How the Braves Spencer Strider rebuilt his mental approach to become an ace

June 22, 2024

On April 24, the Braves’ Spencer Strider delivered one of the top performances by a starting pitcher this season. He pitched eight scoreless innings at Atlanta’s Truist Park and retired the first 18 Marlins hitters. He allowed only two hits, struck out 13 and walked none.

Strider did not even consider it his best performance of the month.

“I didn’t have 100 percent focus on every pitch,” Strider said. “I was just kind of throwing pitches. And for whatever reason, they just didn’t hit the ball.”

Strider’s heightened self-awareness did not come naturally. As a freshman at Clemson in 2018, the All-Star right-hander was emotional, hard on himself, hyper-focused on results. His evolution into one of the best pitchers in the sport stemmed in part from an overhaul in both his mental and physical approach after he underwent Tommy John surgery in February 2019. Cory Shaffer, a mental performance coach the pitcher initially dismissed when they met at Clemson, helped him learn to separate process from outcomes.

Strider, who allowed one earned run and struck out eight in a losing effort in Game 1 of the Division Series against the Phillies on Saturday, is not always successful in distinguishing between the two. His decision to work more closely with Shaffer this season, however, represented a desire to take his game to another level. Most major leaguers understand that focusing solely on results in a game with as many random occurrences as baseball can be self-defeating. But Strider, a pitcher good enough to receive a $75 million guarantee from the Braves last October just 131 2/3 innings into his major-league career, considered the continued development of his mental approach to be his next step.

Shortly after the Braves made Strider their fourth-round pick in 2020, the team’s minor-league strength and conditioning coordinator, Jordan Sidwell, delivered a message that resonated with the pitcher: As a player gets older, he experiences fewer and fewer ways to make a significant jump in performance.

Strider first opened up to Shaffer after his Tommy John surgery during his sophomore year at Clemson. In formalizing their relationship last offseason, Strider sought new paths to improvement, more detailed, consistent exchanges.

“What we’re trying to do is find these half percents and one percents that can make him better in the long run,” Shaffer said. “That takes a lot of humility.”

After each start, Strider enters thoughts on his outing into a Google doc he shares with Shaffer. At the end of each month, he writes a summary, reflecting on how he pitched during that time.

Shaffer, as part of the review, asks him to list his best start. When Strider chose in April a scoreless six-inning outing in San Diego over his near-perfection against the Marlins, Shaffer considered it something of a eureka moment. Strider knew he had stifled Miami, but was dissatisfied with the way he went about it.

“One of the things when we talked about that outing is that pre-game it didn’t feel like I was able to lock in necessarily,” Strider said. “I would kind of find myself drifting off, not thinking about the game, or getting distracted by things.

“I executed a lot of pitches, but it wasn’t because of intent. I wasn’t self-aware necessarily. Sometimes, there is something to that. But that can’t be what you rely on for success.”

Strider can be too much of a perfectionist. Part of him, Shaffer said, believes a perfect game would be 27 outs on 27 pitches, or perhaps even better, three-pitch strikeouts of every hitter. His natural instinct is to see the world in black and white. Shaffer tried to get him comfortable with shades of gray.

The process is ongoing. Every start presents new challenges. Still, Strider, who turns 25 on Oct. 28, is coming off a season in which he led the majors with 281 strikeouts, breaking John Smoltz’s single-season franchise record. His 3.86 ERA, tied for 12th in the NL, probably will cost him the Cy Young award. But it’s easy to forget that Strider is only in his second full season, and his first full season as a starter. He is not a finished product.

Shaffer, Strider believes, can help him realize his full potential, half a percent at a time. Their relationship is independent of the Braves. Neither was willing to disclose the financial nature of their arrangement.

“It’s really hard to evaluate an outing, especially in the moment, without emotion. And if you’re relying on emotion, you’re never going to make a positive or effective adjustment,” Strider said.

“Not only has that been big for me in baseball, I think it’s been good for me in my life. Having purpose, having a plan, being detail-oriented, understanding you’re not entitled to success just because you want it, just because you work hard.

“If you have undirected work ethic, then you’re not really achieving anything, you’re spinning your wheels.”

