Spring Training is underway, and we’re already inundated with stories about pitchers who have come to camp with new pitches, which means it’s time to talk about pitch mixes again.
This will be my fifth year of breaking down new pitches to analyze how they fit into a pitcher’s arsenal and see if it’s something we should be genuinely excited about for fantasy baseball. There are a few other writers who are incredibly knowledgeable in this space, and I’m excited that this first article is a collaboration with Nick Pollack, Eno Sarris, and Lance Brozdowski.
Since so many pitchers are unveiling new pitches in the spring, we decided to divide and conquer so that you could get as much quality analysis on new pitches as possible. Make sure you read Lance’s piece on Paul Skenes, Logan Gilbert, and David Festa, and Nick’s piece on Cristopher Sanchez, Grayson Rodriguez, and Jared Jones, and also Eno’s piece on George Kirby, Casey Mize, and Clay Holmes.
Then keep coming back here all season long as I tackle more new pitches analysis.
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Why Do New Pitches Matter?
On a simple note, new pitches matter because a player learning a new skill can drastically change their fantasy outlook. Because of the symbiotic nature of a pitcher’s arsenal, a new pitch can be great itself, but it can also transform the production of the other pitches in a pitcher’s arsenal. That means it’s not just a pitcher learning a new skill but is also a pitcher re-shaping his entire profile.
Every new pitch is a good thing because every new pitch gives a hitter something else to think about. However, not every new pitch will have a meaningful impact. When I gave my presentation at First Pitch Arizona, I said that a new pitch can be meaningful if it checks three boxes for a pitcher:
- Does it address a weakness
- Does it have a defined role in the larger arsenal
- Does the pitcher trust it enough to use it
That may be a coarse way to simplify it, but I believe this is a good, quick field test for deciding if a new pitch is something to get excited about.
With that out of the way, let’s dive into our first three new pitches of the year.
Kevin Gausman (TOR) – Cutter
I was really down on Kevin Gausman coming into the off-season. I had him ranked inside the top 10 overall starters last year despite acknowledging that he was essentially a one-pitch pitcher with an elite splitter and a mediocre fastball. That was why he always gave up a lot of hard contact and had high WHIPs. While there were some years in San Francisco where he seemed to get his walk rate in check and posted strong WHIPs, he’s been about a 1.22 WHIP pitcher in his three seasons in Toronto and that can actually hurt your team when you’re getting 180+ innings of that high of a WHIP from your supposed ace.
On top of that, Gausman had allowed at least a 42% Ideal Contact Rate (ICR) in each of 2022 and 2023, and I should have paid more attention to that. I like using ICR instead of barrel rate because ICR includes hard groundballs while barrel rate ignores them because of their low launch angle. Still, hard groundballs often turn into hits, and hits turn into baserunners, so we don’t like pitchers who give up hard contact, whether it’s in the air or on the ground.
Gausman’s splitter regressed a bit in 2024, and we have to remember that we only have three years of elite production from Gausman after he reinvented himself in San Francisco. It’s not like he’s been a stud for 10 years and just lost it for one season last year. Pitchers who rely on the splitter as their primary pitch are always a risk, so I came into the off-season ready to plummet Gausman down my rankings, and I did at first. However, I’m more in on Gausman than I was a month ago because of the continued talk that he will use a new cutter or sinker more in 2025. That could be a game-changer for Gausman.
He introduced the sinker at the end of April last season and seemed to get more confident in it as the year went on. He threw the pitch primarily to righties, using it just under 10% of the time, but he struggled with command of it. It posted just a 30% zone rate (well below the 53% league average) and had a 57% strike rate (well below the 67.4% league average). The sinker also didn’t miss bats but, importantly, it did allow just a 30% ICR, and that’s what we want here.
Gausman used the sinker against righties to give them a look at another fastball besides the four-seamer. That should theoretically allow the four-seamer to play up more as a swing-and-miss pitch but also be squared up less than it was previously. The only issue here is that, since Gausman couldn’t command the sinker, hitters didn’t worry about it much. His four-seamer did miss more bats in 2024 than it did in 2023, but it also got hit harder. Some of that also could have been that he also used the sinker low in the zone to righties, so when they saw a low fastball, they knew it was a sinker, and a high fastball was a four-seamer. Still, even though the pitch didn’t work great for him in 2024, I think the idea behind incorporating it was spot-on, and a better command of the pitch could make a real impact in 2025.
We also know that Gausman intends to use a cutter in 2025, which is a pitch he’s never thrown before. The cutter should operate as a second fastball variation to left-handed hitters in the same way the sinker is to righties. In 2024, Gausman got below-average swinging strikes on his four-seamer to lefties but didn’t allow a lot of hard contact. However, his splitter was far less impactful against lefties in 2024. That has a lot to do with Gausman’s command of the pitch itself, but he also only used the four-seam inside the lefties 20% of the time, so lefties were able to look away and could have picked up the splitter more easily. Using a cutter to jam lefties up and in will open up the outside part of the plate for him to get more swings and misses with the splitter.
At 34 years old, I think the days of Gausman as a top-10 starter are done, and the majority of his bounceback is going to have to come from getting more strikes and chases with his splitter. However, I think these added fastball variations could help with that. Each one can be used up and inside to hitters, which will back them up off the plate and make it harder for hitters to time up the splitter low and away. Also, even if the sinker and cutter are just average, it will mean that hitters won’t be able to sit on his four-seam fastball as much as they have been in the past, which should lead to less hard contact and potentially better WHIPs. That could allow us to get a 3.50 ERA season out of Gausman, with his strikeout rate climbing back up around 26% or higher. I’d be all in for that at his current draft cost.
