A Look at Baseball’s Best Horizontal Hitters

There’s a new pitch classification, well, sweeping the nation, and with the aptly-named sweeper comes a lot to learn about its behavior, usage, and effectiveness. For those catching up, the sweeper, which Statcast introduced to its pitch classification system this spring, is a breaking ball that plays more on the horizontal plane than the vertical one, typically thrown slower and with more break than a slider, “sweeping” across its path rather than dropping the way a traditional curveball might. The rarer slurve, on the other hand, breaks horizontally like a sweeper but also features more downward break. While the slider classification had become a bit of a catch-all for pitches that break horizontally, which vary tremendously in velocity and depth of the break, the introduction of the sweeper classification helps to differentiate the breaking ball by both the type and the amount of horizontal break. For reference, here’s what the average sweeper, slider, curveball, and slurve have looked like so far this year:

As many have noted, this isn’t a new pitch so much as it is a recognition of trends toward a pitch that was already there. Over the last seven seasons, the percentage of breaking balls that broke at least a foot to the pitcher’s glove side has risen from 17.7% in 2017 to 27.4% so far this year, including a seven-point increase in the last two seasons. Meanwhile, the average vertical drop (without gravity) on those breaking balls has shrunk from -5.9 inches as recently as 2019 to just -2.0 so far this year. Over the last few years, pitchers have been sending more and more breaking balls veering across the strike zone without dropping. Pitchers and teams have different names for the pitch – the Yankees call their version a “whirly;” Statcast now calls it a sweeper.

It’s all well and good for the pitchers who get to play around with the sweeper, and plenty have. The Twins’ Griffin Jax has recorded a 3.48 ERA, a 1.59 FIP, a 1.81 xERA, and a .211 xwOBA after ramping up his sweeper usage from 31.1% in 2021 and 48.4% in 2022 to a league-leading 73.7% in 2023. Hitters facing Jax know that he’s going to throw the sweeper three out of every four pitches – what they don’t know is what to do with that information. They’re chasing 43.3% of his sweepers outside the zone and posting a .161 xwOBA against the pitch. Seattle’s Penn Murfee has doubled down on a pitch he threw over 51.0% of the time last season — he’s now throwing it 62.3% of the time, inducing 40.4% whiffs and a whole lot of weak contact. Jax and Murfee have both seen huge spikes in their groundball rates thanks to the emphasis on the sweeper.

Then there’s Shohei Ohtani, who has more than doubled his sweeper usage since last year, opting for it 49% of the time. Entering last night’s start, he had thrown 210 sweepers and allowed just three hits on 30 balls in play, which have come off the bat at an average of 87.0 mph. According to Statcast, the Rays have had eight pitchers this season who have thrown at least one sweeper (the pitch accounts for over 10% of their total pitches this year), the Yankees seven, and the Mets six.

But there’s somebody on the other end of all that experimentation, and for hitters, it may not be as much fun. With breaking balls being deployed more and more often – this year’s 32.2% of all pitches would be the highest in recent memory over a full season – and breaking more and more, the ability to hit a big breaking pitch is as important as ever. That got me wondering about which hitters are best suited for the sweeper revolution, and which are at the greatest risk of getting swept away.

Against the over 48,000 pitches classified by Statcast as sweepers since 2012, here are the hitters who have fared best by xwOBA:

A few notes: Statcast’s process for updating their pitch data involves retroactively classifying sweepers from years past beginning with active pitchers – presumably there are past sliders or slurves thrown by inactive pitchers that would be classified as sweepers were they thrown today. This data includes only what Statcast has classified since adding the sweeper classification in February. We’re also still relatively early in the process of that classification. I limited the list to those hitters who have faced over 100 sweepers – as soon as today, we could see William Contreras (.403 xwOBA on 94 sweepers), Rafael Devers (.398 on 99), or Max Kepler (.390 on 95) join that list. But 100 pitches isn’t very many at all, especially for a stat like xwOBA. Most players have seen far more than 100 pitches already this season, and it’s only April – so this is more fun than it is informative in a serious way.

That being said – holy moly, Shohei Ohtani. Is there a list you won’t show up on? Not only is he one of the premier throwers of the sweeper, he has mashed it so far as a hitter, to the tune of a .454 xwOBA, just a hair off Rhys Hoskins for the top spot. In case you aren’t experiencing enough Ohtani appreciation in your daily life, here’s an added dose.

Otherwise, this is a somewhat unremarkable list in that it’s mostly made up of players who hit all breaking balls well. Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Freddie Freeman, Austin Riley, Kyle Tucker – it’s a mostly predictable group. Looking at a stat like accumulated run value over those pitches gives us a similar list – Tucker, Judge, Ohtani, Lowe, Chapman, Goldschmidt, France, and Hoskins all show up in the top 10.

What might be more interesting to explore is whether certain players perform better at reading sweeping horizontal break rather than dropping vertical break, or vice versa, which could give us some sense of who’s best prepared for more horizontal breakers in the years to come. Let’s take a look, for example, at players’ xwOBA off pitches that break a lot horizontally, and their xwOBA against pitches that break a lot vertically:

On the y axis, we have the players’ performance since 2019 against pitches that drop at least eight inches vertically (without gravity); on the x axis, we have the players’ performance in that time on pitches that break at least a foot to the pitcher’s glove side. I’ve included all players who have seen 250 of each type of pitch over the time frame. Of course, there are a lot of moving pieces here – this doesn’t consider pitcher handedness, for instance, and there could be overlapping pitches that broke both a foot to the glove side and eight-plus inches vertically. But it’s meant to give us a quick look at which players might be able to handle more horizontal break in their lives:

This list is more of a mix of hitters who generally struggle against breaking balls – Mitch Garver and Tucker Barnhart stick out in this regard – and those who handle them well, like Nathaniel Lowe and Ty France. But all of them have been considerably more successful against pitches with more sweep compared to pitches with more drop, and this may bode well in the era of the sweeper. Lowe and France, for instance, already showed up on the sweeper leaderboard above.

On the other hand, this group might have some trouble catching up with the sweeping times:

Mike Trout? What is sweeper extraordinaire Shohei Ohtani’s generationally-talented teammate doing on a list like this? Well, this is a group that, for the most part, has crushed dropping pitches – Trout and Mitch Haniger have the two highest xwOBA values off these dropping pitches in the time frame, and Willy Adames is not far behind – they just haven’t been able to keep up that pace on sweeping movement. Others, like Trevor Story and Luis Urías, have had trouble on all kinds of breaking balls, but particularly those with a long horizontal path. In any case, if the future means more sweepers, this bunch might have trouble keeping up their level of production against breaking offerings. That’s not to say that the ability to hit pitches with big drop is obsolete, but amid the sweeper frenzy, the percentage of breaking balls that drop at least eight inches before factoring in gravity has dropped to 5.6% this year, a full percentage point lower than last year and the lowest rate in the Statcast era.

In today’s game, you’re better off being able to handle a serious sweeper. And it doesn’t hurt if you can throw one, too.

All stats as of the end of play on April 26.