Let’s Take a Peek at Some Early 2025 Pitch Usage Trends

Every winter, pitchers step off the mound and into the lab. Sure, not every pitcher is in a wind tunnel with a high speed camera from October to January, but enough are that everyone seems to reap the benefits. You’ve got the sweeper, the kick change, the rise of the splitter, new fastball shapes – you name it, someone has tried it recently. That means that every year, I spend the first month or two of the season catching up to the new hot thing going on in the world of pitching.

But I have to level with you: On the whole, things haven’t changed as much this year as I expected. That won’t stop me from walking through what has changed, though, and the first shift to highlight is a subtle one – we’re seeing more bendy sliders and fewer gyro offerings:

Why? Two things are happening. First, sweeping sliders do better against same-handed batters, so pitchers are choosing that as their secondary of choice when they have the platoon advantage. In 2021, 2.6% of pitches that righties threw to righties were sweepers. In 2025, that number has ballooned to 10.7%; it’s 10.9% for lefties against lefties. Usage is less than half as high when opposite-handed batters are at the plate.

Meanwhile, “regular” sliders are on the decline when pitchers have the platoon advantage. That makes good sense – they’re just throwing sweepers instead. And when pitchers aren’t facing same-handed batters, neither slider is particularly great; pitchers are staying away from both, more or less. That means that the traditional, gyro-spin slider is declining in prevalence overall.

To be clear, plenty of pitchers still throw them. Faster, tighter sliders pair well with certain pitch types, and some guys are just better at throwing them. Not every arm is created equal, or the same. But as pitch design gets easier and easier – it seems like everyone throws six pitches now – why not feature a breaking ball specifically tailored for the situation you find yourself in instead of having only one type of offering?

Likewise, the share of offspeed pitches thrown to opposing hitters has never been higher. We have pitch tracking data back to 2008; last year was the first where offspeed pitches comprised more than 20% of right/left offerings. The five years from 2020-2024 all checked in between 18% and 19%; no previous year even hit 18%. We’ve known since time immemorial that offspeed pitches are excellent against hitters with the platoon advantage; only recently, however, have pitchers started leaning heavily in that direction.

A further tailwind here comes from the aforementioned flourishing of pitch design. Read developmental reports from any of the last 60 years, and you’d see “needs to learn a changeup” in the notes for many would-be aces. It’s not just bad pitchers, either; Clayton Kershaw never could figure out how to throw one despite being one of the best hurlers of the 21st century. But now that the kick change is an option, or a splitter, or different grips based on your fastball grip… Well, you get the idea. Learning a changeup has never been easier because there have never been more ways to learn to throw a changeup, nor more technological tools to help you do the learning.

What have those changeups been replacing? Among other things, sinkers. This year marks the lowest rate of sinkers thrown to opposite-handed batters since we have data. This isn’t some tiny shift, either. A decade ago, righties threw lefties sinkers 21% of the time. We’re down to 9.7% this year. Four-seamers haven’t felt the same sting; pitchers are using them slightly less often, but they’ve comprised just over a third of the pitches that opposite-handed batters see for quite a while now.

In other words, there’s been a wholesale change in the way that pitchers attack opposite-handed batters. Take a look at the pitches that lefty hitters have faced against right-handed pitching over the years:

That’s a bummer for lefties, because sinkers thrown by righties are the single best pitch to face. That’s how it goes when you start crunching data, though: Both sides now know which pitches work best, but only the pitchers get to choose what to throw.

Ah, so are sinkers on the decline everywhere? Nope. Here’s the same grid of pitch types by year, but for right-on-right matchups:

Sinkers are just as cool now as they were a decade ago, at least as long as you’re throwing them with the handedness advantage. Four-seamers are on the decline, with breaking balls taking up much of the slack. It almost looks like two different populations of pitchers making these changes: The ones who face a lot of lefties have given up sinkers, while the ones who face a lot of righties have given up four-seamers.

That’s not quite what’s happening, though. Most pitchers, particularly starters, throw both a four-seamer and a sinker. While pitchers are learning new secondaries at a record clip, they’re also learning when to throw their fastballs. In other words, even with the same arsenal of four-seamer and sinker, pitchers are getting more out of their options by using them differently depending on who’s at the plate.

To measure this change in pitch usage, I came up with a metric I’m calling adaptation score. Let’s use Logan Webb as an example. Against righties, his favorite two pitches are a sinker and a sweeper. He throws those two a whopping 77.7% of the time. Hey, if it works, why do anything else? Against lefties, however, neither of those pitches plays up to its full potential, so Webb throws them less often, a combined 54.4% of the time. He fills in the gap with his excellent changeup and a new cutter. That makes Webb’s adaptation score 23.3 – the difference between how often he uses his top two pitches with the platoon advantage and without.

Compare Webb to Spencer Strider’s 2023 season, and you’ll start to understand how adaptation scores work. Strider threw his four-seamer or slider 99.2% of the time to righties that year; against lefties, he threw them 87.4% of the time. Sure, he adapted a little, but his 11.8 adaptation score is roughly half of Webb’s. Kershaw, the top pitcher of 2015, had an adaptation score of 2.9 that year. He just threw his four-seamer and slider regardless of who he faced. Good pitchers don’t all operate the same way, and this metric helps to measure that.

Armed with this measure of variation in approach, I set out to calculate how much the league’s adaptation score has changed. I took the adaptation score for every pitcher/season combination starting in 2015. Then I took a weighted average for each year, using pitches thrown as my weights. Pitchers are learning to adapt more and more. That’s true even if you think that adaptation score should care about the top three pitches instead of the top two:

If you’re interested in how to calculate this for the whole league, I can tell you in two words: very carefully. Or, fine, I can just show you. The code that turns pitch-level data into league-wide adaptation scores can be found here. Download what you’re looking for from Baseball Savant, make sure the columns are labeled correctly, and you too can easily calculate this statistic I invented today.

Okay, so pitchers are behaving more flexibly than they used to. More specifically, they’re backing off of whatever pitches they’ve honed for use against same-handed batters when they run into a bad matchup. You can think of this, broadly, as the decline of the sinker/slider arm. Sure, there are still sinker/slider relievers in the majors, but many of them behave a bit differently than they used to. They’ve added a changeup, or a cutter, or split their slider up into a sweeping version and a gyro version and mixed them depending on hitter handedness.

In other words, the big change in pitch usage is that pitchers are more willing to vary their pitch usage. I think this has a lot to do with the recent influx of training methods and technology, though I can’t prove it. Now that pitchers are learning new offerings more quickly and more effectively — and particularly now that they also have detailed data on how each of their pitches performs depending on who they’re facing — this increase in adaptation seems like the path of least resistance.

2025 pitch data is current through games of April 29.