Braves’ Grant Holmes looks like Kenny Powers, but his performance is nothing to sneeze at

ATLANTA — Grant Holmes toiled for 10 years in the minor leagues to get here, and he has pitched so well since joining the Atlanta Braves that some wonder why. How does a first-round draft pick spend a decade in the minor leagues, mostly with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland Athletics, before heading to the big leagues?

“That’s the question, right?” said Braves pitcher Chris Sale, who was also a first-round pick but spent just a month in the minor leagues before his MLB debut with the Chicago White Sox. “It’s like you see what he was able to do. What was going on?”

“But it’s obviously a great story. He spent 10 years in the minor leagues, worked his way up, and then he came here and took every opportunity he got. He’s been a highlight for us.”

Indeed, Holmes’ first six appearances with the Braves have been superb, unlike the Braves in general, as an 8-6 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies on Friday was their fourth loss in five games and eighth in 13 games, and dropped them to 10 games behind Philly in the NL East standings.

Holmes has a 1.42 ERA and 0.87 WHIP in 12 2/3 innings, with 13 strikeouts and two walks. Nearly half of the nine hits he has allowed came in a single appearance on June 26 at St. Louis, where he allowed four hits and two runs.

In his other five games, Holmes, 28, has worked 10 2/3 scoreless innings with five hits and a walk, including 5 2/3 scoreless innings with two hits and eight strikeouts in his last two appearances — Sunday against the Pittsburgh Pirates and Thursday against the San Francisco Giants.

“He’s been great for us,” Braves third baseman Austin Riley said. “We love stories like that. He spends, as Walt Weiss would say, a lot of time in the bushes and gets his opportunities, and he makes the most of them.”

Everyone agrees that Holmes is almost as gorgeous as his hair, which falls well below his shoulders. Paired with his handlebar mustache, it gives him the look of someone who went to the ballpark with a motorcycle club or plays bass in Metallica.

Then the South Carolina native looks a reporter in the eye, smiles and answers questions calmly, candidly and humbly, and you’re as disarmed as right-handed hitters have been by his pitching repertoire.

Left-handed hitters are going 6-for-17 with two doubles and two walks against the rugged righty, but right-handed hitters are going 3-for-27 (.111) with three singles, no walks and 11 strikeouts against Holmes. His .111 on-base percentage and 0.35 WHIP against righties are the lowest in the major leagues among pitchers who have faced at least 20 right-handed hitters.

“He’s been great,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said. “And you need a guy like that. You need somebody to come out of the bullpen, go a lot of innings and give you a chance to come back and get to your bullpen guys. I’m so happy for him.”

Giants manager Bob Melvin, who was Oakland’s manager during Holmes’ entire tenure in that organization, said after Holmes pitched 2 2/3 scoreless innings against his Giants last Thursday that he was extremely happy for Holmes. He knew how hard the pitcher had worked for an opportunity, to no avail, during his years in the A’s system.

On Friday, he was told what Melvin had said, and Holmes smiled and said, “He’s always been good to me. He was a good mentor every time I was up there in spring training. He’s always been a good mentor.”

The Dodgers traded Grant Holmes to the A’s in 2016. The A’s released him in 2022. (Allan Henry/USA Today)

So how did Holmes, a 2014 first-round draft pick by the Dodgers who was traded to the Athletics two years later, not get a call-up to the A’s for six years in that organization before being released in July 2022?

“What I have now is a lot different than what I had when I was in Oakland,” said Holmes, who averages 95.1 mph with a four-seam fastball that he throws with pinpoint control and complements with curveballs, sliders and occasional cutters. “I’m a lot more polished and command-wise, it’s like night and day different than it was the six years I was with them.”

The Braves signed Holmes in August 2022, two weeks after the A’s released him in the middle of his second straight plus-8.00 ERA season in Triple-A Las Vegas. His WHIP was over 2.00 in those seasons, with hits and walks totals unsustainable.

