Braves fans know well the joy of foiling the New York Mets, taking glee from consistently defeating their moneyed National League East rivals.
For the past six years, new Braves pitching coach Jeremy Hefner lived on the other side as the Mets pitching coach. In those six seasons, the Braves won the season series each year, even in their disappointing 2025 season. Hefner remembered a stream of dramatic games.
In his memory, the games at New York’s Citi Field didn’t have as many lead changes.
“But it felt like every time we came to Truist (Park), it was a circus and constantly, the back and forth and all that kind of stuff,” Hefner told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “There was always a ton of respect.”
He remembered also the fan support for the Braves.
“It’s just a lot of energy in the park always,” he said. “So we always knew it was going to be a playoff atmosphere, even though we were playing in May.”
In addition to comments made about his new role with the Braves that were featured in a previous column, Hefner offered his thoughts on a number of other topics — including influences, the Mets’ pitching lab at their spring training home, his LinkedIn page and more on his approach to his job on new manager Walt Weiss’ staff.
For instance, Hefner has been connected with what he has called the “kitchen-sink approach,” the idea that the more pitches a pitcher can throw effectively, the more problems it can cause for hitters. He compared it with an ecosystem, such as the redwood forests in California.
The trees are the most obvious element, but “sometimes you lose sight of all the things that have helped them grow to how big they are,” Hefner said. “The squirrels or the grass or the foliage underneath.”
It is the same with supplementing a pitcher’s best pitch with other pitches to help the No. 1 pitch thrive.
“So you kind of have that lens and that vision whenever you’re looking at a guy,” he said.
It does not sound like the Braves will build a pitching lab like the one that the Mets have, one that has motion-capture technology for biomechanical tracking and force plates that measure how pitchers generate power. Hefner said the Mets’ usage of it has been misconstrued.
“We used it a fair amount in spring training, but didn’t really use it a ton during the season,” Hefner said. “I like to tell people the Mets lab, at least how I thought about it, was more our people and our systems and how good we were top to bottom at getting guys to be the best that they could be, whether that’s creating the relationship, that’s adding a pitch, subtracting a pitch — like, all the things that I’ve kind of talked about.”
Hefner also said that the Braves do use technology that captures a lot of the same data.
Asked about influences, Hefner named two in particular from his three years with the Twins (2017-19) after his playing career ended — two years as an advance scout and one year as their assistant pitching coach — along with “many people in New York.”
One is Josh Kalk, now the Twins’ vice president of baseball operations strategy and innovation. Kalk, Hefner said, “helped me a lot on the ball-flight stuff in my time in Minnesota.”
Kalk was part of a 2024 panel on the Twins’ use of analytics held by the Society for American Baseball Research. Kalk was praised by Minnesota senior vice president and general manager Thad Levine for his skill at delivering usable information to Twins pitchers when presenting scouting reports on opposing hitters.
Said Levine, according to SABR, “I think what Josh does masterfully is the art form of conveying some of this information in the best way to ultimately make it actionable, rather than just a piece of paper that sits in a player’s locker and isn’t utilized.”
Jeff Pickler was the Twins’ major league coach and coordinator of major league development during Kalk’s first two years with the team. He recently was hired as a bench coach with the Colorado Rockies. Pickler, Hefner said, “shaped me from an advance perspective and how to tackle navigating the lineup and those types of things.”
They were instrumental in what he called his philosophy on pitching — or lack thereof.
“The philosophy question’s a tough one for me to answer because I don’t have anything specific,” Hefner said. “It’s more, ‘What do the pitchers need and how do we help them achieve it?’”
As for his LinkedIn profile, Hefner has kept it updated, including his new position with the Braves. His listed skills include “Sports Coaching” and “Microsoft Office.” Hefner said he uses the professional networking platform as a way to learn more about others in the baseball industry, including potential hires.
“It’s a good way to go and see someone’s history and kind of where they’ve been and what they’ve done,” Hefner said. “I find people’s paths super intriguing and so I don’t know, I guess if I used it as a way to gain information, I had to set up my own profile.”
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