How Jacob Latz Is Missing Bats

PHILADELPHIA — Before the Futures Game and All-Star Game, I asked a few players if there was anyone in the other dugout they were either looking forward to facing or hoping to avoid. Almost everyone — probably wisely, I must concede — declined the opportunity to give a potential World Series opponent bulletin board material.

But Jacob Latz bit.

“I’m trying to think of who has my number so far,” he said. “I gave up a homer to [Bryce Harper] in 2024. Ohtani would be cool, but he’s not playing. [Corbin Carroll], actually, I like facing him. He’s just a competitive at-bat. But probably Harper is the guy I hope I don’t face. With the hometown Philly crowd, [if I give up a home run to him] that bell is going to be ringing for, like, three minutes.”

My curiosity being piqued, I went back and looked up that home run from 2024. Latz was right to fear the two-time NL MVP, because this was a tank.

Last week’s All-Star Game was a bit of a snoozer; apart from an eighth-inning solo homer by Miguel Vargas, all the scoring came in the top of the first inning. The National League didn’t advance a runner to second base all night.

So when Sal Stewart worked a two-out walk with the bases empty in the bottom of the seventh, it constituted a high-leverage situation by that game’s standards. And AL manager John Schneider called on Latz to retire a dangerous left-handed hitter.

Harper and Carroll were both in the game for the NL — and hitting back-to-back in the order, in fact — but Latz could avoid living out his dream (and/or nightmare) scenario if he retired Luis Arraez.

I know this was an exhibition game, but Latz is far from a household name. How is this guy Schneider’s big lefty weapon out of the bullpen?

Latz was good last year; he posted a 2.84 ERA in 33 appearances for the Rangers, including seven starts. But he outperformed his FIP by nearly a run, and his xERA by a run and a third. Out of 339 pitchers with 50 or more innings, Latz was 251st in K-BB%. Not exactly an All-Star performance in the making.

Two years ago, I wrote about a class of player I called “Token All-Star Relievers.” Every team has to send at least one All-Star, and not every team has a good position player at a position where he’ll fit on the roster. But almost every team has at least one relief pitcher with a respectable ERA who can carry the flag at the Midsummer Classic. Sometimes that’s Jonathan Papelbon, Mason Miller, or Trevor Hoffman. Other times, it’s Evan Meek or Ricky Bottalico.

This year’s Rangers aren’t a bad team; they were actually in first place and two games over .500 at the break. But their only starting pitcher with an above-average ERA is Jacob deGrom, who’s not what he was five years ago. Wyatt Langford and Corey Seager have been hurt. Third baseman Josh Jung (.298/.367/.452 in the first half) had a decent All-Star case, but I don’t know how to argue that he’s been better than Vargas or Junior Caminero. A reliever is easier to fit on the squad.

And Latz has, legitimately, been terrific: a 1.57 ERA in 46 innings and 19 saves in 21 opportunities. He’s still not punching out prime Andrew Miller numbers, but he’s increased his K% from 21.8% last year to 28.1% this year, and reduced his walk rate from 10.6% to 6.6%.

At the same time, he’s getting great results on contact. He leads all qualified relievers in infield fly ball rate by a huge margin — a IFFB% of 29.5%, compared to 25.0% for second-place Rico Garcia — and has the best wOBACON of any pitcher with at least 30 innings pitched this year.

I don’t think a literal .151 BABIP is sustainable for anyone, but Latz is getting lots of popups and weak contact. More than enough to justify a first All-Star nod.

So how’s he doing it?

Let’s go back to that at-bat with Arraez in the All-Star Game, because it shows what was already working for Latz before this year. This is pitch no. 1.

Latz’s slider isn’t some unholy Statcast outlier on its own, but it moves pretty straight left-to-right from the pitcher’s perspective. As opposed to his four-seamer, which is an unholy Statcast outlier.