Griffin Canning (NYM) – Sinker and Sweeper
Griffing Canning ticks three boxes here when it comes to pitchers that we want to watch in spring training. Not only is he joining a new team that will likely be trying to toy with his pitch mix, but he also introduced a new pitch at the end of last season and allegedly has added another new pitch in the off-season.
Let’s start with what he did at the end of last season when he seemed to tweak his slider to be more of a sweeper in the final month. If you look at the average horizontal movement on Canning’s slider, you can see that the tighter movement starts to widen slightly over the summer and then explodes into more of a sweeper in September.
Brooks Baseball
Canning pitched in five games over that span, and the sweepier version of the slider posted a 20.3% SwStr%, 31.6% ICR, and 24.4% PutAway rate. Those are all great numbers. He did have just a 40% zone rate on the pitch, so it’s not a pitch he’ll throw for strikes, but that’s OK if he keeps his regular slider, which is a pitch he has average zone rates on. If Canning doesn’t need to be as precise with his harder slider because he uses it early in the count for called strikes, then we could see that tick up.
This is a change that makes some sense since the Mets love sweepers. Kyle Bland made an awesome table last year tracking the pitch usage by team, and new pitchers who came to the Mets in 2024 dropped their harder slider usage by 11% and upped their sweeper usage by 13%. That’s an organization that would likely have noticed the change that Canning made at the end of the season. The Mets also love sinkers and, like much of the league, are moving away from over-use of four-seam fastballs. In that same table from Kyle Bland, we see that the Mets had new pitchers drop their four-seam usage by 18.2% and increase their sinker usage by 17.8% from the previous season, which is great news for Canning. Last season, the Mets got great success out of Luis Severino by recognizing that his four-seamer was no longer dominant and reducing his usage of it while leaning into the sinker. A similar change would be great for Canning since the four-seamer is his worst pitch.
Overall, Canning’s four-seamer gets below-average swinging strike rates and well below-average zone rates and strike rates. He can’t control the pitch and misses way up and out of the zone often. The hard contact rates and ICR allowed are fine, but when you only throw a fastball in the zone 40% of the time, that’s not going to be a successful pitch for you. For that reason, Canning is the perfect candidate for a sinker. By adding in a fastball with a little bit of horizontal movement on it, Canning doesn’t have to worry about being as precise with his location as he does with his four-seamer since it’s just 93.3 mph with below-average extension and just average iVB. He can use the sinker to get ahead to righties and then set up his two sliders or even the curve, which was fine in limited usage to righties. If he’s unable to use the sinker for strikes against lefties, then maybe he can use the harder slider as a strike pitch and then set up the sweepier slider and solid changeup to lefties, which had an 18% swinging strike rate and league-average ICR last year.
In reality, Canning does not profile as a bad starting pitcher. His slider is a good strike pitch. His changeup is a good swing-and-miss pitch to lefties. His sweeper has the makings of a good swing-and-miss pitch to righties. The curve performs well as a fourth offering that you just want hitters to keep in the back of their minds. All he needs is a consistent pitch to throw for strikes and get ahead in the count. If the sinker is that pitch, I would not be surprised if Canning had a 2025 season similar to what Luis Severino did in 2024, with a 3.91 ERA, 1.24 WHIP, and 22% strikeout rate. That’s not exciting, but it’s useful in deeper formats and in the right streaming matchup.
Kyle Harrison (SF) – Cutter
For a while, I’ve just honestly not quite seen it with Kyle Harrison. He throws his fastball essentially 60% of the time to both righties and lefties, and it grades out as a slightly above-average pitch. He doesn’t have great velocity on it, but it has plenty of horizontal movement (or run), which is why he lives with it up and away to righties and up and in to lefties. The pitch has produced slightly above-average swinging strike rates to both, but righties hit it a little better, which makes sense since he keeps it out and over the plate.
Apart from that, he has a curveball that misses bats to lefties and is in the zone often but gets clobbered by righties and a changeup that he has only average command of but doesn’t miss bats to righties and gets hit hard by lefties. There’s not a lot there that adds up to being a useful fantasy starter.
However, we now have the news that Harrison is adding a cutter this off-season. It should be noted that this is the second straight off-season we’ve gotten that rumor, so we need to take it with a grain of salt, but this time, Harrison himself is talking about the cutter (and his refined mechanics). We know that Harrison threw a harder gyro-type slider in the minors, so that’s likely the pitch he’s referring to, and I love that addition for him. Let’s talk about why.
When he faces righties, he basically only has the fastball, which he keeps middle or away 81% of the time, and the changeup, which he throws middle or away 84% of the time. He doesn’t even like throwing the curve inside to righties because they clobber it, so he essentially has no pitch that he can attack righties with inside. The cutter or gyro slider would be that. It has a clear role to fill.
Depending on its movement profile, he could jam hitters up and in with it, which might reduce its swing-and-miss upside but would keep righties from leaning out over the plate, which would make the low-and-away changeup more effective and also further increase the swings-and-misses on the fastball that runs away from righties. If the shape/movement of the gyro slider/cutter is something he can get swings and misses with down and in then he’d still be attacking righties inside but would have them looking down and in which would allow the up-and-away fastball to play up more and could even make the loopier slurve type curveball he has more effective since they’d attack the same zone but at vastly different speeds and with different sharpness of breaks.
When he’s facing lefties, he can then jam them inside with the running four-seam fastball and then use the combination of the slurve and gyro slider/cutter to attack lefties away with various speeds and movement profiles that could tunnel well with one another.
So the cutter would have a clear role of attacking a quadrant of the strike zone that Harrison doesn’t currently attack. It would also address a weakness of his limited pitch mix, especially to righties, so now we just need to know if he trusts the pitch enough to throw it. Considering Harrison has toyed with this pitch before and not actually implemented it, I don’t want to get too excited, but I’d love this if it came to fruition.
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