Every off-season, we hear about pitchers tinkering with their pitch mix, whether that’s simply trying a new grip shown by a teammate, reimplementing old pitches, or reshaping their arsenal. It is always interesting to track new pitching trends to see what sticks in a given season. So I wanted to look at a few pitchers who have made meaningful changes to their arsenal so far in 2026, and how it has impacted their value moving forward.
To find them, I compared pitch usage across the league between 2025 and 2026, filtering for starters who threw at least 50 innings last season and 30 this year. Anything thrown under 2 percent in 2025 and over 8 percent in 2026 got flagged as a new addition. That first pass returned 38 pitchers, which I cut down to 32 once I dropped the ones who added a pitch and shed another, usually a sign the trackers had just relabeled the same offering rather than the pitcher building something new. For example, the best performing new pitch was Misiorowski’s cutter, but the distinction between his slider and his ‘new’ cutter is somewhat blurry. I wanted to find a range of pitchers, from the top tier of the pre-season fantasy draft projections, one more mid to late round pitcher, and one we might not have considered before drafting began in standard 12-team formats.
So among this group, three stood out. Ben Brown added a sinker to get ahead of counts so he could utilize his best pitch, his curveball, and survive the move into a rotation. Drew Rasmussen leaned on a changeup for the first time in a career built almost entirely on fastballs. And Logan Gilbert added a changeup to pair with his splitter, giving lefties a second look to worry about after a cutter experiment didn’t take.
Logan Gilbert is a pretty fascinating case study into both the success and failure of introducing new pitches into an arsenal. During a difficult 2025, probably the worst of his big-league career, Gilbert relied on four pitches, primarily a four-seam, slider, splitter, with the occasional curveball. Despite his struggles, he still went in the early rounds of fantasy drafts in the preseason. This is because his stuff has arguably one of the highest ceilings in the league in terms of swing-and-miss potential, but still, despite a 94th percentile strikeout rate and 93rd percentile whiff rate, he really struggled. Averaging 5.1 innings for the season, he was unable to consistently go deep into games, as his pitch count ballooned early in games and he struggled to be efficient and get out of innings. His groundball rate was down 7% from 2024 at 38.9%, and naturally, his flyball rate went in the opposite direction. Worryingly, his HR/FB ratio also went up, to a career-high 14%.
These issues led to Gilbert going to work over the off-season to add two new pitches as we came into 2026. With the hope of inducing more groundballs and adding an element of efficiency to his repertoire, he turned to a cutter. This was a pitch he threw in 2024, so a reintroduction rather than a brand new addition, but a clear potential fix as he went through the toughest spell of his career since he was a rookie.
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Gilbert was also looking to diversify his look to lefties in particular: a cutter to run in and get the groundballs to get quick outs and a changeup for swing and miss. These two introductions have resulted in very different outcomes. The cutter has not worked well.
Against lefties, the cutter wasn’t effective, and the heat maps show why: one of his most frequent locations is right on the .350 to .360 AVG zone in the middle of the plate, rather than running in on the hands of left-handed hitters. At 92 mph, it didn’t have the velo or movement to fool anyone, and it got punished.
It surrendered a .355 average and a .613 slugging mark against, good for a 199 wRC+ against left-handed bats. The swinging strike rate is just 5.3%, and the strikeout rate is 8.8%. Hitters weren’t chasing it either, offering at only 22.8% of the ones out of the zone, and with the pitch catching too much of the plate, they made contact 88.3% of the time they swung. And contact meant damage, averaging 95.1 mph off the bat with a 53.6% hard-hit rate and putting it in the air on 46.4% of batted balls. He last threw it on June 9, and we can see it’s now gone, the brown line ending abruptly.
It looks like it’s been shelved from his arsenal.
Conversely, the green line in the same image has stuck, that being Gilbert’s new changeup. Also, seemingly introduced to be primarily used to attack lefties, what makes Gilbert’s addition of a changeup so interesting is its usage alongside his splitter. While not exclusively, these pitches usually play the same role, so you rarely find them both in a pitch mix. Both are typically offspeed pitches with downward, arm-side movement, designed to miss bats.
Logan Gilbert’s splitter has become his main put-away pitch and one of the best splitters in the league. In 2025, it led the league in both batting average against and K%, and led starting pitchers in Whiff rate, only eclipsed by Yankees reliever Fernando Cruz. With the lowest spin rate of any splitter thrown by a pitcher with at least 50 innings, it is an extremely unique pitch. Given the size of Gilbert’s hands, he is able to make it behave closer to a knuckleball than a traditional splitter. This is evident in his movement profile.
The league average zones of a changeup (CU) and splitter (FS) almost sit on top of each other, yet Gilbert’s splitter has much less arm-side run and more vertical drop compared to other splitters. So this means he is able to throw it regardless of the handedness of the batter. But that meant he had a gap in his arsenal for something with movement away from left-handed hitters specifically.
Enter the changeup. It is easy to see how differently these pitches perform in the videos below, with the splitter thrown to the righty Wyatt Langford and the traditional changeup to the left-handed Lawrence Butler.
The changeup has added a great weapon to pair with his unconventional splitter, a quietly effective weapon this season, holding hitters to a .172 average and a .207 slugging mark with a .184 wOBA. The expected numbers back it up rather than flagging luck, sitting at a .206 xBA and a .232 xwOBA. He’s throwing it for strikes at a 37.6% zone rate, and it’s missing bats, generating a 30% whiff rate and a 33.3% strikeout rate with an 11.3% swinging strike rate. This only adds to his value as a high-end fantasy asset, not just for 2026 but in years to come.
