Logan Webb Shouldn’t Try to Fit In

Let me be the first to congratulate Logan Webb on his third-place NL Cy Young finish. It’s well deserved.

Right now, the award is Paul Skenes’ to lose, and it’s easy to see why. He’s big, he throws hard, he’s famous, and while he’s come back to Earth a little in the past three weeks, he genuinely hasn’t had a truly bad start since high school, if ever. Sometimes, playing for a last-place, small-market team is bad for one’s award chances, but if anything, the Pirates’ dog crap season has only perversely burnished Skenes’ reputation. He’d be a big fish in any pond, but my God, does he stand out here.

Believe it or not, there are two NL starters who came out of the weekend within half a win of Skenes on the WAR leaderboard: Webb and Philadelphia’s Cristopher Sánchez. The changeup is back, baby!

Sánchez is going to finish among the higher Cy Young runners-up because that appears to be in the rules. Over the past seven seasons, we’ve had five instances of a Phillies starter finishing between second and fourth in Cy Young voting (Zack Wheeler three times, Aaron Nola twice), but the team hasn’t had a Cy Young winner since Roy Halladay in 2010. With Wheeler suffering from a blood clot in his shoulder and Nola suffering just generally, Sánchez is the next man up.

Webb is himself no stranger to the Cy Young podium, having finished second to Blake Snell in 2023, and I worry that he’s starting to slide out of public attention a little.

Webb is currently in his fifth consecutive season of posting 4.1 WAR or better. He made his last start — an exquisite outing of seven scoreless innings with seven strikeouts, three hits, and no walks — on Sunday. That brought him to 4.3 WAR over 26 starts. That figure is tied for the league lead, and his 160 2/3 innings is first in baseball as well. If Webb makes another seven starts and continues his current level of performance, he’ll end the season with 5.5 WAR, which would be a career high.

I think Webb is underrated not in spite of his consistency, but because of it. As much as baseball people tend to skew small-c conservative in their resistance to change, Webb is a throwback, and every shred of evidence we have suggests that the people don’t want an indestructible sinkerballer. They want Skenes, or Spencer Strider, or Jacob Misiorowski, the supernova who’s understood easily in GIFs or miles an hour.

Throw fast, retire young, leave behind beautiful UCL remnants. That’s not Webb’s game, and it never will be. But he’s as relentlessly dependable as a cast iron skillet. Webb has thrown at least four innings every time he’s taken the mound dating back to April 30 of last season, a run of 52 consecutive starts. He has made it through six innings in 19 of his 26 starts this year; only Seattle’s Bryan Woo has made more six-inning starts.

Unfortunately for Webb (or not; I have no idea whether a lack of notoriety bothers him at all), the Giants haven’t put him in the spotlight very much. The Giants have neither been bad enough to put Webb into Tungsten Arm O’Doylesville, nor good enough to place Webb under the postseason spotlight.

That’s only happened once, in 2021, Webb’s first full season in the majors. And let’s not forget what happened then: The Giants might’ve lost a five-game heavyweight fight to the Dodgers, but that was not Webb’s fault. He made two starts, taking a win and a no-decision, with what is for my money the most dominant single-series postseason pitching performance of the 2020s so far:

The Dodgers scored one run off Webb in 14 2/3 innings, and they only got that much because Corey Seager was able to hit an opposite-field bloop double off a pitch that was six inches off the outside corner.

The foundations of Webb’s game have changed relatively little since then. He’s been mostly sinker/changeup/sweeper his whole career. The first two pitches have a truly jarring amount of sink, which has turned him into a groundball machine.

Out of 397 pitches who have allowed 500 balls in play since 2021, Webb is 15th in the percentage of batted balls that Baseball Savant codes as “topped.” He’s 11th in groundball rate. You can hit the ball hard off him, but most of the time it’s going straight into the dirt. Out of all the individual pitcher/pitch type combos that have been put in play over the past five years, Webb’s sinker and changeup are both in the 96th percentile for lowest average launch angle.

This year, Webb has made a few slight tweaks to his pitch mix, and to be honest, I don’t know if I think it’s made him a better or worse pitcher. It has, unfortunately, made him ever-so-slightly less unusual.

These changes mostly reflect how Webb is pitching left-handed hitters. Webb isn’t one of those pitchers who has a different repertoire for each side of the plate; he throws a ton of right-on-right changeups, and while he uses his four-seamer and cutter more to lefties than righties, these are tertiary pitches regardless of who’s at the plate. For the most part, he’ll throw anything to anyone.

But in 2025, he’s thrown more cutters (13.5%, up from 5.0%) and sweepers (24.3%, up from 15.4%) to lefties than in 2024. Which is backwards, isn’t it? Those are pitches with glove-side movement, and conventional wisdom says those should be thrown to same-handed batters.

He’s also throwing more of every pitch, except the changeup, in the zone to left-handed hitters:

It’s good to throw strikes, I think you’ll find. And indeed, while Webb didn’t exactly struggle against left-handed opposition in 2024, he did walk 8.3% of the lefties he faced, compared to 3.4% of righties. This year, his walk rate splits are 5.2% and 5.3%, respectively.

But the two pitches he’s throwing more often to lefties, both generally and in the zone, are getting absolutely wrecked. Lefties are hitting .315 with a .456 SLG against Webb’s sweeper, and .474 with a .684 SLG against his cutter. Every other combination of pitch type and batter handedness produces an opponent wOBA of .340 or lower, except those two.

How does throwing his two worst pitches more make Webb more traditional? Because he’s getting more swings and misses. You wouldn’t know Webb is on track for a career-best WAR by looking at his ERA, but his FIP is down to a minuscule 2.56. That’s the third-best mark for any qualified starter, trailing only Tarik Skubal and Skenes, the latter by just four hundredths of a run.

Think about what goes into FIP; Webb has dropped his walk rate to 5.3%, which is in the top 10 in baseball and the second-lowest mark of his career. At the same time, he’s increased his strikeout rate to 26.3%, up from just 20.5% last year. And because everything he throws has more sink than an early Against Me! anthem, Webb is usually among the pitchers with the lowest home run rates in the league.

With the exception of 2023, Webb has run noticeable but not especially severe platoon splits, so it’s understandable that he’d want to do something to curb that relative weakness. But it’s not working. Most of Webb’s gains in strikeout rate are actually coming against right-handed hitters. He’s ever so slightly titled the axis of his changeup to give it more drop and less run, and he’s well and truly burying it as a chase pitch.

That’s led to a massive rise in his whiff rate. Righties whiffed 18.5% of the time against the change last year, but this year that figure has risen to 38.5%. A relative weakness (.338 opponent wOBA) has turned into a killer out pitch (.197 wOBA).

But throwing his two worst pitches more often has just made Webb more hittable for lefties, who are batting .287 off the Giants’ ace this season. It seems like a bad idea.

Back to the original point: Webb is having an absolutely stellar year. He’s been one of the best and most consistent pitchers in the NL despite toying around with adjustments that have been evidently self-defeating. Whatever left-handed hitters do to Webb’s sweeper, it’s his third-best pitch, tops. Even without it clicking, he’s in the top three in the NL in WAR.

Eventually one of two things will happen: Webb will figure out how to make this opposite-side breaking ball work, or he’ll ditch the experiment and go back to throwing more changeups to lefties, as tradition demands. Either way, there’s another level of performance to unlock here, and it could make one of the best pitchers in the league even better.