It’s rare that pitch goes from hardly used to 80 grade
Baseball is a fun game where we can dissect lots of things all sorts of ways. If you want to really be in tune with the game these days, you have to be able to keep up with all of the analysis that is happening. That means reading.
A lot of reading.
The other day, I was reading this article by Mike Petriello about Paul Skenes and his ability to throw a bunch of different pitches. There were seven identified with one that he threw in spring training only a handful of times, but has yet to debut it in actual gameplay. There is the quote in there saying that Skenes might be the best pitcher in baseball now, which might be a bit of stretch, but certainly has room for argument. Being able to throw a lot of pitches well does not make a pitcher great if he doesn’t have results to go with them. Skenes’ biggest issue is his body of work isn’t large enough, but I digress with all of this.
Reading that article sent me to Baseball Savant where I started sorting leaderboards in different things. The run value for individual pitches gives a person a rough idea of who has the best of what, so I went to and sorted where Skenes ranked for each of the pitches (It’s high. It’s very high). It led me to where the Phillies ranked in each pitch and I was struck by something.
How often do you think of Zack Wheeler when the best splitters are discussed in the game today?
Personally, when I think of Wheeler and his repertoire, the first two pitches that come to mind are his four-seam fastball and his sweeper. The fastball that he can place anywhere in and around the zone are things of beauty when he’s at the top of his game. The sweeper has become such a dominant offering as a swing and miss pitch, it’s hard to imagine any pitcher has a better one.
But the one that has started to separate him from the pack and led to his ascendance as, in my opinion, the clear cut best pitcher in the game right now is the splitter.
Wheeler’s usage of the splitter started in 2018 when he was still with the Mets. It was a fine pitch, something to show the hitters every now and then, but it wasn’t anything close to what we’d refer to as a weapon. Once he came to Philadelphia in 2020, he threw a few more, but again – nothing really going for him. The big difference is that in those three years, the splitter that he threw was rather hard, averaging 89.7, 89.1 and 90.1 miles per hour each of those three seasons.
Then, just kind of messing around, he brought it back last season, this time with a few obvious tweaks in hand. There was a reason for his throwing the pitch, it being the need to have something different for left handed hitters to look at.
With a better way to combat lefties, Wheeler thinks he might be able to reach an even higher level…“I think this could put me over the top and hopefully get a Cy Young,” he said. “That’s what I want to do, and if I can take care of lefties the way I take care of righties, hopefully that’ll take care of itself. It just opens up the book a little more to a lefty. They did a lot better off me last year than righties did. Me and (pitching coach Caleb Cotham) had a lot of discussions this offseason about it.
I wrote about the splitter’s “debut” last year and how much it had changed from when he was throwing it with the Mets. If you’re wondering why I’m talking about it again, it’s because I’m still just as fascinated by the fact that he was able to seemingly just wake up one day and decide to throw an 80 grade pitch. And not only that, he has gotten better with it as the calendar flipped to 2025.
As this year has started to take shape, Wheeler is throwing the pitch more than ever, hovering around 9% of the time. Against lefties though, he has maintained the amount of time he throws it to them (10.7%), which means the amount of time he’s throwing it to right handed hitters has gone up (3.3% last year vs. 7.4% this year). It’s not a huge huge difference, but now, hitters on both sides of the plate now have to account for the pitch more often than not.
The results have not been there yet for Wheeler as he hasn’t had the sharpest of starts the past two games. He also hasn’t been helped by either his defense or his offense, so he might be feeling a bit unlucky now. But the continued excellence he’s shown in the past, coupled, with the idea that he’s still adapting to the league and learning new pitches should be an issue for the National League.
A learning robot is a dangerous robot.