Spencer Strider: Baseball's Vegan Strikeout King

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When the Dodgers eliminated the Braves from the National League Division Series in October, Spencer Strider was exactly where he had spent most of the 2026 season: on the 60-day injured list, watching in street clothes. The fireballer who struck out 281 batters in 2023 didn’t throw a pitch after May. He’s also one of the very few strict vegans in Major League Baseball, which makes him worth knowing about even while he’s sidelined.

An accidental vegan

Strider didn’t go vegan for the planet, at least not at first. He did it during his recovery from Tommy John surgery back in 2019, when he was rehabbing at Clemson and looking for anything that might help him come back stronger. What he found surprised him.

“I had blood pressure that I was medicated for, [which] I always thought was a little peculiar for a 20-year-old. I had issues sleeping,” he said in comments reported by VegNews. “I decided one day to try it and, within two weeks, I was off the hypertension medicine.”

Two weeks. A 20-year-old professional athlete, off blood pressure medication fourteen days after dropping animal products. That’s the kind of result that turns a rehab experiment into a permanent lifestyle.

The results spoke loudly

Whatever you think about the diet, the performance that followed is hard to argue with. Strider broke into the majors in 2021, then exploded in 2022: 11-5 with a 2.67 ERA and 202 strikeouts, reaching 200 Ks faster than any pitcher in AL/NL history, according to Baseball-Reference. He finished second in NL Rookie of the Year voting, and the Braves handed him a six-year, $75 million extension that October.

Then came 2023, the full breakout. Strider went 20-5 with a 3.86 ERA, led all of Major League Baseball in wins and strikeouts (281), made his first All-Star team, and finished fourth in Cy Young voting. His fastball touched triple digits, and his 13.5 strikeouts per nine innings led the majors. All of it fueled by plants.

More than a diet

For Strider, veganism eventually became about more than his own health. “I think factory farming is certainly problematic and not exactly what we’re supposed to be doing to the planet,” he said in a Guardian profile. But he’s notably low-key about preaching it.

“I’m very conscious to the idea that any improvement, while it may seem insignificant, is still worthwhile,” he continued. “For me, it’s easier to be fully plant-based, but I think everybody can have a marginal improvement [around the ethics of the meat industry] that would, collectively, be great for the environment and the planet.”

That’s a refreshing stance from an elite athlete. No lectures, no purity tests. Just the quiet confidence of someone whose body is the proof of concept.

The elbow saga

Strider’s career since that peak has been a fight with his own arm. He underwent an internal-brace UCL repair in April 2024 and missed the rest of that season. He came back in 2025 and made 23 starts, but it was a grind: a 7-14 record, a 4.45 ERA, and 131 strikeouts across 125.1 innings. After the season he admitted his fastball shape had never come back to what it was.

Then 2026 started with an oblique strain that cost him the first month, followed by eight uneven starts (4-2, 5.31 ERA). In May, right-elbow inflammation shut him down for four weeks. The MRI showed no ligament damage, but he was transferred to the 60-day injured list in July, and he never threw another pitch that season.

It’s worth saying plainly: no diet prevents a pitcher from blowing out his elbow. Throwing a baseball 100 miles per hour is an inherently violent act, and UCL injuries are an epidemic across the sport regardless of what guys eat. Strider’s veganism didn’t cause the injuries, and it couldn’t prevent them. What it did do, by his own account, is fix his blood pressure, fix his sleep, and give him the best years of his career.

Why he matters

Baseball clubhouses run on steak and chicken. The postgame spread is not where you’d expect to find a vegan, which is exactly why Strider stands out. He’s proof that you can throw the hardest fastball in the league, strike out more batters than anyone, and do it all without animal products.

Whether he gets his 2023 form back is an open question. But whenever Strider’s elbow lets him back on a mound, he’ll remain one of the best arguments in sports that plants can power elite performance.