Ben Brown | Chicago Cubs | Sinker
Ben Brown has improved steadily throughout this season and has come a long way from his role in 2025. Initially starting in the bullpen with a three-pitch mix of a four-seam, knuckle-curve, and changeup, he struggled mightily. As we will reference throughout, his knuckle-curve is absolutely top-drawer. Grading out at a Stuff+ of 116, it has actually been the best curveball league-wide in 2026, with a run value of 16. It has generated a whiff 44% of the time it’s been thrown. The highest velocity of any knuckle-curve, with one of the lowest spin rates, it has an interesting movement profile attacking the bottom of the zone. Brown basically exclusively threw four-seam fastballs and knuckle curves in 2025. We can see the unique movement of the knuckle-curve, which doesn’t drop as much as the average and has more arm-side break. But his fastball sits right around average.
We can see through the heat maps as well that he wasn’t locating his pitches. While the knuckle-curve (on the left below) is a plus pitch, it was often out of the zone and, as a result, easier to lay off as a hitter, as there were no other pitches to worry about, with his changeup thrown only to lefties.
Hitters were then able to sit on his fastball, and without real movement, deception, or top-shelf velo, it was an easy pitch to get after as he too often threw it in the middle of the plate (above right). This is reflected in the -11 run value it had in 2025, along with a 51% hard hit rate, .315 AVG, .526 SLG, and .406 wOBA. All in all, not a good pitch. Even with a good breaking ball, if you only throw two pitches, and one is objectively poor, you are not going to have success at the major league level.
To his credit, he has improved his four-seam by adding a tick of velo and commanding it better, to where it’s now an average pitch. But what has really unlocked Ben Brown in 2026 is the addition of his sinker. Throwing it over 40% of the time to right-handed hitters, it has added another layer to his arsenal that allows his best pitch, the knuckle-curve, to really shine. It is not a pitch he is looking to miss bats inside or catch hitters through the back door of the plate. Rather, in the very classical sinker sense, it starts on the outer half of the plate, grading at 100 Stuff+, to tie batters up, induce ground-balls, and get ahead in counts. We can see this play out here.
The movement isn’t too dissimilar to his four-seamer, with just more run, but this has allowed his fastball to hold up better as he can play them off each other, and it just gives him an extra pitch to go to. With 5 inches less drop than the average sinker, it is harder for hitters to distinguish from his four-seam out of the hand, which is what makes the tunneling between the two so effective. The sinker has been hit hard only 33% of the time and has opened up so many more doors for Brown to be a more versatile and complete pitcher. More importantly, it allows him to do what he does best. Throw that knuckle-curve. Unfortunately for fantasy purposes, he has been placed on the 15-day IL. But definitely one to watch out for moving forward after the All-Star break, as he is still rosterable in most mainstream 12-team leagues.
Drew Rasmussen | Tampa Bay Rays | Changeup
The Tampa Bay Rays, predicted by most to be last in a deep AL East, find themselves with a 3.5 game lead over the Yankees and have already hit the 50-game win mark as we enter July. Their rotation has been anchored by Drew Rasmussen, who is arguably having the best season of his career. His ERA is a career low 2.45, as well as his wOBA at .238 for the season so far, and already he has overtaken his 2.5 fWAR from last season in half the number of games.
Rasmussen’s success has been built upon the foundation of the fastball, utilizing the trifecta or multi-fastball approach. Last season, he threw either a four-seam, cutter, or sinker almost 90% of the time. With a sweeper, curveball making up the last 10%, and a changeup just 1%.
Moving into 2026, he still has the three fastball approach, and his sinker, which is his primary pitch thrown to right-handed bats, has improved greatly. With hitters really struggling to get it away, it has an xBA of just .172. What has changed from 2025, however, is that he has now added an offspeed pitch to complement this trifecta of fastballs. Technically, it’s not a ‘new’ pitch, but given the usage has gone from 1% to 12%, I think it definitely warrants inclusion. To lefties in particular, he can sequence the changeup and the cutter, thrown at identical velocities off of the fastball very effectively, and has diversified his pitch arsenal, as we can see from his paired pitches visual.
The changeup has been one of the most effective put-away pitches in his arsenal, generating a 42.7 percent whiff rate and a 40 percent strikeout rate. With a 20.5 percent put-away rate, hitters are struggling to do anything productive. The pitch is thrown out of the zone 72 percent of the time, yet hitters are chasing at a 33.6 percent clip, and when they do chase, they make contact only 36.6 percent of the time.
As we can see from the batted ball data, hitters are understandably late on the offspeed pitch, but crucially, the changeup produces the highest flawed-swing rate of any pitch in Rasmussen’s arsenal at 15 percent. A flawed swing is one where the batter isn’t on time or lined up or centered. This is more than double any other pitch in his arsenal.
But it is not just swing and miss that the changeup offers. Hitters are over the top of his changeup 44% of the time, which is in the top five league-wide, among pitchers with a minimum total of 50 swings on a changeup. So this means that it is not only getting good enough depth to generate swings and misses, but it also means that hitters are always on top of it and driving it into the ground. The average exit velocity is just 82.8 mph with a launch angle of negative 8.4 degrees, and the barrel rate sits at 4.2 percent with a hard-hit rate of just 25 percent, confirming that when the bat does find the ball, it is weak and directed downward. The expected stats back this up with a .190 xwOBA, confirming the pitch is suppressing contact quality.
For someone who threw almost exclusively fastballs, a plus changeup adds such an interesting wrinkle that he can lean on even further as the season moves on, and particularly against left-handed dominant lineups. It will be interesting to see how Rasmussen evolves as a fantasy asset moving forward. He has proven to provide both a high floor and ceiling in 2026; the main hope for Rays fans and fantasy owners is that he can maintain a clean bill of health in 2026 and beyond.
Yes, more of this please! Great article and very helpful visuals as well