After joining the Braves organization, Holmes worked on his pitching repertoire and his body. His wife, Sami, is a fitness and health instructor who pushed him to get a lab report a few years ago that revealed a dairy intolerance, and Holmes has since lost 20 pounds, getting stronger and leaner thanks to a diet designed by his wife.

“I started throwing the curveball more, the curveball I had in high school,” he said. “I added the slider and started throwing the cutter again. I just dropped the changeup, for now. So, pretty much just four-seam, slider, curveball. Over there (in the A’s organization), I was four-seam, two-seam, cutter, changeup, curveball, no slider.

“I think the slider made a big difference.”

Holmes might not have survived a decade in the minor leagues without the support of his wife and immediate family, including his brothers, one of whom, Colby, pitched for South Carolina’s 2011 College World Series champion team and for two seasons in the Braves’ minor league system.

Holmes said his mother, Cherlyn, and father, John, a Baptist minister from Conway, South Carolina, played a crucial role in his long journey to the major leagues. As did his faith.

“Keep the faith and just believe that there is a plan for everything, that God’s timing is the right timing,” Holmes said.

He’s as down-to-earth and unassuming as anyone you’d find in a major league locker room, or any professional locker room. His easygoing nature made Holmes popular with his teammates even before those impressive backup appearances began to pile up.

It was the same at Triple-A Gwinnett, where teammates were elated after his call-up and again when he pitched three scoreless innings in his major league debut June 16 against Tampa Bay.

“You would have thought everybody got called up to the big leagues, the way everybody was celebrating,” outfielder Eli White, a teammate in Gwinnett and now in Atlanta, said after White was brought up from Gwinnett on Friday. “Grant is a guy who deserved it more than anybody, and everybody is rooting for him. It’s fun to watch him do what he does.”

Good guy?

“Oh, great,” Sale said, and smiled before adding, “Big league A+ hair, too.”

About his hair. It’s naturally curly, and Holmes said he hasn’t had a “real haircut” since 2007. Only the occasional trim from his wife or mother-in-law. “I don’t do it myself,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t have the confidence to do it.”

His teammates smile when asked about Holmes, and their smiles widen when his hair is mentioned.

“I said something to Matty (Olson) yesterday, the Fourth of July, that with that haircut and that mustache, he had to pitch yesterday,” Riley said with a laugh. “We would have disgraced America if he didn’t pitch yesterday. So it was good to have him here.”

Riley laughed before adding, “It’s beautiful hair. My wife was like, ‘I wish I had hair like that.’ I said, ‘I’m sure a lot of people do.’ She said, ‘I put so much product in it, trying to get it to stay like that.’”

It’s because of his hair that Holmes has heard people call him “Kenny Powers” ​​for years, shouting from the stands when he’s on the mound or in the bullpen. Powers was the hilarious and deranged main character on the TV series “Eastbound & Down,” a fictional former major league pitcher trying to resurrect his career in the minor and independent and international leagues.

“Oh, yeah. Everywhere,” Holmes said of the Powers references. “Especially when I had a little goatee. Now I just have the handlebars. But I guess that’s what really struck everybody, Kenny Powers.”

Holmes likes the comparison and loves “Eastbound & Down.” He’s never met the actor who plays Powers, Danny McBride, but said he’d like to.

“I was thinking about it the other day, I thought it would be really cool to see him,” he said. “Get a little picture. I wonder if he still looks the same.”

Unlike Powers’ character, Holmes spent many years trying to reach the major leagues, rather than trying to get back. Now that he’s here, after a decade of bus rides and commercial flights and relative obscurity in the minor leagues, he hopes he won’t have to go back.

“Absolutely. I want to stay here for the rest of my career,” said Holmes, who was a die-hard Braves fan growing up in South Carolina. “You never know what’s going to happen. But I’ll never give up, I can tell you that.”

(Photo: Zach Dalin/USA Today)