The 2026 Pitching Superlatives, Part 4: Results

Welcome back to our 2026 pitching superlatives series. We discussed velocity in part one, movement in part two, and location in part three. Today we’re talking about results. That means which pitches created the most whiffs or balls in play, which pitches produced certain kinds of batted balls, and which pitches made batters look the silliest.

We have to start with the best result a pitcher can get, and that’s a swinging strike. The top of the list features tons of pitches you’d expect: breaking balls from Mason Miller, Adrian Morejon, and Chase Burns. Aaron Ashby’s slider and curveball are both in the top six! But the Whiffiest Pitch in baseball belonged to Luis Medina of the Athletics, whose changeup ran a 59.8% whiff rate. Should we watch every single whiff Medina’s changeup earned this year? Yes, I agree. It’s the only responsible thing to do.

If you’re not familiar with Medina’s game, that’s understandable. He spent the 2023 and 2024 seasons as a starter, ran an ERA above 5.00 in each of them, and missed 2025 due to Tommy John surgery. But he transitioned to the bullpen this year, and he threw 73 innings over 60 appearances, running a 3.08 ERA and a 29.3% strikeout rate. He also had lots of problems. He posted a 12.3% walk rate, a 90-mph average exit velocity, didn’t earn any chases, and didn’t do a great job of keeping the ball on the ground. Basically, whiffs were the only thing keeping Medina afloat. But he seems ripe for an overhaul. He’s got a starter’s repertoire, with a four-seamer, sinker, slider, change, and curve. He led with the four-seamer even though it got shelled. If he shelved it in favor of the sinker and some more sliders and that unhittable changeup, he could be a real weapon.

I apologize for sneaking real baseball analysis into this article. We’re here to gawk at superlative pitches, not to help the Athletics turn Luis Medina into a superstar. (But just to be clear, if you’re reading this, Athletics, you should definitely turn Medina into a superstar. It seems doable.) The Most Hittable Pitch in baseball belonged to Bryce Miller, whose sinker ran a contact rate of 98.3%. It’s actually worse than that, though. Miller threw 162 sinkers, earned swings on 60 of them, and was credited with only one whiff. But it wasn’t actually a whiff.

It was a foul tip, which Statcast just happens to lump in with true whiffs for the sake of convenience. Miller didn’t miss a single bat with a sinker all season long. It’s possible that it wasn’t just the Most Hittable Pitch, but rather a Literally Unmissable Pitch. We may never know the truth.

Before we move on from whiffs, we should acknowledge that there’s no whiff quite like a whiff inside the strike zone. Earning whiffs outside the zone is great, but it means that you have to induce batters to chase, and, stubbornly, sometimes they refuse. Dylan Cease’s changeup earned an absurd 50% whiff rate inside the zone in 2026. No other pitch even reached 45%. It was the Zone Whiffiest Pitch of the year. Here’s Cease’s biggest miss of the season on the changeup, paused at the moment when the ball hits the catcher’s mitt.

Jazz Chisholm Jr. missed by 21.8 inches. He was so far ahead that Statcast didn’t even record an intercept point, which I can only assume is the computer telling us that Chisholm’s bat was never even in the same geometrical plane as the ball. By the time the ball hits the glove, Chisholm has had time to finish his swing, and, based on the way he’s looking wistfully out at Cease, take a moment to consider whether this whole baseball thing is really for him after all.

Statcast’s new miss distance tool tells us that although Ashby’s slider was only the second-whiffiest pitch, it came in first for the superlative of Missiest Pitch. Batters missed Ashby’s slider by an average of an absurd 10.7 inches. Look at a ruler or even just hold up your hands and estimate how far apart 10.7 inches is. That is so far, and it’s just the average. Because Ashby’s slider fooled batters so badly and they were always out in front of it, they spent all season trying to slow down their bats in order to not miss it. That also made the Ashby slider the Bat-Slowingest Pitch of the year, with an average bat speed of 69.3 mph. Here’s the biggest miss Ashby got on his slider all season. At its closest point, the barrel of Ryan McMahon’s bat was still 36.8 inches away from the ball. He missed by more than a yard!

McMahon missed on this pitch for a bunch of reasons. He was clearly fooled by the fact that it was a slider, so he swung over it, but he also swung way too early.

Intercept point is another thing we can check. No pitch had batters farther out in front than Fernando Cruz’s splitter. It was the Reachiest Pitch in baseball. The average intercept point for that pitch was a whopping 47.8 inches ahead of the batter. Compare that to the league average of 30.2, and you’ll see just how abnormal it really is. I actually asked Cruz a few weeks ago whether he even knew that he led the league in this particular category. “I mean, I wasn’t really aware of it,” he said. “Hitting is about timing. You do certain moves to be able to have a 12- or 14-mph differential with the same movement, the same aggressiveness. That’s what it’s all about.”

