WASHINGTON -- For players on non-contending teams, there’s one goal for September: finish strong and set the tone for the offseason.
Hurston Waldrep did just that on Wednesday afternoon, falling one strikeout shy of matching his career high in Atlanta’s 9-4 series finale win over Washington at Nationals Park. The victory earned the Braves their first four-game series sweep on the road since Aug. 12-14, 2022, in Miami.
Waldrep struck out two batters in each of the first four innings while allowing just one hit -- a single in the bottom of the fourth. The fifth inning was what ended his outing, as Dylan Dodd entered for the sixth, but a mere three runs -- particularly considering the Braves’ bats woke up to put up a four-spot in the next half-inning, and Matt Olson hit his 28th homer of the year in the seventh -- hardly overshadows what Waldrep had done in the prior four frames.
“It was really good starting out,” manager Brian Snitker said. “Curveball was really good, I think he didn’t have to lean on his slider or splitter so much. And then he kind of just started leaving some balls up and he had a long fifth inning. [But he hung] around and finished the inning, ended up getting a win. So good for him.”
A lot of Waldrep’s success, as his manager would tell it, is due to one thing in particular. Last year, during his brief cup of coffee in the Majors, Waldrep was “throwing,” as Snitker said pregame. This year? He’s pitching.
“He was more of just a thrower when he was up here last year, and he was just kind of launching that ball,” Snitker said. “And now he's refined his stuff and [is] using different pitches. I think he's made some mechanical adjustments. He's just more mature, you know? He came in -- he's a very talented guy, and but again, it's, you know, they still have to pitch and get that experience in order to learn who they are. And I think he's figuring that out.”
The proof is in the numbers, too. In his two starts last year, which amounted to seven innings -- a statistically insignificant sample size, but a sample regardless -- Waldrep’s strikeout rate was 8.3%, with a 22.2% walk rate. This year, those numbers are essentially swapped, with a 22.8% strikeout rate and a 9.8% walk rate over nine games (eight starts) and 49 1/3 innings.
A lot of that success can be attributed to his newer, more robust arsenal. Entering the league last year -- making his MLB debut at Nationals Park, in fact -- Waldrep really only had three pitches: a four-seamer, a split-finger and a sinker. (He also threw five curveballs last year).
Both Waldrep and the Braves wanted him to expand his repertoire, and, as he explained, it was a sort of “mutual agreement” that would be his offseason task.
“It was kind of a mutual agreement between me and our pitching director down in Triple-A and just kind of the whole organization,” Waldrep said. “... I think last year, the walks kind of just showed that, you know, we needed something else, and we needed to kind of bring everything together.”
This year, his arsenal is six pitches, leading with that split-finger and sinker as his main fastballs while turning to new secondary pitches like his cutter, a more robust curveball and a slider. The four-seamer remains there, but he has used it infrequently this year (3.2% or 22 pitches).
On Wednesday, it was Waldrep’s curveball that got the job done. After not being able to utilize the offering against the Astros in his prior start on Friday, he and backstop Drake Baldwin knew it was the right pitch on Wednesday.
“I mean, even after that first inning,” Baldwin said, “he started to use it a lot of times. [His] putout pitch is his splitter, but being able to just have a couple more pitches that we can lean on with two strikes is nice, just to keep the hitters off-balance. And he did a really good job throwing it for strikes.”
“I thought the curveball was kind of the star of the show today,” Waldrep said. “So it was really nice to have that back and kind of led the arsenal and made everything what it was. But yeah, then kind of some compounding damage there in the fifth and things got out of hand a little bit, but, you know, reeled it back in and got the win. So that's all that matters.”