A mental performance coach has helped Spencer Strider, here in an April game against the Padres, learn to separate process from outcomes. (Todd Kirkland / MLB Photos via Getty Images)

Strider was a draft prospect at the Christian Academy of Knoxville (Tenn.), the Guardians’ 35th-round pick in 2017. He chose instead to attend Clemson, confident his ability alone would carry him to success. “He wanted nothing to do with mental training, sports psychology,” Shaffer said. “He came in as a stubborn 18-, 19-year-old who had it all figured out.”

Shaffer, a former javelin thrower at Cornell, works for Amplos, a company that specializes in performance psychology, and is located about 45 minutes away from Clemson in Greenville, S.C. He would meet with the Clemson baseball team about once a week. Strider was unmoved. He viewed mental-skills training as “a non-relevant sort of aid,” an admission he wasn’t competitive, an excuse to avoid physical training.

His coaches, on the other hand, considered him precisely the kind of player who might benefit from working with Shaffer.

“He showed his emotions through his body language on the mound,” said Monte Lee, Strider’s head coach at Clemson. “He was very, very good, even as a true freshman. It almost felt like watching him pitch, he didn’t feel like he was good enough.”

Andrew See, Strider’s pitching coach at Clemson, put it another way: “He had a lot of inner demons when things didn’t go well.”

The type of frustration Strider demonstrated is not unusual, See said, for high-school stars who arrive at ACC or SEC schools and suddenly realize they no longer are the best players on their team. Strider had a 4.76 ERA as a freshman, pitching mostly in relief, but showed enough potential for the coaches to project him as their Friday night starter the following year.

In his mind, it wasn’t enough.

“I worked really hard. I cared a lot,” Strider said. “But I was unable to understand that didn’t guarantee me success.”

The coaches, he said, identified his “quick trigger.” Lee was a little baffled by it. In Strider’s exit meeting at the end of his freshman year, Lee told him, “you realize, you’re one of the best freshman pitchers in the ACC. Give yourself a little bit of grace.”

Five years later, Strider acknowledges he was too stubborn and insecure to recognize he was holding himself back. His coaches pointed him in the right direction.

“They pretty much told me, ‘You need to meet with Cory. You need to work on this,’” Strider said. “We scheduled our first meeting. And the day before our first meeting, I tore my UCL.”

At Clemson, a student-athlete expected to miss several months, typically after a surgery, is offered the chance to meet with a mental-health or mental-performance professional. Shaffer, aware of Strider’s resistance to his work, took a methodical approach with the pitcher, at first just trying to learn more about him, establish a relationship.

It was not until the second or third meeting that Shaffer broached the subject of mental training. Strider knew of his coaches’ concerns. He faced a 12-month recovery from Tommy John surgery. He grew more open and receptive.

Shaffer emphasized that Strider’s injury happened for a reason, that it was his body’s way of telling him something wasn’t working. He also told Strider that the injury presented an opportunity to rebuild himself in every possible way. Physically. Emotionally. Mechanically.

“I’ve given that same line and had that same dialogue with plenty of athletes,” Shaffer said. “But I would argue none of them have ever taken advantage of it quite like he did.”

Strider was excited by the chance “to make myself whatever I wanted to be from the ground up, with no timetable.” Through his talks with Shaffer, he adopted the mindset, “I’m going to get better because of Tommy John, not despite Tommy John.” And so his work began.

He adopted a plant-based diet. He started journaling, outlining short- and long-term plans. He studied the deliveries of right-handers with similar builds and changed his mechanics to develop greater extension. With the help of Clemson strength and conditioning coach Rick Franzblau and assistant athletic trainer Travis Johnston, he tailored his lifting program to help him become more efficient in his delivery, too.

“It was the first time I really understood purpose and details and patience,” Strider said.

Pitchers talk about the loneliness of rehabilitation. Strider turned it into a period of transformation. Shaffer was a driving force, telling Strider he could improve as a pitcher before even picking up a baseball again. By the time Strider returned for the 2020 season, the change in him, even in his breathing on the mound, was noticeable.

“The confidence and just how calm he was, he was just a different guy,” said Lee, who is now the associate head coach and recruiting coordinator at South Carolina. “He didn’t let his emotions get the best of him. He just pitched.”

The 2020 college baseball season did not last long. Strider pitched only 12 innings over four starts before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down play on March 12. Once it became clear the season would not resume, Shaffer advised him to treat the down time just as he treated his recovery from Tommy John: As a newfound opportunity.