This is a still from the pitch where the batter was farthest ahead of his splitter. Miguel Vargas’ intercept point was an absurd 71.5 inches ahead of his center of mass. He was more than one full Joey Ortiz ahead of the pitch. Once again, I paused the video when the ball hit the catcher’s glove, and as you can see, Vargas is pretty much done swinging, if you want to call that a swing. He’s less focused on hitting the ball and more focused on seeing which piece of equipment he can launch further, his helmet or his bat.

On the other end of the spectrum, Drew Sommers’ sinker was the Deepest Pitch in baseball. Even more fun, it didn’t just get deep on hitters; it got deep on them because it was sneaky. At an average of 95 mph, it wouldn’t seem like a candidate for getting on top of batters so quickly, but it’s came from a side-arming lefty with 98th-percentile extension, and that made it very unusual. The average fastball coming from a left-handed pitcher with an arm angle between 10 and -10 degrees this season was just 91.2 mph. Throwing 95 from that angle, especially with all that extension, made Sommers’ sinker stand out. Amazingly, the Sommers sinker that got deepest on the batter all year actually wasn’t a whiff. Josh Naylor somehow fouled this pitch off even though his bat met the ball just 0.4 inches in front of his center of mass.

Naylor would strike out on the next pitch.

Statcast’s tied up and flailing bat tracking metrics give us another way of measuring the discomfort a pitch causes in a batter. Flailing means that the batter’s intercept point is closer to the end of the bat than they’d like, while tied up means the intercept point was closer to the knob. It’s only measured on whiffs, but it’s still a fun proxy for jamming batters, and Zack Wheeler was the king. Wheeler’s sinker had a 38% tied up rate, making it the Jammiest Pitch, and at 34%, his cutter finished in second place. No other pitcher topped 30%, making Wheeler hands-down the Jammiest Pitcher in baseball. Here he is sawing off Ceddanne Rafaela with a pitch off the handle.

On Monday, we established that Hunter Gaddis throws the Changiest Changeup thanks to a 15.4-mph velocity gap between it and his four-seamer. You may not be surprised to learn that that’s a pretty desirable trait. The Gaddis change was also the Hardest Pitch to Hit Hard. Here’s the only hard-hit ball Gaddis allowed on the pitch all season long.

Oh yeah, I should’ve mentioned that it was a foul ball. Gaddis threw 196 changeups, and not only did the pitch have a hard-hit rate of 0%, no one even came close to hitting it hard. The hardest-hit fair ball he allowed on the changeup was a 227-foot single that left the bat at 90.5 mph. That was also the only batted ball against Gaddis’ changeup to even reach 90 mph! That’s wild.

Now that we’ve gotten into whiffs and weak contact, we can talk about launch angle. As anyone who’s ever heard the name Voros McCracken is well aware, pitchers only have so much control over the kind of contact they generate. Still, they have some control, especially when you’re looking at the very top and bottom of the leaderboard. Morejon, who is about to get paid big in free agency, featured the Most Earthbound Pitch. According to Statcast’s over/under bat tracking metrics, hitters ended up with their barrel higher than Morejon’s changeup 63% of the time, which was tied with Ashby’s curveball for the lead. (Sidenote: Ashby was really good.) At 13 degrees, the Morejon changeup also had the second-lowest launch angle, and its 77% groundball rate was the third-highest of any pitch. When it got put in play, it averaged just 72 feet in the air. The crazy thing is that Morejon’s changeup was so good at forcing hitters to hit the ball straight down that he became susceptible to the Baltimore chop. Three of the balls with the most precipitous launch angles – we’re talking -73, -65, and -46 degrees – turned into singles.

It’s also worth noting that batters were under Morejon’s four-seamer 62% of the time, which ranked 10th in baseball. Truly, batters could not seem to square him up. However, the Poppiest Pitch superlative goes to Sandy Alcantara’s sweeper, which ran a league-leading 32% popup rate and a very nearly league-leading 36-degree launch angle. When batters put Alcantara’s sweeper in the air, it traveled an average distance of just 204 feet. If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when you induce a popup that literally goes straight up, Alcantara and Bryce Harper can help you out.

And that wraps it up for part four of our pitching superlatives series. Come back tomorrow for the fifth and final installment, in which we will finally answer the age-old question: Who throws the pitch that breaks the absolute least?