LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – Minutes after giving up a batting-practice big fly to Braves slugger Matt Kemp, pitcher Aaron Blair walked off the field smiling. “Get a 40-home-run hitter and tell him a change-up is coming, he’s going to hit it out,” he said.
And Kemp did. It was one of the infrequent hard-hit balls on a day when pitchers generally had the upper hand, as they usually do when facing hitters in the first “live” batting practice sessions of spring training. Pitchers or catchers often tell the hitter what pitch is coming as a courtesy in these early spring sessions.
The Braves had live BP on the first day of full-squad workouts in past years, but pushed it back a few days this spring, That was the wish of veteran pitching coach Chuck Hernandez, in his first year in the position with the Braves, and manager Brian Snitker agreed it made sense.
“It can’t do anything but help, probably, to let (hitters) get their hands going and things like that,” Snitker said. “That’s tough, man, hitting live (early in spring training). It’s just hard to get jacked up doing that. But the guys I saw, they were swinging, that’s good for them.”
Hitters still were behind pitchers, as they usually are at the start of spring training, but at least this time they had a few more coach-pitch batting practice sessions under their belts and pitchers had a little sharper command after throwing at least a couple of bullpen sessions apiece in the past week.
“The guys I saw throw looked really good,” said Snitker, who was on a different field than the one where Kemp, Freddie Freeman, Nick Markakis and Dansby Swanson faced pitchers Blair, Joel De La Cruz and Eric O’Flaherty. About half of the Braves pitchers in camp threw batting practice on one of four backfields adjacent to Champion Stadium.
“(Mike Foltynewicz), (Josh) Collmenter, (Jose) Ramirez, (Lucas) Sims, I saw a little bit of Chaz Roe — I liked all those guys,” Snitker said. “You peek across the diamond, with the four fields, you like to be able to see everybody but you can’t. But the guys looked like they were not getting too amped or rushed, were getting the ball over the plate. It was pretty good.”
Ultimately, however, whether balls were hit or not didn’t much matter.
“It’s practice,” Snitker said. “Probably to a man everybody’s waiting for games to start. I mean, they come (to spring training) in such good shape anymore. Just seeing some live pitching, but these guys have been doing it a long time and they’re really good at it, so it doesn’t take them long.”
