In 2008, the first year of PitchF/X pitch tracking, 13.9% of all pitches across the major leagues were sliders. Ah, those were the days – flat, crushable fastballs as far as the eye could see. More or less every year since then, sliders have proliferated. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the graph:

Are you surprised? Of course not. You’ve seen Blake Snell pitch – and Lance McCullers Jr., Sean Manaea, five of your team’s best relievers, and pretty much anyone in the past half decade. Pitchers are flocking to sliders whenever they can get away with throwing one. It used to be a two-strike offering, then an ahead-in-the-count offering, and now many pitchers would rather throw sliders than fastballs when they desperately need to find the zone. Look at that inexorable march higher.

Only, maybe it’s not so inexorable anymore. Between 2015 and 2023, the average increase in slider rate was 0.9 percentage points year-over-year. The lowest increase was half a percentage point; each of the last three years saw increases of a percentage point or more. But from 2023 to 2024, slider rate stagnated. In 2023, 22.2% of all pitches were sliders. In 2024, that number only climbed to 22.3%, the lowest increase since the upward trend started a decade ago.

That’s hardly evidence of the demise of the slider. For one thing, the number is still going up. For another thing, it’s one year. Finally, 2024 marked the highest rate of sliders thrown in major league history. If I showed you the above graph and told you “look, sliders aren’t cool anymore,” you’d be understandably unmoved.

Not to worry, though. It might be January 9, but I won’t try to pass that off as genuine baseball analysis even in the depths of winter. I’ve got a tiny bit more than that. Raw slider rate is a misleading way of considering how pitcher behavior is changing. There are two ways to increase the league-wide slider rate. First, pitchers could adjust their arsenals to use more sliders and fewer other pitches. Second, the population could change – new, slider-dominant pitchers could replace other hurlers who throw the pitch less frequently.

For example, Adam Wainwright retired after the 2023 season. He threw 1,785 pitches that year, and only five were sliders. Plenty of the innings Wainwright filled for the Cardinals went to Andre Pallante, who graduated from the bullpen to the rotation and made 20 starts in 2024. Pallante actually threw fewer sliders proportionally in 2024 than he did in 2023 – but his pitch count ballooned from 1,139 to 1,978. Similarly, Michael McGreevy made his big league debut in 2024 and threw 311 pitches, 19% of which were sliders.

The numbers can lie to you. Pallante, the only one of our three pitchers to appear in both years, lowered his slider rate. But in 2023, Pallante and Wainwright combined for a 7% slider rate. In 2024, Pallante and McGreevy combined for a 17.1% slider rate. That sounds like a huge change in behavior – but it’s actually just a change in population composition.

The story we all think about isn’t Wainwright retiring and handing his innings to McGreevy and Pallante. It’s Brayan Bello going from 17.5% sliders to 28% sliders while pitching a similar innings load – something that also happened in 2024, just so we’re clear.

To measure how existing pitchers are changing their slider usage, we shouldn’t look at the overall rate. We should instead look at the change in each pitcher’s rate. That’s a truer reflection of the question I’m asking, or at least I think it is. And that answer differs from the chart I showed you up at the top of this article.

There were 315 pitchers who threw at least 50 innings in 2023 and 2024, and threw at least one slider in each of those two years. Of those 315 pitchers, 142 increased their slider usage, 24 kept their usage the same, and 149 decreased the rate at which they threw sliders. The story was similar from 2022 to 2023. There were 216 pitchers who fit the criteria in those years; 90 increased their slider usage, 19 kept theirs the same, and 107 decreased the rate at which they used the pitch. From 2021 to 2022, the effect went the other way; 122 pitchers threw sliders more frequently in 2022 than they did in 2021, 22 kept their usage the same, and 74 decreased their usage.

Put that way, the change is quite striking. The slider craze kicked off in earnest in 2017. From 2016-2017, 114 pitchers increased their slider usage and 89 decreased theirs. That rough split persisted in 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Everything around the 2020 season is a little weird thanks to the abbreviated schedule, but the basic gist – more pitchers increasing slider usage than decreasing slider usage – was true in every pair of years from 2014-2015 through 2021-2022.

