Spencer Schwellenbach steals the show in Atlanta's home opener
The Atlanta Braves are cornering the market on dominant young starters named Spencer
The Atlanta Braves broke their seven-game losing streak in dominant fashion on Friday night, taking down the Miami Marlins 10-0 in Truist Park.
As you can tell from the score, the offense had a good night - ten runs on sixteen hits, including Atlanta going 7-for-17 with runners in scoring position tonight and picking up four extra-base hits, two homers (Marcell Ozuna and Matt Olson, back-to-back) and two doubles (Ozuna and Michael Harris II). Harris’ double was one of three hits for the young leadoff hitter, while Nick Allen and Drake Baldwin combined to go 2-8 with a run and an RBI in this one.
But all I want to talk about is Spencer Schwellenbach, because the young hurler was absolutely dominant tonight. Let’s dive in.
The next run he allows will be the first this year
Schwellenbach went eight scoreless innings in this one, allowing only two singles.1 He struck out ten with no walks, giving him fourteen strikeouts, two walks, and just three hits in the season’s first fourteen innings.
There was a list circulating on social media after the game, one of those “players to do X, Y, & Z below BLANK age” type things.
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be named something other than Spencer.
It’s the pitch mix for me
Partial credit for this one goes to catcher Drake Baldwin, but Schwelly’s shown the ability to harness his wide arsenal in different ways, tailoring his approach to each opponent.
Against San Diego last week, it was a lot of splitters and a lot of variety overall - while the splitter was his most used pitch (20 pitches, so 22%), he threw everything at least 14% of the time and even in non-obvious platoon situations. His cutter was used to both righties and lefties, while his four-seam fastball was primarily a lefty pitch and sinkers subbed in for the 4S against righties.
It wasn’t that way tonight.
Schwelly and Baldwin leaned heavily on the heater tonight, with 42 of his 99 pitches being four-seam fastballs. Nothing else exceeded 17% and his other two fastballs were both below 10% usage. He still platooned the pitches, with the 4S being the lefty pitch and the sinker being used exclusively against righties, but the cutter was exclusive to the lefties in this one, as well, while the slider was barely offered to a southpaw (4 out of 15 thrown).
Some of this may have been because the heater was working - it picked up 12 whiffs in 23 pitches - but it’s still an interesting willingness to change what he’s doing in the face of a different lineup.
It’s the exact opposite of how he attacked Philadelphia last season - his lowest fastball usages of the season were in his starts against them, but it worked as he went a combined 2-0 with a 2.45 ERA in three starts and 18.2 innings.
The efficiency stands out
There’s two things that amazed me about this outing:
The first was that in 99 pitches, he threw only 26 balls. The game plan was clearly to attack Miami in the zone, and it worked. Even when Miami made contact, it wasn’t good contact - they had more foul balls (18) than balls in play (16) and mustered only six hard-hit balls off of Schwellenbach, all for outs.
The other thing was the efficiency - eighteen of his twenty-six first pitches were strikes, and only three batters even got a three-ball count.
If you want to beat Schwellenbach, you’re going to need to get a good swing on a strike and Miami just wasn’t doing that tonight.
He could have finished the game
If this was May instead of April, that was likely a complete game. But Schwellenbach’s career high in the majors is just 106 pitches2 , so Atlanta did the responsible thing and went with reliever Aaron Bummer to close it out in the 9th.
(Fun fact there, Bummer’s 20 pitches needed for the 9th inning were more than any single inning of Schwellenbach’s.)
That efficiency is going to allow Schwellenbach to stack innings, if he wants, although he’s shown he is flexible. Similar to Max Fried before him, he can tailor his wide arsenal towards inducing groundballs/weak contact or towards getting strikeouts, depending on what is projected to work best against the lineup he’s facing that day.
What’s next for the Atlanta Braves?
AJ Smith-Shawver takes the mound on Saturday evening opposite Cal Quantrill at 7:15 PM ET.
And they, of course, were on the two softest batted balls of the night by the Marlins - 73.6mph by Liam Hicks to break up the perfect game in the 5th and a 76.1 mph single in the 7th by Griffin Conine.
A hilariously inefficient start against the Minnesota Twins on August 27th: 4.2 scoreless innings with five hits and three walks opposite eight strikeouts. He gave up three doubles and had to work out of trouble multiple times…but he did, getting a no-decision in a 8-6 Braves win.