At the top line, Spencer Strider looked really good on Wednesday afternoon: four innings, one walk, five strikeouts. When you consider that it was a visiting Rays team, maybe that’s more akin to something expected, but… I thought that this was a nice outing for him.
When Strider returned from injury last year, my amateur take on his struggles early was that he was struggling to stay mechanically consistent after taking a break between innings. Then, when things fell apart for him later in the year after his really
nice run of starts, it was the slider mechanics (and resulting command) that did him in. So, I wasn’t surprised at all to see that in his first two Spring Training outings, the things he was struggling with were these same two: getting feel back after “going up and down” and having any semblance of consistency on his slider release.
So, the good news, if you care at all about my divinations into a guy’s mechanics in Spring Training, is that Strider looked much better for big chunks of this outing. There seemed to be a concerted effort to “slow down,” which I saw both in that he was “pulling” his four-seamer a lot (later release) and that everything was definitely not max effort.
The end result seemed to work out fairly well, especially towards the latter half of the outing. Strider worked the fastball early and didn’t get creamed for it (again, a quarter-strength Rays lineup at best here) and then really started carving up the set of Spring Training randos in his latter two frames. When he struck out the side in the third, it was very vintage Strider — Logan Davidson went down on a 1-2 well-located slider below the zone, Chandler Simpson swung through a zone curveball, and Gavin Lux got eaten alive on an above-the-zone fastball. Again, not the stiffest of competition, but still. Strider did issue his only walk in the fourth, but ended his outing with a nice (and Drake Baldwin/ABS-assisted) strikeout where he got Ben Williamson to look daft on two waste-type sliders.
Oh, and there was a game separate from Strider’s outing, too. Who knew. Matt Olson popped his third Spring Training 2026 homer, and the Braves drew some walks against Nick Martinez, but this was a low-scoring game for a while. Martinez actually struck out the side in the third before walking Austin Riley to start the fourth and departing. The Braves had a bit of a rally against Bryan Baker in the fifth: Brett Wisely homered to start the half-inning, Mauricio Dubon was robbed by a diving catch on a 100 mph screamer in center, Baldwin struck out (again), and then Olson, Riley, and Mike Yastrzemski proceeded to dunk balls onto grass to give Atlanta a 4-0 lead. There was a late tack-on run, too, with Luis Guanipa bouncing one up the middle to score a runner from second.
On the pitching end, Raisel Iglesias came in after Strider and had a few scary fly balls, but survived. Martin Perez worked the rest of the slate — all four innings — and was kind of mean to the random Rays’ hangers-on and minor leaguers, given his arsenal. Williamson did pop him for a three-run homer after a barely-there roller and a walk put two on with two out, but the rest was easy pickin’ for the veteran, as he struck out six of the 17 batters he faced.
The Braves will play a night game tomorrow as they head to Bradenton to hang with the Pirates. Will they return with Charlie Morton? Who knows. (Probably not.) Stay tuned.
