The young righty looks to follow up his career best outing from last week and lead the Braves to a win in Pittsburgh
AJ Smith-Shawver is coming off of arguably the best outing of his career, certainly the deepest, as he went 8.0 innings of shutout, one-hit ball. He didn’t miss as many bats as he has generally this season and still walked 4 batters, but it was a strong outing and he continues to look the part of a real major league pitcher…and a very young one with plenty of room to improve.
AJ’s splitter has been the star of the show this season, behaving almost like an axial turbo-knuckleball, with ridiculous variance of movement, but a clearly defined shape and some truly absurd arm-side break when it hits it’s horizontal maximum. The fastball shape looks pretty good too, even as the command of it has been a bit of an issue. His third pitch has been a solid slow curveball and he has sprinkled in a slider. Right now he is running a 3.00 ERA, but with a worse but still totally fine 4.01 xFIP. He’s been managing that with really rough command in general and a pretty high 4.33 BB/9. If he can reign in the command both in terms of avoiding the middle of the plate and reducing walks, even to an average level, his arsenal has the looks of one that can make some real noise.
The Pirates will roll with the lefty Andrew Heaney, a veteran who was available for much of the offseason and ultimately signed a 1 year deal worth a little more than $5 million. He’s performed similarly to Smith-Shawver this season, with a 3.18 ERA and a 3.91 xFIP, but with significantly fewer strikeouts and walks than AJ. Heaney pitches primarily off of a fastball and changeup that each have a lot of arm-side run, with a slider, sinker, and curveball mixed in. He only throws in the upper 80s-low 90s with his fastball, despite the significant arm-side run.
On paper this looks like a roughly even pitching matchup, but you would expect a much more average outcome from Heaney, while Smith-Shawver seems much more likely than his Pittsburgh counterpart to either have a stellar or blow-up outing. I am a believer in Smith-Shawver, so I will be optimistic and hope he can continue to string together strong outings and lead Atlanta back into the win column.
Game Info
Game Date/Time: Saturday, May 10, 4:05 p.m. EDT
Location: PNC Park, Pittsburgh, PA
TV: FanDuel Sports South/Southeast
Streaming: MLB.tv
Radio: 680 AM / 93.7 FM The Fan