An Adaptation Score Follow-Up

Last week, I investigated the increasing divergence between the way pitchers approach same-handed and opposite-handed batters. I learned that pitchers across the league are varying their arsenals more and more every year. But that was a broad look, and I had some follow-up questions. Mainly, who specifically? Which teams? Which players? And how? Today, I’ll provide some answers.

As a refresher, I calculated what I’m calling “adaptation score” by comparing how frequently a pitcher uses his top-two offerings, both against same-handed and opposite-handed batters. Adaptation score is simply the difference between how frequently a pitcher throws his two best pitches when he has the platoon advantage and how often he throws those same two pitches when the batter has the edge. I split the data up by teams to see who was driving the move. First, we’ve got the five most and least adaptable teams in 2025:

Not much to see here. The Dodgers’ being on the bottom might suggest that adaptation is bad, even. But truthfully, there’s a big element we’re missing in looking at the data this way: personnel. Changing who’s on your team, even if you have the same philosophy, can change how you score in this metric. The Dodgers were in the middle of the pack last year when it came to adaptation score. Then they overhauled their pitching staff and ended up here.

To attempt to smooth out those year-to-year fluctuations, I blended the past three years together. I did the same for 2015-2017, the first three years of my dataset. Then I compared the two. The big change? It’s mostly the AL Central:

This is change data, but I can tell you why those teams show up: None of them adapted very much in the 2015-2017 time frame. It’s not so much that they stand out now; the Tigers and Guardians are at the forefront of the adaptation movement, but the White Sox and Royals are smack dab in the middle of the pack. But a decade ago, the entire division was full of same-pitches-to-everyone types. I don’t have a great theory for why it’s grouped that way, but it does seem clear that things have changed. Well, except for the Twins, who were more adaptable than almost everyone a decade ago but haven’t changed as much as their divisional rivals.

If you’re wondering about which teams have changed the least, I can show you that as well:

That’s not very interesting aside from one factoid: Every single team has a higher adaptation score now than a decade ago. This isn’t something where some front offices love this trend, and others think that it’s backward. Everyone is doing it. The only question is the degree to which they’re leaning that way.

My main takeaway from the team-level data is that you can’t think of this trend as being driven by only one or two teams. Every team is doing this. The team that varies its pitches from one handedness to the other the least in 2025 would be in the top 10 in 2015. We’re not talking about one or two clever R&D groups figuring out this new trend. We’re talking about everyone realizing that pitches are easier than ever to develop, and thus are turning around and developing more.

Everyone’s doing it – but how much? To answer this, I looked for starters with notable moves between 2024 and 2025. Here are the largest changers:

Wait, a negative adaptation score? That’s right – and it’s not hard to understand how it happens. Cabrera’s best pitch is probably his 94-mph changeup. It’s so good that even against same-handed batters, where changeups are generally less useful, he threw it more than any other pitch last year. Of course, he threw it even more often against lefties. Last year, 53% of his offerings to righties were changeups or four-seamers. But when he faced lefties, he really let the changeup eat; changeups and four-seamers comprised 67% of his offerings. To get a negative adaptation score, you need to feature your best opposite-handed pitch even against same-handed batters. It’s rare but hardly impossible.

That said, Cabrera is trying something new this year. He’s using a sinker/slider approach to righties, mothballing the four-seamer almost completely. Against lefties, he still throws a ton of changeups, but now his second-most-frequent pitch is a curveball. He barely throws sinkers and sliders to lefties – why would you? The result is a much larger adaptation score and the biggest change in baseball. Now, I’d argue that Cabrera might be better served to work on his command than develop new pitches; he’s rocking a double-digit walk rate for the fifth straight year. But the numbers don’t lie; he’s adapting far more than he used to.

The other names here are a mixed bag. Holmes added a cutter and a changeup when he transitioned to the starting rotation. Wilson learned a changeup over the winter. Carrasco leaned into a sinker/slider approach against righties; he used those two pitches roughly half the time with the platoon edge last year, but he’s up to 77% in 2025. Lodolo, a lefty, is throwing more sinkers to lefties than ever before.

Perhaps my favorite of these is Bassitt. I’m surprised that he didn’t have a higher adaptation score already; after all, he throws eight pitches, why not mix them up? But while he throws eight, cutters and sinkers accounted for about two-thirds of his offerings to righties in 2024. And, well, he likes his sinker and cutter! He threw them more than half the time to lefties, too. But this year, he’s added a new wrinkle to his game. Rather than a cutter against righties, he’s using a sweeper, getting in on the sinker/sweeper craze that everyone loves. Meanwhile, he’s leaning into the kitchen sink approach against lefties, throwing four pitches more than 10% of the time, a completely different strategy than the one he deploys against same-handed hitters.

I’m not convinced that adaptation score is a strictly good thing. I am convinced that it’s useful descriptively. Wondering which pitchers have changed their approach? It’ll tell you. Wondering which are sticking with old reliable? That’s pretty easy to find, too. Just to pick a few prominent names, Bryan Woo, Corbin Burnes, Kyle Hendricks, and Yusei Kikuchi have almost identical scores in 2024 and 2025.

I’ll leave you with one greatly amusing player, the man whose adaptation score fell the most from 2024 to 2025. That would be Cardinals righty Andre Pallante, who was an extreme adapter in 2024. He relied on a sinker/slider mix against righties, but almost completely shelved those pitches against lefties. And I do mean almost completely: He threw four-seamers or curveballs 95.8% of the time when he didn’t have the platoon advantage. That resulted in a whopping 60.2 adaptation score, the third-highest mark in the majors.

This year, Pallante has dialed back his sinker usage, and I understand why. His four-seamer has long been his best pitch; by run values, it’s 24 runs above average in his career while every other pitch combined is 21 runs below average. He now leads with a four-seamer against righties – and he should, what with it being his best pitch and all. But since he leans on it even more against lefties, that means his adaptation score is now negative! In fact, he now boasts the third-lowest adaptation score in baseball, a far cry from last year’s third-highest mark. That is absolutely wild stuff.

Pallante and Cabrera are a good reminder that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of whether to vary your pitch mix or stick with your best options. Cabrera flipped his approach to have different pitch mixes against lefty and righty hitters, and his results have suffered so far. Pallante went the other way, going from being an extreme adapter to sticking with his bread and butter more frequently, and he’s also off to a miserable start. There are no silver bullets here, no easy moves that everyone can do to improve. But while the data are noisy at the individual level, the overall trend is clear. More pitchers are diversifying their approaches than are consolidating them. I’m not sure where the trend will end – but I’m quite confident that the direction is no accident.