Welcome to another installment of fastball velocity risers and fallers. For reference, here are a few articles that explain both the process and the importance of increased or decreased velocity when predicting future success:

• Using Game-By-Game Fastball Velocity to Influence SP Sit/Start Decisions by Lucas Kelly
• MLB pitching models should incorporate recency, giving us an intriguing ranks update by Eno Sarris
• Baseball’s ‘Hot Hand’ Is Real by Rob Arthur and Greg Matthews

The data for this article reflects games played through April 15th (but may include a Spring Training start for any pitcher who has yet to reach three starts) and only displays Statcast’s four-seam fastball (FF) velocity.
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The splitter’s usage among starting pitchers reached a 14-year high in the 2024 season when it hit a 3.2% usage league-wide. In the past four seasons, no qualified pitcher has taken the top splitter usage trophy away from Kevin Gausman who averaged around 36% usage from 2021 to 2024. Taijuan Walker came close in 2023 when he threw his splitter 33.2% of the time, yet it wasn’t enough to top the king. 2025 seems like the year in which Gausman will lose his crown. Roki Sasaki will be one of the most-watched pitchers in 2025 and according to some, will showcase one of the best splitters in the world. How often he’ll use that pitch remains to be seen. Shota Imanaga (30.6% usage) came close to King Gausman’s mark in 2024. In Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s 90 innings pitched in 2024, he threw his splitter 24.2% of the time. What will happen in 2025? Dare I suggest the league-wide splitter usage continues its growth and finishes at 4.1%? It’s possible. Only 12 qualified pitchers threw splitters in 2024. In this edition of “Know Your Averages”, I’ll bring in any pitcher who threw at least 45 splitters and compare their plate discipline metrics.

Fastballs: Four-seamers | Sinkers | Cutters

Breaking and Offspeed Pitches: Sliders | Changeups | Curveballs | Splitters | Sweepers
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Are you a hitter who can’t time up the fastball? Feeling over-powered? Not having your best day? Just wait it out, the hook will come eventually. Keep that weight back and search for that little bump, that little loop, as the pitch comes towards the plate. Wait on it, wait on it, wait on it….strike! It’s not as easy as it sounds. Of the 115 starting pitchers who threw at least 100 innings in 2024, 76 threw a curveball. Some of them got blasted; Miles Mikolas, Pablo López, Jameson Taillon. Some of them did the blasting; Framber Valdez, Seth Lugo, Max Fried. Take a look at some finer details below and see if you can find a few pitchers with positive curveball metrics for the back end of your fantasy rotation.

Fastballs: Four-seamers | Sinkers | Cutters

Breaking and Offspeed Pitches: Sliders | Changeups | Curveballs | Splitters | Sweepers
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Fastball! Fastball! Inside-fastball!….changeup. It’s almost soothing, isn’t it? The hitter gets some relief from the loud, scary, onslaught of heat to a nice, easy, soft-dropping cambio. But don’t be fooled, that soft-cuddly change of pace can be absolutely devastating. It can send you right back to the dugout looking, and that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you just whiffed so hard a little snot came out of your nose, you made a loud grunting noise and possibly pulled a muscle in your lower back. Some pitchers utilize the changeup by only throwing it to opposite-handed hitters when they need it. Some throw it with regularity, lulling hitters to sleep. There’s no perfect way to use it, but a decent changeup in a pitcher’s arsenal can be a difference-maker. Let’s continue the “Know Your Averages” series with a pitch that’s thrown in the zone less often, rarely called for a strike, and chased like a rat terrier going after a….well…let’s just get to it.

Fastballs: Four-seamers | Sinkers | Cutters

Breaking and Offspeed Pitches: Sliders | Changeups | Curveballs | Splitters | Sweepers
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Toward the end of the 2024 season, I aggregated fastball performance metrics with “Know Your Averages 2024” and wrote about the pitchers near the minimum, the maximum, and the average. For example, Aroldis Chapman’s sinker still rules the SwStr% category (maximum, 17.8%), while Jake Woodford couldn’t buy a swinging strike (minimum, 0.9%) and George Kirby was perfectly average (6.0%). Below, you can find links to those posts. You may find them useful when contextualizing the statistical vomit coming from any baseball podcaster’s repertoire. I needed to do it for myself:

Fastballs: Four-seamers | Sinkers | Cutters

But now we move beyond the fastballs and attempt to digest all those other pitches. There are tremendous differences in the fastball swinging strike rates around and below 10% and the 15%’ers of sliders and splitters. We’ll begin with sliders.

Breaking and Offspeed Pitches: Sliders | Changeups | Curveballs | Splitters | Sweepers
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Many indicators are pointing to Adolis García’s power declining. If so, his fantasy value may be careening down a cliff. Read the rest of this entry »

You can feel it in the pit of your stomach. Symptoms of watching a slider hang in the zone from your favorite pitcher include but are not limited to jaw-clenching, toe-curling, fist balling, hot-flashes, “we’ll never make the playoffs” thoughts, and of course, a bubbling sensation in the lower abdomen region. Dylan Cease fans beware, the following GIF may conjure up some of the previously listed symptoms. Read the rest of this entry »

What is different about the cutter? Scroll down to the bar chart below to see that it is in the zone the least of the three fastballs (four-seamer, sinker, cutter) analyzed in this series. In the zone the least, yet swung on the most. Heck, it’s even chased out of the zone by hitters the most. That’s the cutter. When executed correctly, it cuts in on a batter’s hands or it tails away from the barrel. How else does it compare to the four-seamer and sinker? In this article, we conclude the “Know Your Averages” series with a jammed hitter, a broken bat, and a sore palm.

Four-seamers | Sinkers | Cutters
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When you have a pitch that can be thrown in the zone, induce weak contact, and get called strikes, you throw it and you throw it often. However, last season (2023) the sinker’s usage hit its lowest point within the Statcast era among starting pitchers, down to 13.9%. A slight resurgence this season has brought its usage up to 15.0%. Compared to a 22.8% usage in 2015, the start of the statcast era, the sinker no longer sits at the popular kid’s lunch table.

However, if we change the split to view the sinkers utilization by relievers, we see the resurgence started earlier and with a little more gusto:

Relievers have been doing crazy things with their sinkers when you look at the data. The obvious ones like throwing it faster with more movement are apparent, but throwing it in unusual locations seems to be a thing. While all those small changes are occurring, we can still rely on what is happening on average to help us make quick comparisons. For example, a swinging strike rate of 10% on a four-seam fastball is average. A 10% swinging strike rate on a sinker is really good. This post serves to help navigate benchmark statistics on the sinker.

Four-seamers | Sinkers | Cutters
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How can Statcast improve hitting prospect valuations? This article examines the predictive power of prominent Statcast metrics at the Triple-A level.

With Statcast data now publicly available for every Triple-A game since 2023, I wanted to look at how much it helps us evaluate hitting prospects compared to more traditional data. Specifically, this article considers how well several Triple-A metrics from the full 2023 season — wOBAcon (wOBA on contact), xwOBAcon, barrel rate per batted ball event, and 90th percentile exit velocity — predict MLB wOBAcon in 2024 (MLB wOBAcon through the games of July 26th, as I have been working on this piece for a little while now).

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