Maybe Clay Holmes can walk a bunch of Braves again
For the second time in a couple of weeks, the Braves pulled off a comeback win over the Mets by walking a bunch, while Spencer Strider did his thing on the pitching end. Last week’s comeback win came against Clay Holmes, who also happens to be tonight’s starter for New York. Holmes had arguably his worst start of the year, walking six and striking out five (would’ve been fewer if the Braves weren’t trying to get that bread walk) in 4 2⁄3 innings. Will he learn that the Braves really, really want to draw walks, and not let them? Will the Braves maybe do something like hit a homer? (Holmes had allowed nine homers in his past seven starts coming into that game). I guess we’ll see.
On the intrigue side, this game will feature the second career big league start of 20-year-old righty Didier Fuentes. A lot of people were impressed with Fuentes’ debut, in which he threw five innings of 3/1 K/BB ratio ball against the Marlins, and there are definitely things to like: his command is freakishly good considering he’s A) a pitching prospect of any stripe and B) 20 years old, even before you remember that C) his stuff is at least decent. Where he had some issues, like stray fastballs he held onto too long, and a lack of good spin mirroring, those adjustments should be relatively easy to make. His stuff also just looks really annoying for hitters to deal with, with a slower breaker that has more exaggerated horizontal movement and a harder breaker that doesn’t. That said, I was surprised to see that for whatever reason, the extra movement and the ability to leverage two different secondaries didn’t get him to miss a lot of bats. Maybe it’s a spin mirroring thing, or something else, but we’ll see what happens tonight.
Game Info
Game Date/Time: Wednesday, June 24, 7:10 p.m. EDT
Location: Citi Field, Flushing, NY
TV: FanDuel Sports South, Southeast
Streaming: MLB.tv
Radio: 680 AM / 93.7 FM The Fan