That sounds more like a trend than the overall rate of sliders thrown. Graphically, it looks like this:

Let’s put that in plain English. From 2015, the start of the spike in slider usage, through 2022, there were far more pitchers increasing their slider frequency than decreasing it. On average across those years, 1.3 pitchers threw more sliders for every one pitcher who threw fewer. In the past two years, that trend has reversed; more pitchers are reducing their reliance on sliders than increasing it. The population is going to continue to change – they don’t make a lot of Adam Wainwrights these days – but on a per-pitcher basis, the relentless increase in slider usage has halted.

I tried a few other ways of looking at this phenomenon. I held pitcher workloads constant from year one and applied year two slider rates to each pitcher (pitchers who only threw in year one obviously keep their rate unchanged). The same trend held – the last two years have seen a sharp divergence from the boom times of 2015-2022. I looked at the percentage of starters who started using a slider more than some other pitch in their arsenal and compared it to the ones who de-emphasized it; same deal. I also should note that I’ve grouped sweepers and slurves among the sliders for this article, so this reversal is not about pitchers ditching traditional sliders to get in on the sweeper craze.

No matter how you slice it, we’ve seemingly entered a new phase of pitch design. For a while, most pitchers took a hard look at what they were throwing and decided they needed more sliders. Now, though, it appears that we’ve reached an equilibrium point. Some pitchers still want more. Some think they’re throwing enough, or even a hair too many. Now splitters are on the rise, and hybrid cutters are starting to eat into sliders’ market share.

It’s far too early to say that sliders are on the decline. Factually speaking, they’re not. But to me, at least, it’s clear that the last two years are different than the years before them when it comes to the most ubiquitous out pitch in baseball. Sure, everyone has a slider now – but in the same way that four-seam fastballs were inevitable right until sinkers made a comeback, the slider is no longer expanding its dominance among secondary pitches. An exciting conclusion? I’m not sure. But it’s certainly backed by the evidence.

As of the time I’m writing this article, roughly half of our Top 50 free agents have signed new contracts this offseason. That sounds like a great time to take a look at how the market has developed, both for individual players and overall positional archetypes. For example, starting pitchers have been all the rage so far, or so it seems. But does that match up with the data?

I sliced the data up into three groups to get a handle on this: starters, relievers, and position players. I then calculated how far off both I and the crowdsourced predictions were when it came to average annual value and total dollars handed out. You can see here that I came out very slightly ahead of the pack of readers by these metrics, at least so far:

To be fair, none of us have done particularly well. The last two years I’ve run this experiment, I missed by around $1 million in average annual value, and the crowd missed by between $1 and $2 million. Likewise, I’ve missed by roughly $10 million in average annual value per contract, with the crowd around $18 million. This year, the contracts have been longer than I expected, and richer than you readers expected, though you did a much better job on a relative basis when it came to predicting total dollar outlay. We were all low on every category, though, across the board.
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Are there any Oakland Athletics fans reading this? If so, don’t worry, your team is doing its usual nonsense, there’s nothing to see here. You’re lucky they left, don’t feel so bad, those last few years can’t take away all the good times. You can go ahead and skip this one, great article, hooray. Now that that group is gone, and we’re left with Sacramentonians, new A’s fans, more general fans of the sport, and perhaps Vegas residents, let me say this: The A’s signing Brent Rooker to a five-year, $60 million extension is awesome, and I love it.

Rooker was a rare bright spot on a dismal 2023 A’s squad. Then he was downright excellent on the green-shoots-of-hope 2024 team, compiling 5.1 WAR, even with the punishing positional adjustment that comes from DHing, thanks to a scorching .293/.365/.562 batting line. That line is even better than you might think, coming as it did in the cavernous Coliseum, and it didn’t look fluky.

