Braxton Ashcraft Flummoxes the Multitudes

I don’t know how much attention Braxton Ashcraft wants in his life, but he must be either fuming at his lack of recognition or thrilled to be left alone. As much ink has been spilled on the Pirates this year, only some of it has gone to their starting rotation, as opposed to Konnor Griffin or the team’s new cadre of veteran bats. Of that fraction, Paul Skenes dominates the headlines, followed by the talented but frustrating Bubba Chandler, the newly returned Jared Jones, and the occasionally truant Carmen Mlodzinski.

But as of this writing, Ashcraft is in the top 10 in baseball in pitcher WAR, trailing Skenes by only a tenth of a win. And this on the heels of Saturday’s loss to the Braves, in which Ashcraft surrendered nine hits and six earned runs in five innings. I wouldn’t be especially worried; it’s only Ashcraft’s second bad start out of 13, and the Braves will do worse to better pitchers before the season’s out.

Ashcraft was a pretty big prospect: A second-round pick out of a Waco, Texas-area high school in 2018, and the no. 60 overall prospect heading into last season. And he pitched quite well as a rookie in 2025, with a 2.71 ERA and 2.78 FIP in 69 2/3 innings, split more or less evenly between the rotation and the bullpen. So it’s not like he came out of nowhere, but he would’ve been third-favorite for the role of Skenes’ sidekick if you’d asked around a year ago.

Ashcraft told David Laurila last fall that his best pitch is a slider, a 92-mph beast that doesn’t have much induced movement, but his long arms and crossfire delivery make it look like it’s diving in on left-handed hitters:

You know how only one in every 10 shishito peppers is spicy? Ashcraft’s slider is like that. You’ll see some that back up or stay on a string horizontally, but others will carry in on left-handed hitters. In the clip above, Ozzie Albies looks almost puzzled by this pitch. It looks like a fastball, then its spin causes it to knuckle in late, and if it starts to move that much, there’s no way it caught the inside corner.

Albies is right to be puzzled. Ashcraft is pulling off a trick that cuts to the heart of what good pitching is. The meal ticket for a big league hurler is any pitch — a rising fastball, a tumbling splitter, a looping curveball — that looks like a strike until the hitter makes a decision to swing, but ends up outside the hitting zone.

This year, the league as a whole is batting .299 and slugging .505 when the hitter swings at a pitch inside the strike zone. When the hitter swings at pitches outside the strike zone, those numbers drop to .161 and .223. The secret to hitting is the ability to distinguish strikes from the scrap pile. Congratulations, I’ve just restated the thing you learn on Day 1 of U8 baseball practice.

A few rungs up the baseball ladder, pitchers and batters are engaged in a contest of deception. Through location and movement, the pitcher tries to blur the line between strikes and balls. And in order to muddy the waters even further, pitchers frequently don’t even try to hit the zone. They want to tease the hitter into an ill-advised swing.

It’s not just movement. You could throw a perfect sweeper that looks like a batting practice fastball and veers a foot off the outside corner, and get any big leaguer to swing and miss at it. At least the first time.

A competent hitter will be able to figure that pitch out the second or third time through the order. Juan Soto probably identifies it and draws a walk without even running the count full in his first plate appearance.

So pitchers have to employ what in game theory is called a mixed strategy, sometimes selecting a suboptimal pitch in order to keep his opponent guessing. (As academic jargon goes, “mixed strategy” is almost downright colloquial, but I mentioned game theory because I want to feel fancy.)

In pitching terms, you want to throw enough balls that hitters will chase, but not so many balls that you end up walking everyone. That’s a tough trick to pull off. Using Baseball Savant’s cutoffs, you’d get about 50 pitchers each in the 90th percentile or better in one of walk rate or chase rate.

Only 11 pitchers are in the 90th percentile for both:

To no one’s particular surprise, this is just a list of good pitchers, and also Mason Englert. You’ve got a two-time Cy Young winner, both current Cy Young frontrunners, a handful of elite relievers… and Ashcraft.

If anything, this is more impressive than Ashcraft’s WAR this season or his 3.01 career ERA. He’s not just chucking crazy stuff at the dish and hoping for the best — though Ashcraft has very good raw stuff — he’s really pitching.

Ashcraft has another 90th-percentile quality: Off-speed pitch usage. Actually, flip that upside-down. Among starters with at least 250 pitches thrown this year, he’s in the bottom 10%.

They say you can’t survive as a big league starter without an off-speed pitch. It’s key to getting opposite-handed opponents out and turning the lineup over multiple times. As with all aphorisms, there are exceptions.

Ashcraft has an off-speed pitch, a splitter that’s new for this season. But out of more than 1,100 total pitches this year, he’s only thrown 53 splitters, all to left-handed batters. In his entire career, he’s never thrown 10 off-speed pitches in a single big league game.

I think Ashcraft is actually suffering a little for lack of an effective off-speed pitch; right-handed hitters are wOBAing .267 off him, while lefties are wOBAing .309.

But he’s stayed alive by throwing a bunch of right-on-left curveballs. It’s his second-most common pitch against lefties, and while it moves in to left-handed hitters, it’s his only true change-of-pace pitch. Ashcraft’s four-seamer and sinker both average in the 97 mph range, and his slider and splitter are both among the hardest you’ll see in their pitch types: 92.0 mph and 91.7 mph average velocity, respectively.

The curveball has just about the most bang-average movement profile of any hook in the league, but at 85.1 mph, it’s 12 mph slower than the heater, and it’s been giving left-handed hitters fits. They’re batting .085 and slugging .170 against Ashcraft’s curveball:

What makes Ashcraft’s lack of changeup interesting is that crossfire delivery. At 6-foot-5, 218 pounds, with a butterfly swimmer’s torso, Ashcraft is very long, even for a pitcher. And while I wouldn’t call him a sidearmer by any stretch of the imagination, he has a low-three-quarters delivery that puts side-to-side movement on the baseball.

Or, it lets him put backspin on the four-seamer that translates as arm-side run, rather than rise. If you want to know what I’m talking about, I explored this phenomenon in April of last year, in the context of Nick Lodolo’s sideways fastball from Wayside School.

But unlike Lodolo, who pitches from the arm side of the rubber in order to accentuate that side-to-side action, Ashcraft pitches from the glove side. (It’s the first base side in both cases, but Lodolo’s a lefty and Ashcraft’s a righty, so relatively speaking, it’s different.)

Even with his low arm slot and long limbs, Ashcraft is in the leftmost 10% of right-handed pitchers in horizontal release point. No. 2 on the list: Reds hurler Graham Ashcraft (no relation, as far as I’m aware.) I guess the Rogers twins prove that pitching motion is not a genetic attribute, but look at this:

Graham is so over the top, he falls off the mound like Chris Devenski. No way these guys can be related. But the one thing they do have in common is the fact that they set up way over to the left, with just their tippy-toes hanging onto the rubber.

That puts Braxton Ashcraft’s release point right in the middle of the plate, and if he’s crossfiring breaking balls to the glove side and backspinning fastballs to the arm side, maybe he can get by throwing only half a dozen splitters a game.

I should probably stop second-guessing Ashcraft anyway. Clearly he knows what he’s doing.