This fastball isn’t enormously fast; an average of 94.7 mph isn’t special heat for a one-inning reliever anymore. It’s special because his over-the-top arm angle gives it massive backspin. That means it drops less than a comparable fastball — 2.4 inches less, on average, according to Baseball Savant.

That’s a pretty common approach for a left-handed reliever; the king of the mega-backspin fastball is Alex Vesia. But Vesia sacrifices arm-side run to get that rise, while Latz produces above-average movement on both axes. There are only two relievers in the game who get more rise on their fastball than Latz, relative to comparable pitches, while still getting at least an inch more horizontal movement than comparable: Dylan Lee and Erik Sabrowski. You might remember that both of those pitchers have done well this year, as Ben Clemens and I wrote about the pair on consecutive days in May.

After Arraez took that get-me-over slider for strike one, Latz showed him a pair of four-seamers. One missed for a ball. The other dotted the top of the zone, and Arraez swung through it for strike two.

In terms of location and velocity, that’s pretty much the same pitch Harper hit into the center field arboretum two years before, but Latz has made some tweaks since then.

“I got put in touch with a pitching coach this offseason,” he said. “It’s the first time I’ve worked hands-on with someone since high school, so he was able to keep me in check on a day-to-day basis. Because sometimes we feel like we’re doing the right thing, but it might not be. The extra set of eyes helped a lot.”

The extra offseason work wasn’t done with a return to the bullpen in mid; Latz was supposed to be a starter this year. He was trying to work on two things: First, improving the efficiency of his motion with an eye toward pitching more innings, and second, working on his curveball.

The fastball-slider combination worked just fine against lefties last season. He allowed a .240 wOBA to same-handed batters in 2025. And even on a reliever’s workload, his four-seamer graded out as having the 19th-best total run value in baseball, according to Baseball Savant. The two names in front of him on that leaderboard were Tarik Skubal and Zack Wheeler.

Righties, however, tagged Latz for a .316 wOBA, and hit better than .300 against both his curveball and changeup. Clearly, a starter’s workload would demand a more robust offering.

“[The curveball] was a pitch I just never had confidence with, and now I’m throwing it with two strikes,” Latz said. It’s still his fourth-most-used pitch, because he throws it almost exclusively to righties, but opponents still have not recorded a hit off it this season; they’re 0-for-15 with 10 strikeouts and an xBA of .036. Latz has held right-handed hitters to a .097/.167/.183 line overall this year. That’s actually better, by 40 points of wOBA, than he’s done against lefties.

The work on his delivery has paid off even more.

“I tried to get my arm in a little bit of a better spot in terms of being more efficient, and then it ultimately led to better carry on the fastball,” Latz said. “And then I think it’s also led to hiding the ball a little bit better. I used to get long and a little less deceptive, where as this year [the ball is] just hidden within my body or my ear a little bit better.”

Latz is getting on top of the ball more this year, but the difference is minute — three degrees in average angle, with maybe an inch’s worth of change in release point in each direction. Latz said he considers two to three inches in extension to be a significant change, and one to three inches of vertical release height.

“But we’re looking more for consistency than a change per se,” he said. “That wasn’t necessarily by design, but it was more by trying to be more efficient.”

The biggest change in pitch movement is in Latz’s changeup, which now has more than six inches less vertical drop than a comparable pitch. That means he can throw something with very similar induced movement to his fastball, but up to 10 miles an hour slower. He almost never throws those left-on-left (just seven in the regular season so far this year), but he went up and in on Arraez in an attempt to get strike three.

It almost worked. Arraez chased and was miles out in front, but he got the bat on the ball and fouled it off.

Arraez passed on a 1-2 fastball off the plate, but when Latz went back to the well and brought the ball down slightly, the Giants second baseman could not resist.

Latz got two whiffs on six pitches from the best contact hitter of this decade, a guy who has swung and missed just 58 times on 1,567 regular-season pitches in his career. It wasn’t Harper, and it wasn’t really a pressure situation, but it was a good day at the office.