Rooker hits the stuffing out of the ball. He finished eighth in barrels per batted ball in 2024, just ahead of certifiably enormous guys Oneil Cruz, Kyle Schwarber, and Marcell Ozuna. He also elevates the ball more frequently than any of that crew. The two are intertwined, obviously, but any time you’re hitting rockets like the 2024 versions of Schwarber and Ozuna, you’re doing something right. You could hardly do better from scratch if you were trying to come up with an ideal power hitter; a vicious swing (78th-percentile bat speed) that frequently puts the ball in play at profitable launch angles (86th-percentile sweet spot rate) means plenty of barrels (97th percentile) and 39 homers even in a park that suppresses righty power mightily. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m sure that Yankees fans are well and truly tired of hearing about Juan Soto. We get it, he likes the other New York team more. So don’t worry, friends. I won’t mention Juan Soto, unparalleled hitting genius, after this paragraph. Sure, the ghost of Juan Soto, signer of the biggest contract in professional sports history, might inform the rest of the moves the Yankees are making. Sure, not signing superstar Juan Soto after his incandescent 2024 season makes all the rest of the team’s moves feel minor. But again, you won’t see the words “Juan Soto” after this instance, so let’s get to the moves the Yankees are making to bolster their team in the aftermath of losing one of the brightest stars in the game.

Signing Paul Goldschmidt
The Yankees are going to need some offense if they want to replace Jua – whoa, almost broke my own rule right out of the gate. Uh… the Yankees are going to need some offense, period. They were a top-heavy team last year between Aaron Judge and his running mate, name tastefully withheld. Giancarlo Stanton’s playoff surge notwithstanding, the existing roster just didn’t have that much juice beyond Judge. Sure, adding Cody Bellinger was nice, but they needed to do more. Paul Goldschmidt, signed for one year and $12.5 million, is definitely more, it’s just a question of how much after his bummer of a 2024 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Every story written about the Mets this offseason starts with Juan Soto, but pretty much all of them immediately introduce a caveat: “They’ll also need to sign more pitching.” And it’s true! The Mets, as constituted after signing Soto, had a fearsome top of the lineup and a mystery box of a pitching staff. But they also had money, which can be exchanged for goods and services, and now they’ve given that money to Sean Manaea, who signed a three-year, $75 million deal to return to Queens last week.

Manaea was comfortably the team’s best starter in 2024. He signed a one-year prove-it deal that valued him somewhere between a swingman and a fourth starter, and he delivered the goods, to the tune of a 3.47 ERA over 181 innings of work. He got even better in the second half, adopting a new cross-fire delivery and changing the shape of his fastball for the better. A down postseason hardly put a damper on his year; the 2024 version of Manaea fulfilled the promise he’d shown since breaking into the majors in 2016.

The question, then, is whether he can do it again. There’s plenty of reason to believe he can. Manaea’s fastball plays much better from a low slot, and he misses enough bats to run an above-average strikeout rate even without a true wipeout pitch. He also got his walk rate under control in the second half of the year, which has long been a sticking point in his game. It’s not so much that Manaea’s wild, but at his best, he was running walk rates around 5%, and that number had ballooned into the 8-9% region in recent years. After changing his delivery in late July, he walked only 6.2% of opposing batters. He’s never going to strike out a gaudy number of guys, but if he isn’t issuing free passes, his stuff keeps hitters off balance and results in a lot of easy innings even without strikeouts. Read the rest of this entry »

Last offseason, the Diamondbacks were in search of a marquee starter to pair with Zac Gallen atop their rotation. The market was thin at the top – Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani were probably never available to them, so their best options were Sonny Gray, Blake Snell, Eduardo Rodriguez, Shota Imanaga, and Jordan Montgomery. They signed two of those guys, and neither delivered the rotation-stabilizing performance they had expected. But instead of waving their hands in the air and raving at the injustice of variance, the Diamondbacks got right back on the horse:

BREAKING: Corbin Burnes to Diamondbacks, $210M, 6 years. opt out after 2 years

— Jon Heyman (@jonheyman.bsky.social) 2024-12-28T06:32:12.313Z

Corbin Burnes was the best free agent pitcher available. In each of the last five seasons, he’s been one of the top pitchers in the game, racking up a 2.88 ERA, 3.01 FIP, and 816 innings pitched. He’s second in WAR (21.7) over that time frame, second in RA9-WAR (23.2), second in strikeouts (946), and third in innings pitched. In other words, he’s been a capital-A Ace, a set-it-and-forget-it choice at the top of the starting rotation. He’ll receive $35 million a year for six seasons, with an opt-out after the second year of the deal, which also includes a $10 million signing bonus.

