The Braves have a path to succeed against the Dodgers pitching

A lot of focus is on Atlanta's anemic offense after their sweep at the hands of the Padres, but there's a blueprint for a rebound here.

Sometimes, a major league pitcher will set out to confuse you, mixing several different breaking balls and trying to get you to chase.

And sometimes, their goal is just to blow it by you. That’s what Braves hitters can expect this week against the Los Angeles Dodgers in their three-game series that starts tonight.

Let’s break down how Atlanta can get back into the win column to close out the road trip.

Just hit the strikes

The Braves have worked off of the mission of hitting strikes hard for a few seasons now.

They’re going to get plenty of them in this series. Here’s the pitching matchups:

GM 1: Grant Holmes vs Tyler Glasnow
GM 2: Chris Sale vs Dustin May
GM 3: Reynaldo López vs Blake Snell

Blake Snell is a known quantity at this point - a fastball/curveball/changeup guy who’d rather walk you than give you a pitch to hit. Let’s set him aside and look at the other two. Tyler Glasnow (last season) and pre-surgery Dustin May (so 2023) both like to attack you with heat without worrying much about drawing chase. Let’s take them in the order they’ll start in this series.

For Glasnow, here was his pitch mix last year:

But let’s throw in some adjustments to what the raw data says.

Adjustment #1: That curveball is a much bigger threat to lefties than righties, but lefties can disregard the sinker almost completely

Tyler Glasnow threw 574 curveballs last season, but 223 of them were to lefties and only 151 to righties. Conversely, only 31 of Glasnow’s 171 sinkers were delivered to a lefty.

Only three lefties in the league even saw more than two Glasnow sinkers, with then-Giants outfielder Michael Conforto seeing three across 34 total pitches and Luis Arraez of the San Diego Padres seeing three in 21 pitches.¹

So if you’re a lefty, it’s an elevated fastball with either a cutter-ish slider or a curveball, in almost equal parts. For righties, it’s still the elevated fastball, followed by the slider and then almost equally, the curveball or a sinker.

And that brings us to the next note:

Adjustment #2: Glasnow’s slider is used more like a cutter

Glasnow’s slider has two characteristics that make me place it more with the cutter group than the slider group - the velo and how he uses it.

While it’s true that the pitch doesn’t have the IVB of a typical cutter, meaning it drops more like a slider, it doesn’t actually get that much horizontal movement. It comes in at 90 mph, making it consistently the hardest slider in baseball - no other pitcher last season threw as many 90+ mph sliders as Glasnow’s 100 such pitches.

The other characteristic I’m looking at here is its usage. The typical usage of a cutter is to bridge the gap between a fastball and a breaking ball, and from a movement perspective, that’s exactly what the slider does.

But it’s also when Glasnow uses it - when he’s behind in the count. He throws it a lot of 1-0 and 2-1 counts, leaving it in the zone and hoping to get either a whiff or a called strike with it.

By comparison, Glasnow is trying to get you to expand the zone with the curveball in 0-1, 0-2, and 1-2 counts.

Most sliders end up being chase pitches below the zone, but not Glasnow’s. It’s a cutter in everything but IVB. His 2024 chase rate of 27.3%, 33rd percentile in all of baseball, belies that philosophy. His goal is to beat you in the zone with the fastball or cutter/slider, but you’ll have opportunities to get yours as well.

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Dustin May is a similar profile to Glasnow, or at least, he was before surgery. He’s a power pitcher, one that throws all three fastballs, although he also has a combo of sliders (a standard slider and a sweeper) and a changeup, which Glasnow doesn’t throw.

But his whole thing is attacking the zone with heaters. Back in 2023, under the caveat that it was just 48 innings, he used those three fastballs a combined 74% of the time. (33% sinker, 27% four-seam, 14% cutter). The slider (13%) and sweeper (7%) combined for 20% usage and the remaining 5% is the changeup.

Here’s the pitch chart from Statcast.

It’s an East-West profile, so a similar directional look at Chris Sale, albeit with a lot more options than Sale’s FB/SL dominant arsenal.

But just like Glasnow, there’s definitely some platoon splits in this arsenal as well.

The sinker is predominately used against righties, while the four-seamer is against lefties. The cutter is the second option against lefties, while the slider is the second option against righties.

Interestingly, despite sweepers having the largest platoon splits of any pitch in baseball, May threw the exact same amount of them to both righties and lefties in 2023.

And all but one of the changeups were used against lefties.

He also didn’t get very much chase, coming in at just 25.9% - not enough pitches thrown to qualify on the Statcast percentile leaderboards, but a result that would have been somewhere in the bottom quartile in all of baseball.

So, Atlanta’s assignment this week is to hit the strikes hard - both guys will throw a lot of them, and predominately with the fastballs.

Let’s go win a series, yeah?

1. Arraez grounded out twice and took the third one for a ball, while Conforto took all three, two for a ball and one for a called strike, walking in one at-bat and striking out in the other.