ATLANTA — Grant Holmes toiled 10 years in the minor leagues to get here, and he’s pitched so well since joining the Atlanta Braves that some are wondering why. How does a first-round draft pick spend a decade in the minors, mostly with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland Athletics, before sniffing the big leagues?
“That’s the question, right?” said Braves pitcher Chris Sale, who was also a first-round draft pick but spent just one month in the minors before his MLB debut with the Chicago White Sox. “It’s like, you see what he’s been able to do. What was going on?
“But obviously it’s a great story. Grinding out 10 years in the minor leagues, getting through that, then getting here and taking every bit of that opportunity that he’s got. He’s been nails 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 defeat 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’s allowed came in one appearance June 26 at St. Louis, when he gave up four hits and two runs.
In his other five games, Holmes, 28, has worked 10 2/3 scoreless innings with five hits and one walk, including 5 2/3 scoreless innings of two-hit ball with eight strikeouts in his past 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. “You love stories like that. He spends, as (bench coach Walt Weiss) would say, a ton of time in the bushes and gets his opportunity, and he’s making the most of it.”
Everyone agrees that Holmes has been almost as magnificent as his hair, which flows well past his shoulders. Coupled with his handlebar moustache, it gives him the look of someone who rode 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 quietly, with candor and humility, and you’re as disarmed as right-handed hitters have been by his pitch repertoire.
Left-handed batters are 6-for-17 with two doubles and two walks against the sturdily built righty, but right-handed batters are a meager 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 majors among pitchers with at least 20 right-handed batters faced.
“He’s been awesome,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said. “And you need a guy like that. You need somebody to come out of that bullpen, go multiple (innings) and give you a chance to come back and get to your back-end (bullpen) guys. I’m so happy for him.”
Giants manager Bob Melvin, who was Oakland’s manager during the entire time Holmes was in that organization, said after Holmes pitched 2 2/3 scoreless innings of one-hit ball against his Giants on Thursday that he was extremely happy for Holmes. He knew how much the pitcher had worked for an opportunity, to no avail, in his years in the A’s system.
Told Friday what Melvin said, Holmes smiled and said, “He was always good to me. A good mentor whenever I was up there in spring training. He was always a good one.”
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 Los Angeles Dodgers who was traded to Oakland Athletics two years later, not get called up by the A’s during six years in that organization before being released in July 2022?
“The stuff that I have now is a lot different than what I had when I was with Oakland,” said Holmes, who averages 95.1 mph with a four-seam fastball that he throws with pinpoint control, and complements it with curveballs, sliders and occasional cutters. “I’m a lot more polished, and command-wise it’s like night-and-day different from what it was in the six years I was with them.”
The Braves signed Holmes in August 2022, two weeks after the A’s released him midway through his second consecutive season with a plus-8.00 ERA at Triple-A Las Vegas. His WHIP was over 2.00 in those seasons, the hits and walks totals untenable.
After joining the Braves organization, Holmes worked on his pitch repertoire and his body. His wife, Sami, is a fitness/health instructor who urged 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 with help from a diet his wife designed.
“I started throwing the curveball more, the curveball I had in high school,” he said. “I added the slider, and I started throwing the cutter again. Just threw away the changeup, for now. So pretty much just four-seam, slider, curve. Over there (in the A’s organization) I was four-seam, two-seam, cutter, changeup, curveball, no slider.
“I think the slider’s made a big difference.”
Holmes might not have made it through a decade in the minors if not for support from his wife and immediate family including his brothers, one of whom, Colby, pitched for South Carolina’s 2011 College World Series championship team and for two seasons in the Braves’ minor-league system.
Holmes said his mother, Cherlyn, and his father, John, a Baptist pastor in Conway, S.C., were crucial in his long journey to the majors. Along with his faith.
“Keeping the faith and just believing that there’s a plan for everything, God’s time is the right time,” Holmes said.
He’s as grounded and modest as anyone you’re likely to run into in a major-league clubhouse or any professional locker room. His easygoing nature made Holmes popular among teammates even before those impressive relief appearances began to mount.
It was the same way at Triple-A Gwinnett, where teammates were overjoyed after he got called up, and again when he pitched three scoreless innings in his major-league debut June 16 against Tampa Bay.
“You would have thought everyone got called up to the big leagues, the way everyone was celebrating,” said outfielder Eli White, a teammate at Gwinnett and now with Atlanta after White was brought up from Gwinnett on Friday. “Grant is a guy that deserved it more than anybody, and everybody is rooting for him. It’s fun to see him doing what he’s doing.”
Good dude?
“Oh, awesome,” Sale said, and smiled before adding, “A-plus big-league hair, too.”
About that hair. It’s naturally curly, and Holmes said he hasn’t gotten a “true haircut” since 2007. Only an occasional trim done by his wife or mother-in-law. “I don’t do it myself,” he said, laughing. “I don’t trust myself to do it.”
His teammates smile when asked about Holmes, and the smiles widen when his hair is mentioned.
“I said something to Matty (Olson) yesterday, on the Fourth of July, that with that hairstyle and mustache, he had to pitch yesterday,” Riley said, laughing. “We would have done a dishonor to America if he didn’t pitch yesterday. So, it was good to get him in.”
Riley chuckled before adding, “It’s great hair. My wife said, ‘I wish I could have hair like that.’ I said, ‘I’m sure a lot of people do.’ She was like, ‘I put so much product in it, trying to get it to stay down like that.’”
The hair is why Holmes has heard folks call him “Kenny Powers” for years, shouting from the stands when he’s on the mound or in the bullpen. Powers was the hilarious, unhinged main character in the TV show “Eastbound & Down,” a fictional former big-league pitcher trying to resuscitate his career in the minors and independent and international leagues.
“Oh, yeah. Everywhere,” Holmes said of the Powers references. “Especially when I used to have a little goatee. Now I have just the handlebars. But I guess that’s really struck with everybody, Kenny Powers.”
Holmes gets a kick out of 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 that the other day, how that would be really cool to see him,” he said. “Get a little picture together. I wonder if he still looks the same.”
Unlike the Powers character, Holmes spent many years trying to get to the majors, 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 minors, he hopes he doesn’t have to go back.
“Absolutely. I want to stay here for the rest of my career,” said Holmes, who was a diehard Braves fan growing up in South Carolina. “You never know what’s going to happen. But I won’t ever give up, I’ll tell you that.”
(Photo: Zach Dalin / USA Today)