With Gallen also on their dance card, the Diamondbacks have one of the best one-two combinations in the majors. That doesn’t even include Merrill Kelly, a borderline All-Star when healthy, or Brandon Pfaadt, who looked like he was finally breaking out before a rough final two months of the season. Add in Montgomery and Rodriguez, and Arizona goes six deep with plausible playoff starters. That’s how you injury-proof a rotation – sheer depth.
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Hi, I’m Ben Clemens. You might know me from such articles as “C’mon, Orioles, Do Something”, “Why Are the Orioles’ Playoff Odds So Low?”, and “Wait, FanGraphs Is Too Low on the Orioles Again?!”. In my spare time, I also write about the rest of the league, but today I’m focusing on Baltimore yet again given their latest signing: The O’s and right-hander Tomoyuki Sugano have agreed to a one-year, $13 million contract.

Sugano has been one of the best pitchers in NPB for more than a decade. The 35-year-old won the Central League MVP in 2014, and he’s added two more MVP awards since then. He also won two Sawamura Awards – think the Cy Young, only for the entire league and with minimum criteria – neither in any of his three MVP seasons. In other words, he’s been racking up hardware like no one else for his entire career.

Reading a scouting report on Sugano is like chicken soup for my command-obsessed soul. If pitching was entirely about hitting a tiny target, Sugano might be the best pitcher in the world. Saying that he has the ball on a string would be offensive to Sugano; I can’t control a yo-yo as well as he can spot his five-pitch arsenal. He walked 16 of the 608 batters he faced last year, a 2.6% rate that would make George Kirby jealous.

It’s not just walk avoidance that sets Sugano apart from the crowd, though. He works the corners and tunnels his pitches off of each other to great effect. He can add or subtract from everything he throws, so his five-pitch mix can feel even deeper when a hitter is trying to figure out what’s coming next. He might not inspire the physical discomfort batters experience when facing triple-digit heat that could come right at their ribcage if the pitcher misses his location, but facing Sugano is like solving a Saturday crossword puzzle, if crossword puzzles threw splitters. Read the rest of this entry »

The Winter Meetings always feature trades, but two stood above the fray last week. First, the Guardians traded Andrés Giménez to the Blue Jays in a two-part transaction that briefly left Cleveland with three lefty-hitting first basemen. Then the White Sox traded Garrett Crochet to the Red Sox for four prospects. The best of that group, Kyle Teel, happens to play catcher, the same position as Chicago’s top prospect Edgar Quero. They even have the same future value grade of 50, which is the cutoff for top 100 prospects.

The Guardians made an extra trade to avoid doubling up on similar archetypes, sending Spencer Horwitz to the Pirates for three young pitchers, but the White Sox just kept both catchers. I heard a lot of murmured questioning of that decision as I walked around the Dallas hotel that briefly hosted the center of the baseball universe. But I think both teams were acting rationally, and that worrying about Teel and Quero overlapping is silly. I can’t prove it for you – but I did come up with some data that will hopefully sway your opinion.

Cleveland’s case was straightforward. Steamer projects Horwitz as a 2.5 WAR/600 PA player. It projects Kyle Manzardo as a 1.8 WAR/600 PA player. Josh Naylor? Steamer has him down for 2.4 WAR/600 PA. Three players for two positions — first and DH. (Yes, Horwitz has played second base, too, but he really shouldn’t be a second baseman, and I don’t think the Guardians would’ve used him there.) One of them would ride the bench despite being an above-average contributor, a poor decision for a team that’s trying to maximize its resources. Something had to give.

On the other hand, there are the White Sox. They, too, traded a young star, and the best player they got back plays a position where they already had a similar option. Teel was our 42th-ranked prospect on our updated Top 100 list in 2024, a polished all-around catcher who we expect to reach the majors at some point in the next two years. Quero was our 40th-ranked prospect, and you’re never going to believe this, but he’s a polished all-around catcher who we expect to reach the majors at some point in the next two years.
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