have three pitches that are all staying kind of to the arm side. You have a sweeper which is characterized by extreme horizontal movement. So it's running across the plate to the other side of the pitch plot. Okay. You have a curveball. His curveball is a two plane breaking curveball. So it moves both horizontally and vertically. And you can actually see the exact numbers. Last year in AAA it moved on average 13 12 in away I'm sorry 13 and 12 inches towards the plate. So away from his arm side and it dropped about 11 in induced vertical break, right? Not counting what gravity made it do. But the issue and then the cutter, the reason I love a cutter so much, and those of you who are on YouTube can actually see this on the screen, the cutter is right there in the middle between both the four seamer and the sweeper. And it's kind of in the middle between the four seamer and the curveball. like the the cutter's right in the middle of the pitch plot between everything. It has a little more drop than a four seamer, but not as much as a sweeper. It has a little bit of horizontal movement off of the four seamer, so it gets right back to the middle, but not nearly as much drop as a curve ball. And if JR Richie threw a slider through a standard slider, not a sweeper, a standard slider, it would be a gyro slider would come in ideally the perfect gyro slider is like 00 like right in the middle of the pitch plot. And then if you have a slider that moves a little more, it's going to come down almost like a baby curveball, right? It's going to come down a little bit farther below the zero inches of induced vertical brake line, and it's going to come a little bit more to the glove side. But what J.R. Richie has because he had a two seam change up that ran back to the arm side. He has a giant gap in his pitch plot. Right? He has things that move extremely horizontally in the sweeper. He has things that move to the arm side in the sinker. He has things that stay up in the forseam fast ball. He has things that drop below the zone in a curveball. But his curveball also has horizontal movement. He doesn't have anything that kind of moves towards the middle of the zone but drops down. So changing the ch I shouldn't say changing the change up. Adjusting the standard change up to what he's calling the Vulcan split. a pitch that has more of that downward breaking action like a splitter, but still some of the velocity difference of a traditional change up. It's going to fill a missing hole in the pitch plot right there below the cutter, below the 000 point, below the middle of the zone. It's going to fill that missing hole. Because when you're looking to add a pitch, you're always trying to figure out what is the goal of this pitch. And for Richie, it's very clear he wants something to fill a missing spot in the zone. And that makes it because it's ends up the movement profile would naturally take it to the middle of the plate. It's not based on running off the plate. It's based on running dropping below the plate. It ends up being pretty ar like pretty platoon agnostic. It doesn't care if you're a lefty or a righty. Like guys like Max Freed who have a really good 12 to6 curveball that is a pure vertical breaking pitch. That pitch works against both lefties and righties because it doesn't count on moving away or towards you. It just drops below your back. That's what Richie is trying to get with this Vulcan split. I love it. I love this adjustment. Uh don't you don't see a lot of guys trying to steal the best characteristics of both because again the change up it usually again moves away from the center of the plate back to the arm side and it's really banking on the velocity difference. The splitter comes in harder. Not the veloc velocity but still harder but it's banking on that vertical drop. He's trying to combine both. He's trying to get the vertical drop of a splitter with the velocity difference of a standard change up. I love it. It's a great idea. There's I'm sure that there's other guys to do things like this. He's calling it a Vulcan split because he kind of wants to. I don't necessarily know he's the only guy that's ever tried this, but I still love it. I still love the ingenuity. And again, this is another situation where he was working with Jeremy Hefner and JP Martinez and some of the Braves pitching staff, pitching coaches on figuring out what to do. Again, nothing against uh Rick Granitz, good pitching coach, not the right pitching coach for Atlanta's current rotation setup. You saw this last year when Chris Sales struggled. Remember we talked about this. Who fixed Chris Sail? It wasn't Rick Cran. It was Spencer Swellenbach and Grant Holmes with iPads in the bullpen. Do you trust Jeremy Hefner to also figure the same thing out that Spencer Swelenbach and Grant Holmes figured out? Cuz I do. Again, nothing against Rick Cran. That's just not how he works. That is how Jeremy Hefner works. And hopefully this does two things. One, this explains why some people think I talk about Jeremy Hefner too much. I'm an amateur pitching nerd, as you could tell by 40 minutes of me talking about three new pitches. But also, this is how modern baseball works. This is modern pitching development. You can very quickly analyze what a guy does wrong, and you can figure out a fix. Maybe it's a tweak to your existing change up like it is with Richie. Maybe it's a grip adjustment on a substandard pitch like it is Grant Holmes's four seam fast. Maybe it's introducing a new pitch like Joey Wentz and the two seamer. This is how modern baseball works. And things like this are why as long as the health holds out, I'm so high on Atlanta's rotation this year. because there is the institutional knowledge, there's the comfort with technology, there's the willingness to suggest and try new things that I think can help the Braves unlock new levels of performance in these guys they didn't have before. This has been Braves today for Tuesday, March 3rd. Sorry I went long again. You guys said in the survey this is what you wanted. So, 43 minutes of me nerding out about pitching was the show for today. Do me a favor, please like the video. Please subscribe both here and on bravestoday.com. And reminder, in the episode description, in the show notes, and on my social media, we have a link to the survey. If you didn't like this or if you did like this, click on the survey, give me your thoughts because that's going to be the direction I take the shows the rest of this season, the newsletters the rest of this season, the other things we do, and also there might be a special gift at the end of the survey for you, some Braves Today merchandise for free. Until next time, this has been Braves Today. Heat. [music] Heat.

Lindsay Crosby breaks down multiple Atlanta Braves starters who added or tweaked pitches this winter, focusing on how these changes could improve Atlanta’s rotation beyond the biggest question of health. Joey Wentz added a two-seam fastball to help neutralize left-handed hitters after stark platoon splits with Atlanta, crediting new coaches Jeremy Hefner and JP Martinez. Grant Holmes is working to fix a “dead zone” four-seam fastball that graded among MLB’s worst by run value by adjusting finger placement to change pitch shape, while also revisiting his cutter and kick change. The episode also covers Reynaldo López modifying his changeup grip and prospect JR Ritchie developing a “Vulcan split” to add more vertical drop and fill a movement-profile gap, highlighting the Braves’ modern approach to pitch design and development. 01:56 Joey Wentz Splits Issues 14:38 Grant Holmes Fastball Fix 29:21 Lopez And Ritchie Updates 33:31 Ritchie Vulcan Split Explained Take our NEW audience survey for 2026: https://forms.gle/5VPxJGQiuPqcpDDB6 Subscribe to Braves Today on audio wherever you get your podcasts Join our NEW Discord: https://discord.gg/wksQqVNEpX Follow the show on Twitter: @braves_today Follow Lindsay on Twitter: @CrosbyBaseball Read our written work: bravestoday.substack.com Send us questions: contact@bravestoday.com Get 10% off at Chinook Seedery with promo code "Braves" Get 20% off at NCase Cards with promo code "BravesToday" Rocker Chicks by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/