The Atlanta Braves, at risk of seeing a 104-win regular season buried under the weight of a Division Series exit, face an elimination contest in Thursday's Game 4 against the Phillies. In an effort to force a deciding Game 5 back in suburban Atlanta, they'll send young ace Spencer Strider to the Citizens Bank Park mound. It's a hostile environment, to be sure, but Strider, already known for his poise and even demeanor in just his second full major-league season, voiced the proper mindset ahead of perhaps the biggest start of his career.
"Yeah, it's a great place to pitch," Strider said of CBP on Wednesday. "I mean, even if you're not on the supported team, you know, you got phenomenal fans here that are very passionate, and that's great for baseball. It's a good postseason environment, to say the least. And I think if you can figure out how to kind of focus on the right things, it's good energy for you."
Layered on top of the intensity of the venue is that, as noted, it's a win-or-go-home game for the top overall seed in this playoff scrum versus the division rival that bounced them in the same round last year. Those are high stakes, to state the readily apparent. Of course, this isn't lost on Strider.
"When I was a kid, I was out in the front yard just pretending I was pitching in the World Series. I think that's kind of what a lot of kids' journey is like," Strider also told reporters. "Nobody wants to come into the game in a regular-season game in June. You're always preparing or visualizing yourself in the biggest games in the biggest moments. Like I said, the energy and the adrenaline is good for you, if you can harness it."
Strider, of course, is a major-league player, and if he were inclined to bow to such pressures, then he never would've reached the highest level of baseball in the first place. What matters most in Game 4 will be his skills and his wielding of those skills.
Thanks largely to health concerns, the Braves' rotation was regarded as the soft underbelly coming into the postseason, and indeed Max Fried and Bryce Elder got knocked around in their NLDS starts. Strider, though, thrived in what turned out to be a Game 1 loss for Atlanta. In that start, he worked seven innings – a yeoman's workload by postseason standards – and allowed two runs (one earned) on five hits with eight strikeouts and two walks. That continued a pattern of dominance/near-dominance for Strider against the Phillies.
In seven career regular-season starts and one relief appearance against Philly, he's pitched to a 1.90 ERA with a whopping 72 strikeouts in 47 1/3 innings. Yes, the Phillies got to him in last year's NLDS start, but Strider at that time was still compromised by an oblique injury.
Normally, it's unwise to cite a pitcher's career performance against a team roster turnover over the years means you're basically noting his numbers against a given uniform. In the case of Strider and the Phillies, there's been a great deal of carryover in the Phillies personnel he's faced. Indeed among current Philly hitters, only Brandon Marsh has any high level of success against Strider, and that's across a sample of just 11 plate appearances.
This is no accident. Strider among big-league starters is one of the hardest-throwers around, with a fastball that averages better than 97 mph. While the Phillies are a good offensive team overall, they struggle against velocity in the upper registers. Against pitches that clock 95 mph or greater, the Phillies rank just 24th in MLB this season with an OPS of .690. Bump that up to where Strider sits at 97 mph or greater, and the Phillies' offense ranks 25th with an OPS of .601.
It's tempting to look at Strider's 2023 run-prevention numbers and note that they've been "merely" good this season, but his underlying dominance has been on another level. His strikeout percentage of 36.8 – truly a towering figure for a starter – leads all qualifiers by a huge margin, and he's in the 98th percentile when it comes to inducing swings and misses. That's elite success at a fundamental level, and that means far more when projecting near-term performance than surface-level numbers like ERA do.
Given all the preceding, the Braves have exactly the right pitcher on the mound for Game 4. Even if Strider delivers and the Braves force the series back to Cobb County, a fully rested Zack Wheeler awaits them, just as their own uncertain rotation does. For now, though, the focus is on one of the best young pitchers in the game and whether he can keep the likes of Bryce Harper, Nick Castellanos, and Kyle Schwarber, among others, at bay once again. He has no other choice.