“That’s kind of how I viewed it,” Strider said. “I couldn’t pitch. So get stronger, get more mobile, do things you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.”

He already had shown an improved fastball, up to 95 mph, putting him back on the radar of major-league clubs. On June 11, in a draft the league shortened to five rounds, the Braves selected Strider as a college-eligible sophomore with the 126th pick.

As a professional, his velocity became his trademark, though his slider is his most effective pitch. This season his four-seam fastball averaged 97.3 mph, putting him in the 93rd percentile of all pitchers. Hitters, though, batted .258 off the pitch, up 57 points from last season.

Baseball cannot be completely mastered, not physically, not mentally, not even by the most gifted.

Strider, here pitching against the Giants in August, has worked to find a balance between keeping his focus and not becoming so intense that he wears out. (Darren Yamashita / USA Today)

Strider’s start in Pittsburgh on Aug. 7, against a Pirates team with a below-average offense, was one of his worst of the season. He lasted just 2 2/3 innings, allowing six runs. Initially, he couldn’t figure out why. He was coming off a strong start. He felt good, capable of throwing his pitches to precise locations. Why didn’t he get a more representative outcome?

In evaluating the outing with Shaffer, Strider began to understand how things went awry. The two, who conversed sporadically from 2020 to ’22, now speak every week or two, often by Zoom.

Against the Pirates, Strider concluded that he did a poor job reading hitters and making adjustments during Pittsburgh’s six-run third inning. Unable to slow the game down, he began trying to be perfect, an approach that was bound to fail. “I never made a perfect pitch,” Strider said, “because one doesn’t exist.”

Talking with Shaffer, Strider reached a few conclusions. When he feels good, don’t try to be perfect, just attack. And when his changeup and slider feel good, don’t abandon the fastball, his most frequently used pitch. Against the Pirates, Strider became distracted by outcomes. The loss, a rarity during a season in which he finished 20-5, served as a learning experience.

His next start, at Citi Field against the Mets five days later, taught him a different kind of lesson. Strider sought to redirect his focus, believing the confidence in his stuff against the Pirates left him too detached from what was happening in the game. This time, pick a cliché, he would bear down, lock in.

His performance was much better — seven scoreless innings, despite matching his season-high with four walks — but he over-corrected. Shaffer said Strider was so intense in his pre-game process and throughout the game that by the end he was mentally spent.

“That heightened adrenaline led to good results, but if it’s not monitored pre-game, you can get in the bullpen and start overthrowing. And then, if you have a couple of baserunners, a bit of a long inning, you can wear yourself out quickly,” Strider said.

So, even on a night Strider’s pitching line was outstanding, he still was not entirely satisfied with his process. Shaffer, like Strider’s former coaches at Clemson, reminds the pitcher not to be too hard on himself after a poor outing, to keep in mind his larger body of work. Strider’s rapid ascent, however, has only added to the challenge of maintaining his equilibrium.

Realistically, Strider knows he cannot peak in every start. He didn’t quite grasp that at Clemson, which is why he was so often frustrated. He bristles at the easy narrative, that surgery changed him. He already knew he was wound too tight. “I needed to contain or at least govern that emotion with some objectivity,” Strider said. “That’s where Cory came in, as that third person with an objective perspective who has no emotion in the situation.”

Players talk often about controlling only what they can control. Strider initially thought he could put his own spin on that concept, apply it subjectively. Either he could decide not to worry about what was out of his control, or he could try to exert control, even if it meant growing upset when results did not follow. Before meeting Shaffer, “I tried to control everything,” Strider said. “It was very counter-productive.”

And now?

“It’s about trying to find consistency,” Strider said. “I would consider myself to be one of the most, if not the most, detailed-oriented guys who is focused on removing variables start to start. And still, there is constant change and fluctuation. That’s what happens in your brain. That’s what we’re trying to train here, your subjectivity.”

It’s a constant challenge, pitch by pitch, inning by inning, start by start.

“He’s doing historic things, which is really cool. But what that can do if he’s not really careful is seep into his mind and create this expectation that this is what it’s supposed to be like every time,” Shaffer said. “That may be what the media thinks. That may be what fans think. That may even be what his teammates or coaches think. But he cannot think that way.”

(Top Image: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Casey Sykes / Getty Images)

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