Who is RHP Darius Vines, Atlanta's starter tonight in Colorado?

The Atlanta Braves made it official after last night's victory over Colorado, naming Darius Vines tonight's starter in what will be his major league debut. 

Vines, 25, was a 7th rounder in the 2019 MLB Draft out of California State University in Bakersfield, CA, the hometown of fellow AAA pitcher Allan Winans. He got a brief bit of time post-draft in the minors, but lost the 2020 season due to the pandemic and was forced to go it alone, as he was not one of the few prospects Atlanta brought to their alternate site during the shortened 2020 season. 

He came out of the gate in 2021 looking like whatever he did for personal development during 2020 absolutely worked, as he pitched in both levels of the lower minors in 2021 and both levels of the upper minors in 2022, consistently delivering ERAs under four at every single stop. 

Unfortunately, his 2023 was derailed before it even started, with a shoulder injury suffered during spring training preventing him from even taking the mound in a competitive context until late June. He made rehab starts at the complex level and High-A Rome before rejoining the AAA roster in the end of July. In five starts for Gwinnett, Vines went 2-2 with a 2.86 ERA, striking out 25 and walking only 11. 

He was called up when Jared Shuster was sent down earlier this week, and similar to Shuster, was put into the bullpen for depth with an eye on him taking a start if he wasn't needed during the week. 

As far as a pitch mix is concerned, a lot of folks who are just copy and pasting a MLB Pipeline scouting report to you from the preseason are going to talk about four pitches (with the curveball being the 4th), but Vines primarily relies on three. He's the rare pitcher that throws as many changeups as fastballs, with his plus change (thrown 34.7% of the time) sitting around 81 miles per hour and getting a 32.5% SwStr (swinging strike percentage) and 35.7% CSW (Called Strikes plus Whiffs) this season, all significantly above average numbers. His four-seam fastball (thrown 32.7% of the time) averages right around 90 miles per hour, but it's more of a setup pitch than to put someone away - he only gets 6.1% SwStr and a 17.6% CSW. His slider's the crucial pitch here, as it's the only pitch with a different movement direction from the first two pitches and he's thrown it about 24.1% so far this season. Coming in at 80.9 mph, it's in the same velocity band as the changeup (which I don't love, honestly), but moves opposite of the changeup and gets both an average 19.3% SwStr and a very healthy 36.7% CSW. 

Outside of those main three, which comprise over 90% of his usage this season, Vines also throws a cutter about 8% of the time, coming in at 86 mph and completely fooling hitters when he throws it - it's got a 25.0% SwStr and 38.9% CSW. (In my professional opinion, he needs to throw it more to get that third velocity band in play). He's got the "get me over" curveball that still shows up in preseason scouting reports, but he's thrown only two of them all season out of 453 pitches. 

Keys for Vines tonight will be to sequence well - he doesn't throw any of these pitches for strikes more than 50% of the time, for the most part, and so he needs to keep hitters off balance and chasing something that's going to move out of the zone. Three of his five homers on the season have been off the slider, and it gets barrelled pretty often (11.1% barrel rate by opposing hitters) so being judicious with its usage and throwing more cutters is the key to making it work. The actual movement profiles of both the changeup and fastball aren't actually that great, so his command will need to be on point tonight to keep hitters from teeing off on his stuff in the thin air of Coors Field.