Braves’ Strider K’s 6 of 8 batters in spring debut
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Buster Olney
NORTH PORT, Fla. — Spencer Strider returned to the mound Monday for the first time in almost a calendar year and threw 2⅔ perfect innings for the Atlanta Braves in their spring training game against the Boston Red Sox, striking out six of the eight batters he faced.
“That was good,” Strider said. “It was like a little reward sprinkled on the pathway, a good test for the work you’ve been doing.”
It was better than good; he was exceptional. Strider had two three-pitch strikeouts in the first inning, finishing former teammate Vaughn Grissom with a slider and then whipping a 98 mph fastball past the motionless Roman Anthony for strike three. He struck out the side in the second inning, deploying three different pitches to close out the three Boston hitters.
Strider had elbow surgery last April, after he was diagnosed with damage to his ulnar collateral ligament, an injury that was the first in a wave that hit the Braves last season. Spencer went into spring training of 2024 among the favorites to win the NL Cy Young Award, and now he is working his way back toward rejoining the Braves’ rotation — perhaps sometime in mid- or late April.
With his outing against the Red Sox, Strider started his game progression toward a regular season return to what is already a good Atlanta starting rotation. In a sense, Strider is just starting his exhibition season, and if all goes smoothly in his next starts, he’ll slowly build his pitch counts.
Chris Sale won the NL Cy Young Award last year, and on Monday morning, Sale was formally announced as the Braves’ starter on Opening Day. But Sale spoke of how dynamic Strider is as a pitcher, with his high-riding, high-velocity fastball; in 2023, Strider led the majors with 281 strikeouts.
“Let’s not forget, he’s still the best pitcher on this team,” Sale said.
Strider responded, “He’s delusional … I am certainly appreciative of that statement. I don’t agree with it.”
Reynaldo Lopez and Spencer Schwellenbach are also part of the Atlanta rotation. Ian Anderson, Grant Holmes and AJ Smith-Shawver are competing for the fifth spot. Strider, who has grown a full beard around the moustache for which he is known, has the ability to augment the Braves in what is likely to be a highly competitive NL East.
Strider was welcomed warmly by the fans here when he took the mound, and the reaction from the stands grew with each subsequent strikeout. Hitters and pitchers don’t game-plan in spring training the way they will in the regular season, but Strider’s sequence of pitches and his stuff — a mix of mid-90s fastballs, sliders, changeups and curves — overwhelmed the Red Sox hitters.
Strider threw a 96 mph fastball past Red Sox prospect Marcelo Mayer to get to 1-2 count and then spun a curveball that was 17 mph slower, with Mayer flailing over the top.
Strider knew as he went out to start the third inning that he probably would face only a couple of batters. After he struck out his final hitter of the day, punctuating the delivery with his pronounced follow-through, he took a couple of steps toward the Braves’ dugout. In the moment, he did not realize that there were just two outs.
“I have not pitched in a while, so I forget how many outs there are in an inning,” he said, smiling. “I was not a math major in college, either, so counting to three is a big chore for me.
“I think I got a little ahead of myself and forgot that they had to come get me, and I can’t just walk off. I have to have adult supervision.”
He’ll figure that part out in the weeks ahead. He appears to have a lot of the pitching part down already.
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Tim Keown
TOKYO — Shohei Ohtani seems impervious to a variety of conditions that afflict most humans — nerves, anxiety, distraction — but it took playing a regular-season big-league game in his home country to change all of that.
After the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ Opening Day 4-1 win over the Chicago Cubs in the Tokyo Dome, Ohtani made a surprising admission. “It’s been a while since I felt this nervous playing a game,” he said. “It took me four or five innings.”
Ohtani had two hits and scored twice, and one of his outs was a hard liner that left his bat at more than 96 mph, so the nerves weren’t obvious from the outside. But clearly the moment, and its weeklong buildup, altered his usually stoic demeanor.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shohei nervous,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But one thing I did notice was how emotional he got during the Japanese national anthem. I thought that was telling.”
As the Dodgers began the defense of last year’s World Series win, it became a night to showcase the five Japanese players on the two teams. For the first time in league history, two Japanese pitchers — the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Cubs’ Shota Imanaga — faced each other on Opening Day. Both pitched well, with Imanaga throwing four hitless innings before being removed after 69 pitches.
“Seventy was kind of the number we had for Shota,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “It was the right time to take him out.”
The Dodgers agreed, scoring three in the fifth inning off reliever Ben Brown. Imanaga kept the Dodgers off balance, but his career-high four walks created two stressful innings that ran up his pitch count.
Yamamoto rode the adrenaline of pitching in his home country, routinely hitting 98 with his fastball and vexing the Cubs with a diving splitter over the course of five three-hit innings. He threw with a kind of abandon, finding a freedom that often eluded him last year in his first year in America.
“I think last year to this year, the confidence and conviction he has throwing the fastball in the strike zone is night and day,” Roberts said. “If he can continue to do that, I see no reason he won’t be in the Cy Young conversation this season.”
Cubs right fielder Seiya Suzuki went hitless in four at bats — the Cubs had only three hits, none in the final four innings against four relievers out of the Dodgers’ loaded bullpen — and rookie Roki Sasaki will make his first start of his Dodger career in the second and final game of the series Wednesday.
“I don’t think there was a Japanese baseball player in this country who wasn’t watching tonight,” Roberts said.
The Dodgers were without Mookie Betts, who left Japan on Monday after it was decided his illness would not allow him to play in this series. And less than an hour before game time, first baseman Freddie Freeman was scratched with what the team termed “left rib discomfort,” a recurrence of an injury he first sustained during last year’s playoffs.
The night started with a pregame celebration that felt like an Olympic opening ceremony in a lesser key. There were Pikachus on the field and a vaguely threatening video depicting the Dodgers and Cubs as Monster vs. Monster. World home-run king Saduharu Oh was on the field before the game, and Roberts called meeting Oh “a dream come true.”
For the most part, the crowd was subdued, as if it couldn’t decide who or what to root for, other than Ohtani. It was admittedly confounding: throughout the first five innings, if fans rooted for the Dodgers they were rooting against Imanaga, but rooting for the Cubs meant rooting against Yamamoto. Ohtani, whose every movement is treated with a rare sense of wonder, presented no such conflict.
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