Braves' Maier showcases elite spin rates in Fall League

PEORIA, Ariz. – When the Braves selected Adam Maier in the seventh round of the 2022 Draft out of the University of Oregon, they handed a hurler with just 34 2/3 collegiate innings under his belt a massive overslot amount of $1.2 million to forego his remaining eligibility and begin his pro career.

Nineteen of those frames may have come for the University of British Columbia in the Cascade Collegiate Conference, but Maier had “feel for spin” -- a relatively recent buzz phrase indicative of his ability to snap off a hammer of a breaking ball.

A former two-way player who had an internal brace put into his right elbow during his stint with the Ducks, Maier spent all of his first season in the Atlanta organization on the rehab track. Understandably, he was champing at the bit to debut on the mound in 2024, even if he was something of a blank slate as a pro pitcher.

The Braves decided that after Maier worked 83 1/3 frames between Single-A Augusta and High-A Rome, he would be well served to conclude his year with a stint in the Arizona Fall League. Beyond numbers and how he fared, he got the chance to face elevated competition, even if it meant prolonging his return to his native Canada by another six weeks.

Of all pitches thrown in the Fall League in which Statcast data is available (four of the six parks), Maier sports six of the top 20 and eight of the 25 in terms of spin rate, with seven of those pitches coming in his final start for Peoria on Monday night. The Braves’ No. 17 prospect has ripped off 30 pitches with a spin rate of at least 3000 rpm – in just three starts.

“To be honest, that's the same breaking ball I've been throwing all my life. The same curveball that my dad taught me when I was 10 years old or whatever,” Maier said. “I pretty much have the exact same grip and I think my arm slot has kind of dropped a little bit over the years. So it's turned into more of that sweeper instead of your kind of traditional curveball, but I mean, it's always been a good pitch for me. I didn't really know that I had that much spin on it I suppose until I got into college and saw a TrackMan report.”

The average spin rate on a Major League curveball this past season was 2545 rpm. It was just nine years ago that the highest recorded spin on a breaker in the big leagues was 3086 rpm (Garrett Richards), a mark Maier has exceeded seven times in the Fall League alone.

One year after Richards, Seth Lugo set the record for the highest rpm on a curveball (3458, a mark he has broken multiple times over) and has continued to spin his way into a top three AL Cy Young Award finish in 2024, a season in which he was one of 10 pitchers to average north of 3000 rpm on breaking balls.

But just how vital is spin to success? The below stats show as spin rate increases so does swing-and-miss while the average-against and slugging percentage go down.

MLB average curveball: 2,545 rpm
31.7% whiff rate / 30.7% strikeout rate
.220 BA / .370 SLG

Curveballs with 2,750+ rpm spin rate (more than 200 rpm above the average):
34.0% whiff rate / 35.9% strikeout rate
.205 BA / .336 SLG

Curveballs with 2,350 rpm or lower spin rate (more than 200 rpm below the average):
29.3% whiff rate / 26.0% strikeout rate
.228 BA / .391 SLG

Charlie Morton has served as the Braves’ spin doctor for the past four seasons. He threw each of the 69 pitches by Atlanta hurlers in 2024 that generated the highest rpm on breaking balls, with the club ranking fourth in the Majors in average rpm (2570). The 825 strikeouts the staff generated on all types of breaking balls were far and away the most in the big leagues (143 more than the Cardinals, the next closest club), and dating back to the 2020 regular season, the club leads the Major Leagues in breaking-ball punchouts.

But for as exciting as it can be to craft a pitch in a lab like a chemistry student finding a potion that fizzes, there’s a lot more to pitching than just having a sky-high spin rate.

It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: Are teams teaching spin better or do certain clubs target pitchers who are more susceptible to have success with their breaking stuff?

“You can see the data and say, ‘Oh, that's probably gonna be a successful pitch,’” Maier said. “But then again, you’ve got to learn how to use it. You gotta learn when to use it and where to throw it and how to combine it with other pitches and learn what pitches kind of tunnel with others in certain counts and what specific hitters are looking for. There's a lot that goes into it, to be honest.”

Which is where Maier’s downtime has come in. As his elbow healed, his mind was engaged at the club’s complex in North Port, Fla. An unintended benefit of big league hurlers missing time during the regular season -- Max Fried in 2023, among others -- is that young pitchers can absorb knowledge from them in person, as opposed to watching from afar.

“There's always big league guys kind of circulating through the rehab group, which I spent a lot of time in,” Maier said, “so it's cool to be able to pick up things from them and just kind of learn what it means to be a pro.”

Maybe unsurprisingly given his lack of innings on the mound at any level, Maier fluctuated dramatically between success and being hit hard during his first pro year. The 22-year-old didn't allow more than one earned run in nine of his 19 starts, finishing with a 4.10 ERA largely due to the three outings in which he gave up five or more runs.

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His run in the Fall League yielded forgettable numbers (11.20 ERA, 2.42 WHIP) but Maier took it as a learning experience that will help him in 2025 and beyond.

“I think it's good to kind of design pitches -- more so the early stages -- and see what kind of locations and what kind of shapes will give you the best success,” Maier said. “But I mean, at the end of the day, you’ve got to execute pitches, and I can see when my ball is moving and I don't really need the data to tell me. But then again, it does help to know that certain shapes are more favorable than others. I guess it’s a ‘best of both worlds’ kind of thing – I like to use both.”