Jared Jones doesn’t see himself as a patient person and it was something he needed throughout the offseason as he started to add a fifth pitch to his repertoire.

Whether you want to call it a two-seamer or a sinker -- Jones would prefer to call it “something nasty” -- it was on full display Tuesday afternoon at LECOM Park as the Pirates suffered their first loss of spring training to the Braves, 2-1. 

The hard-throwing right-hander, who tallied three strikeouts and one walk while allowing one hit in two innings of work, threw his two-seamer for five of his 27 pitches and even broke Garrett Cooper’s bat with a pitch in on his hands that induced a weak ground ball back to the mound.

“He executed and got a broken bat,” said Joey Bart, who caught Jones today. “Guys right now don’t know he has it. But it’s going to be something that he needs to continue to develop as the spring goes on and get comfortable with it. Some days he’ll have it, some days it will feel weird and he just has to mentally lock in and trust the long game and keep continuing to work on it.”

Here's Jones' full media availability from today: 

In his rookie season, Jones utilized his fastball and slider 49.2% and 34.8% of the time, respectively. He mixed in a curveball and a changeup as well but used it considerably less than his other two pitches -- 9.3% and 6.6%, respectively. Introducing his two-seamer will give him a pitch that works in conjunction with his slider. Rather than only having pitches that either drop or break away from a right-handed hitter, he’ll have a pitch that runs into a right-handed hitter and away from a leftie.

As Bart alluded to, the pitch is something that is still a work in progress and has taken a lot of work to get it to where it currently stands. Jones has high standards and as he said today: "Yeah, if it's not up to my par, basically, I think it's terrible.”

That’s where Jones’ patience has come into play. While he’s had days where he’s struggled with both his fastball and slider, he said he struggled with developing the two-seamer for about two months this offseason and had to pull back when it came to trying to tweak it in his bullpen sessions.

“I don't have patience. I think during this offseason, I had to cut myself off at 30 pitches after every pen or whatever it is,” Jones said. “Just making sure I'm not out there for 102 just throwing 70 two-seamers because I would eventually get there if I let myself."

It’s also hard to tell where a pitch stands until it gets used in a game. When a pitcher is throwing a bullpen, they don’t get live reactions from opposing hitters and today was the first time Jones got that. The two-seamer played well off his four-seam fastball, which topped out at 98.5 mph, and his slider as he challenged hitters throughout his outing. He didn’t use it at all in the first inning, as he attacked Eli White with three straight fastballs to start his outing that were 97 mph or above, and used a two-pitch mix of his slider and fastball to Nacho Alvarez and Bryan De La Cruz. 

In the second inning, he threw back-to-back two-seamers in on Cooper’s hands to induce the broken bat. Then, he used his three-pitch mix against both Orlando Arcia and Curt Casali to get out of the inning. 

Jones was pretty happy with where it stood after the game, saying: "Yeah, I don't think it sucks like I thought it did. I think it's a pretty good pitch so far." 

The process to get his new pitch to where it is has been a long one. It took a lot of work and patience. But, once a pitcher can see where it stands in a game, it gives him a good barometer of how it needs to be tweaked moving forward.

"I think what you need is to get a feel for it when you're working on it, on the side,” Derek Shelton said. “Then you need hitter reaction. You need to be able to see how it works, and he has spring training to be able to work on it and see how it reacts. We get a good look at it metrically. We get to see what hitter reaction is, how it feels coming out of his hand. It's a culmination of things there."